But it felt right, as soon as the words crossed my lips.
“Nari! You cannot throw your life away!” Tamin said, overhearing our words and stamping through the snow drifts towards us.
“I am not, Uncle,” I said clearly, seeing now what had to happen.
“Come to me, child of the Western Wind!”
Either Fargal would listen to me and agree, in which case we would get a powerful ally.
Or Fargal would be furious and kill me, in which case the Stone Crown would lie forever down here with the most powerful guardian dragon that it could ever have. Or even be destroyed along with me. However powerful Inyene might get afterwards – she wouldn’t be so bad as High Queen Delia was. There might come another time and another dragon-friend able to destroy her where I had failed, just as the Dark King of Torvald had supposedly reigned for many generations, before Lord Bower and Queen Saffron deposed him…
“I would never let you die, Little Sister!” Ymmen growled for real this time, sending up a cough of flame into the freezing air above the Circle of Grom. I felt a twinge of melancholy at that (which I was sure that Ymmen felt, and only made him even more determined that he would defend me at all costs) but there was also a sense of deep peace, and yes – even strength in what I was doing.
“We fly,” I whispered to Ymmen, and felt his gigantic heart beat in sympathy as he bunched his legs and threw himself from the ledge with a sudden explosive force – his wings snapped outwards on either side of him, flaring wide and strong with a crack of noise that echoed around the tangle of mountains and ridges that made up the Circle.
Ymmen’s heat and my calm resolve drove away all awareness of the biting wind or the frost-laden air. The Circle of Grom stretched around and below us in all directions, completely filling my view, and at its heart was a blackness so deep that it looked like the end of the world. Ymmen circled around the entire circumference of the Circle just once, his wings thrumming with the strange interplay of air currents welling up from below—
And then, with a slight forward tilt of his wings, he sent his great body and me riding atop it downwards, slicing into the arteries of this world and towards the black unknown.
Chapter 19
Eldest Sister
As soon as Ymmen and I had crossed the lip of rock that separated the outside world from this subterranean underland – there was a change to the air.
“Smells different,” Ymmen informed me, and I nodded. Even with the useless nub of my nose (when compared with a dragon’s snout, anyway) I could somehow detect a difference to the air. Maybe it was my time spent in the Mines of Masaka that gave me this ability, I thought with a cringe. But there was the sharper, fresher notes of rock minerals, abraded and exposed to the elements by the constant winds and hails – but there was also something else there, too, wasn’t there?
Not the frankincense of dragon-scent, I knew. Instead, this slightest aroma had none of that effulgent sweetness. Instead, it was heavier, more aromatic somehow…
“Sandalwood trees.” I suddenly thought of the closest approximation to what it was that played inside the air of the ancient Circle of Grom. Yes, that was as close as I could make out, I told myself. Something like the heavy ritual smokes of the rare and precious sandalwood trees, as well as a note of something like…Cinnamon?
“First Brood,” Ymmen muttered at the back of my mind, and I could sense his wariness as well as a slight note of something else – envy? When I pushed that thought towards Ymmen, I was met by a stony silence, and I remembered how he had spoken of the dragon songs – their teaching stories and memories and histories, all rolled into one, being broken.
I did not know what it was like to grow up and live as a dragon, and previously I had looked on such powerful dragons like the Brood Mother the Lady Red or Elder Brother as chieftains or even kings – but now I felt that they might be more like the Imanus of the Daza. Those who keep alive who we are, I remembered my own mother, now sick and crazed, describing what she was… And what path she had wanted me to follow, I added.
What must it be like, to meet the first Imanu for a dragon? I wondered. What would it be like meeting the most important, sage, and wisest Imanu that the Plains had ever birthed?
No wonder Ymmen might be nervous, I considered to myself. My own mother had a habit of looking right through you, sometimes. Knowing your weaknesses and limitations even before you knew them yourself…
We circled deeper and deeper down the well of the world, with the light around us still bright enough to see by, but taking on an ethereal, almost misty quality. Sparkling drifts of snow were all around us, as if we were being surrounded by the firebugs of the Plains (although, the frost I could see on the walls meant that was the only similarity to the warm and hot Plains I could think of!).
The walls all about were whorled and erratic in their shapes, but always continuing downwards. And then, suddenly – the air stopped sparkling with frost, and instead I was instantly covered in the finest mist. The air had grown warmer this far down, and all of the sleet and snow and ice on the walls naturally melted away.
The darkness grew underneath us, become deeper and richer and so total that my eyes rebelled, and I thought that I could see distant movements and shapes of lighter forms down there, in that way that refused and confused eyes do.
I looked upwards, to see that the circular entrance to the Well was now so high above us that all I could see was a tiny egg of watery-gray light. It looked so far away as to be impossible to get to—
“Little Sister!” Ymmen whispered, a fraction before my eyes finally did register something below us.
A singular puff of a red spark, like a single strike of flint in a cave…
And then the tunnel itself started to slowly lighten, growing in a steady brilliance that emanated from random points around the walls of the well-shaft all around us.
“Ymmen?” I whispered, somewhat nervously, as one hand stretched to the blade at my waist. Useless, of course – as I knew full well that we were at the mercy of both magic and dragon and any fell thing that might make its home so far from the sun’s warmth and light.
But, as we slowly circled our way downwards, we crossed the home of one of those glowing spheres of light and I saw it for what it truly was: An Earth Light, just like the ones that had been naturally occurring in the cavern under the Shifting Sands where Elder Brother and the Stone Crown had made a home. Only, these rosettes of crystals—reactive to any light, able to hold and distribute light for many hours after they first caught it – were far larger even than those others. They were as large as my head, as my entire torso, and I saw their lances of crystal wands gleam and shimmer with many soft, pastel colors – purple, indigo, blues, reds, and greens…