Shadows Rising
A Songs of Chaos Story
Melded inside a shadow, Nox felt at ease and truly safe. Hiding came as readily to her as roaring did to other dragons. Even after all her time with Osric, her rider, it remained her first instinct.
“It’s alright, Nox,” Osric said in his blunt tone. “You can come out.”
Gingerly, Nox raised her head out of the shadow. The joints of her black scales were so faint that an onlooker might have mistakenly thought her large purple eyes floated in darkness. She snaked her neck one way then the other but found only Osric standing by the anvil in the forge yard.
Though once pale, his face had darkened under the desert sun, clashing with the paleness of his bare arms under the rolled-up sleeves of a loose white shirt. And once clean-shaven, his hair and beard were now brown thickets mottled with gray.
“She’s gone,” he said, referring to the serving girl. “She was only bringing chai.”
He tilted the steaming glass in his remaining hand, and a stiff smile struggled up one cheek.
“I know,” Nox said, her words crossing her soul bond to Osric’s mind. “She startled me is all.”
Nox stepped fully out of the shadow to walk on her four feet. Compared to the weightless feeling when melded, her body felt clumsy and heavy, her tail a dead weight that dragged behind her.
Mercifully, the forge yard of the rider’s embassy was well shaded by a canopy of lattice woodwork, threaded with leafy vines, and white stone buildings, capped with palm trees of the sky gardens and turreted towers. These towers captured the wind, Osric had said, guiding it over water underground to cool the courtyard.
She picked her way over to Osric, lifting her head to meet the stump where his right hand had once been. As he stroked her neck, her wings twitched, eager for the day when she’d be big enough to carry him on her back. An impression of her thoughts must have crossed their bond, for he said, “One day.”
Humming, Nox enjoyed the moment before drawing back to examine the dragon bellows. These contraptions were another way humans moved air. They looked like wavy sacks bound by wooden boards, and this dragon-sized set would be worked using a massive iron pedal. All this would make the furnace hot enough to create dragon steel, something a human blacksmith could not achieve on their own.
Nox pressed on the pedal with one foot. It didn’t budge. She pressed harder, but to no avail. Annoyed, she reared on her hind legs, then dropped her full weight onto the pedal with both front feet. A shearing, metallic scrape raked her ears before the pedal struck the ground with a bone-rattling clang. Realizing she’d clenched her jaw against the vibrations, Nox backed away.
How embarrassing. Most dragons were older than Nox when they first bonded to a human, and older still by the time their bonds strengthened to that of an Ascendant, the rank at which riders created their dragon steel weapons. Nox and Osric were Ascendants, perhaps more, but she’d bonded to Osric as a hatchling and was barely two years old.
“I doubt I’ll be as helpful as a dragon should be.”
Osric looked intense as he set his chai upon the workbench. “I got no help at all from Him when I made my axes.”
A shiver ran down Nox’s spine, right to the tip of her tail. Osric’s previous dragon had been cruel, hateful. Nox would have been killed under that dragon’s orders had Osric not broken free at the pivotal moment to save her.
“How did you manage to forge them alone?”
Osric gestured to the human-sized bellows on the other side of the furnace. “Working harder and longer than even riders ought to, until my sweat turned to blood. And many failed attempts…”
He trailed off, gazing down at his stump.
Nox wondered what part of his past had reached up to drag him into gloom. The brutality of a mercenary? The neglect of a family who’d rather he was gone? Perhaps the fatal relationship with his brother?
She sympathized with that. She was always dragged down by thoughts of her twin.
That’s all behind us now.
Yet even as she thought this, a twist tightened in the center of her being as though her soul were cramping. She huffed, as if to blow the feelings out, and nudged Osric with one wing.
“We look ahead now, right?”
Osric emerged from his reverie with a nod, then pulled on a thick camel-hide glove, added fuel to the furnace, and lit it. He worked the human bellows while Nox pressed on the pedal, and the forge yard filled with heat and the bitter scent of smoke in short order.
Satisfied, Osric said he would prepare the crucible.
“We begin by making pure steel of the highest quality,” he explained while selecting a large clay pot. “Iron ore goes into the crucible, and then the smiths advised me to add pitch for the source of ‘hardness’ as they lack charcoal here.”
The pitch looked like lumps of soft black wax. He brought a piece over for Nox to sniff, and a resinous sting caught at the back of her throat. Osric grunted in agreement, then returned to the crucible to place the pitch carefully inside it.
“Next, shards of glass and sand. These melt and bind to impurities to take them away.”
After pouring in the sand, he hesitated, then frowned. This time it was Nox who knew, without knowing how she knew, what he was thinking.
“I can try holding it for you.”
Only after she offered did she consider the difficulty. Maybe she could hold the pot between her teeth?
But even as she tilted her head, taking the measure of the pot, Osric said, “No need.”
And his shadow changed. It morphed until its proportions weren’t stretched as shadows should be but a perfect black reflection. A gentle burning sensation arose in Nox’s soul as Osric pulled lightly on the magic within her core, summoning it across their soul bond. His shadow then stood up from the ground, as if it were darkness made flesh, as broad as he was, with the same missing right hand and two purple eyes like Nox’s own.
Osric’s Shadow steadied the crucible with its hand while Osric placed a lid on top and sealed it with wet clay. When Osric hooked an iron pole through a ring on the pot and lifted it, his Shadow lent its hand to the task, and together they placed the crucible into the heart of the furnace.
“Now we have to push the fire to its limit and keep it there.”
Nox pushed on the pedal again. Already her heart quickened. “For how long?”
“At least five hours.”
Nox gulped, then shook herself and flexed her talons over the ground. She’d been through far worse than this. She could manage. She had to manage.
Osric’s Shadow faded, then dropped back to its natural place upon the ground, leaving rider and dragon alone to their work. They sank into the companionable silence Nox loved best. It was a shame the forge yard wasn’t as quiet, what with the whoomphing bellows, the crashing pedal, and her increasingly labored breath.
“Not long now, right?”
“A few more hours.”
Head down, tongue lolling, Nox groaned.
Another trickle of magic left her core, and then a dark foot joined hers upon the pedal. She raised her head to find Osric’s Shadow beside her, but it was hard to discern an expression on its face. It tried to assist her, but strong as Osric was with the enhanced body of a rider, and strong as his Shadow must be, the dragon bellows were not meant to be worked by humans, riders or otherwise.
“Could your own Shadow help you?”
Nox drooped her head, twitched her tail.
Apparently, her Shadow had appeared in the desert, back when they were at the Sunstrider camp after Osric awoke from his ordeals. He’d been performing the rider meditations used to purify and strengthen her core, and in that serenity, while she’d been asleep, the ‘other’ version of herself had emerged.
She had yet to see it. Part of her feared that Osric had seen what he wanted to see. Try though she might, she couldn’t fathom how to make her natural shadow lift from the ground like Osric did. Her magic seemed to work differently, in melding, in hiding, in catching enemies unawares.
“There’s no harm in trying,” Osric said.
Nox tried. She really did. But it was like trying to fly before her wings had grown. She tried again, pulling motes of magic from her core and letting them swirl through her body. Riders spoke of directing magic through their mote channels, as if they could sway the flow of blood in their veins, yet Nox had never needed to consciously channel her magic. When she melded to a shadow and slid as essence, she didn’t have to think about it, no more than she had to think about breathing. And all that swirling magic in her went nowhere, led to nothing but an ache in her stomach and a pounding in her head.
“I can’t do it.”
“Mmm,” Osric intoned, pulling on his bellows.
“I could make myself stronger, though,” Nox said in a rush. “Oh no, that won’t work. You need my magic to fold into the steel.”
“Once the ingot is made, I can refill your core before we move on to the next phase.”
Nox braced herself, then pulled from her core, this time with the intention of empowering her body. Magic rushed into her muscles and bones, and pressing the pedal became easy, but such use of power felt wild and unskilled, like smashing through rock rather than simply flying over it, and her core drained alarmingly fast.
Their magical progression had been stilted due to wounds in Osric’s soul. He’d not been able to grow and maintain her core as much as other riders, and it sputtered low long before the iron had turned to steel.
Stepping away from the bellows, gasping for breath, even Nox’s telepathic voice sounded winded. “I’m sorry, Osric.”
Osric came to her, dropping onto one knee to touch his head to her snout. “Of all the things to be sorry for, don’t be for this. We keep going until we succeed.”
“Even if we run out of supplies?” she asked, forcing a lightness into her voice.
“Then the Shah will find us more.”
Nox snuffled, and then a rumble rose in her throat. Part of her liked the idea of annoying the Ahari ruler, for she thought him devious and much too in love with the sound of his own voice.
“He does owe us,” she allowed.
“That he does. Let’s rest for now.”
The rest of this story will be available as part of the 'Featured Creatures Anthology' coming later this year!