Chapter 1: Seeing the Unseen
How may a soul pine for that which it has never known, for a something of nothingness born? For a sightless person, to be seen is a miracle that defies imagination. My ravenous intellect did suckle most greedily at the nourishment offered by my hands, nose, tongue and ears, but my eyes remained instruments most intractable, until my soul’s abyssal despair eclipsed any darkness e’er I knew, and I learned a singular truth.
Nothingness is not dark, nor is it black. It is not an absence of colouration, nor a dearth of sound, nor has it the appearance of a boundless space. Nothingness is the definition of void: non-existent in both the material and immaterial realms, beyond perceiving or knowing or immortality, transcending even a mortal being’s immutable homage to time itself.
It is what befalls after the ravages of anguish have sundered a heart, and only nothingness remains.
Nothingness is eternal.
Auli-Ambar Ta’afaya, Reflections
Auli-AMBAR’s BLOOD congealed in her veins as a sharp point of cold metal pricked her sternum. For a terrible instant, she thought a Dragon had shoved her up against the wall of her new baths. The rich gold veins in this section were studded with hand-sized sapphires which quarried holes of their own into her upper back as the man, judging by the rank stench of his sweat, pressed her up onto her toes.
A shocked gasp whistled harshly out of her ruined mouth.
“I will have the prophecy,” he hissed.
She would have replied, but an overpowering reek of minziberry wine mixed with other heavier, sour tangs she could not identify, caused her to double over, coughing helplessly. Stay calm, Auli! Seize a weapon, any weapon … her fingers scrabbled frantically at her belt pouch. Ink? A Cinizzara Miniature? Stylus!
He slammed her against the gemstones a second time.
“Aah! Please –”
“Don’t you be toying with the Talons,” slurred the man. He was not of Fra’anior, his accent suggested. Sylakian? From Yorbik? “Move again, and a little flame might get herself snuffed out – yieee!”
He screamed as Auli-Ambar slammed the point of her stylus into his blade hand, simultaneously twisting her body away from a potential thrust. Si’ishi’s training had made her movements decisive. The dagger or sword he held clanked against the metal cladding on the wall. She thrust free, tripping him with a cunning hook of her ankle. Thud. Vile swearing erupted in the vast, empty Dragon bathing cavern as the young Loremaster fled as fast as her long legs could carry her, given the limitations of her traditional ochre Fra’aniorian dress with its allegedly practical four-foot train dragging along behind.
Cursed fashion!
Heavy boots pounded in pursuit.
“It is futile to flee, blind wench,” he chortled horribly. “Watch out!”
Blind she might be, but Auli-Ambar knew the layout of her works better than he. Ducking the location of the scaffolding which she had memorised, she ran her fingers along the wall to orient herself, darting around a corner into the main reception area – all constructed to draconic proportions, of course, and to draconic standards of luxury. Here was a problem. Countless sacks of gemstones and great stacks of priceless marble tiling, arranged according to colouration and Isle of origin, had been stored here, to say nothing of the five hundred and ten platinum and white gold light fittings she had just signed for. Oh, the rich irony of a blind girl designing light fittings.
She felt her way between the stacks as quickly as she could.
Panting. Wheezing. Ruing the face-veil that restricted her breathing. Her heartbeat lolloped painfully inside her ribcage.
The pursuer closed in relentlessly, despite that he smelled and sounded blind drunk. Auli-Ambar, called ‘little flame’ by the Dragons, knew escape was unlikely at best. The wicked chortling was coming from her left side now as the man flanked her, mocking her slow progress. Her dress snagged and tore on an unseen protrusion where she knew the grey, mauve and pink chalcedony spars were stacked.
One chance. Just one.
Arkurion! she cried in a panic, deep inside her mind. Arkurion the Mercury Blue! Help!
Telepathy was not illegal. It was impossible. But Auli-Ambar knew for a fact that Dragons were capable of speaking mind-to-mind, a secret which the Mercury Blue of Tanstoy had made her triple-swear she would never reveal. She focussed only on him, on the rich, spicy scent of the roguish Dragon who had brought untold joy – and light, if she could be allowed an illogical metaphor – into her life by detecting her innate magical ability to read with her hands, and becoming her teacher and friend.
Never before in the history of the Halls of the Dragons.
Snagged again. Auli-Ambar cried out as she stumbled over a metal rod on the ground and crashed to her knees. Up! Go! She smelled freedom on the slight breeze curling in through the ajar access doors.
O Arkurion, please, if you can hear me …
Where could he be? The roving researcher must be deep in the Dragon Library, chomping blissfully on a ten-foot tome of Dragon lore as he pored over the endless ranks of painstakingly neat runes. How could he possibly hear her cry?
Feeling her way along the immense door, her breath snuffled in her throat. There were Dragons outside, but not within easy hailing distance. The mighty Dragon Elder, Sapphurion, had expressly forbidden his kin from snooping around her covered works, the better for the unveiling to be a complete surprise. This was Auli’s Empire. Now, it had become a trap.
“No!”
She pulled up sharply. The man was ahead of her, perhaps standing in that gap, sniggering with a quality of insane derision that arrested her footsteps.
“Little flame. Why do they call a hideous husk like you, little flame?” He hissed just like a Dragon. “Pitiful. You veil your face the better to spare Fra’anior’s caldera the gruesome offence of your visage.” The blade touched her clothing near her left hipbone. “Speak the prophecy, girl, or I shall carve it out of your hide, cut by slow cut. Come. It’s just you and me. A feckless paw-licker and a noble Talon.”
Auli wet her scarred lips with her tongue. “Which prophecy?”
“The one!”
She opted to laugh scornfully. “Mercy, that narrows it down.”
“The one that drove Ra’aba insane.”
Laughter must perish. That was one name she would never forget, nor forgive. As the memory of the perverse, uncannily parasitic relationship between the Captain of the Royal Guard of Fra’anior and Razzior, the powerful Orange Dragon, played through her mind, she shuddered. In ruthless pursuit of their purposes, they had smashed the lower half of her face, tortured her father, and forced her to reveal the hidden magical entrance to the Sacred Library. For that, she had engineered their doom. Neither had recovered consciousness since attempting to recover the lore of ruzal from the Dragon Spirits of yore.
She and her father had survived a gamble that still gave her nightmares, thereby ensuring Hualiama’s safety. Now, the enigmatic little girl was hidden in plain sight.
She had always assumed that Ra’aba was aligned with the Talons. This incident argued otherwise, for if they did not know what he did, then was there a schism, mistrust, or no relationship at all? Sapphurion must be informed. Here was another nuance to the complex socio-political landscape of the only Island-Cluster in the world where Dragonkind and Humankind co-existed in harmony. Relative harmony. Very well! A prosperous but fragile, oft-tested harmony.