Olga McArrow - Hot Obsidian

“Orion? Orion!” Raven tugged at his sleeve.

“What’s up?” Orion yawned.

A brief explanation later, to everyone’s surprise, Milian and Orion grabbed two coils of rope from the backpack pile and started bending the trees. The rest of the team watched them with distrust at first but then they got it: they were going to sleep under a roof after all! Everyone joined the building process, even Juel. Little Jarmin, woken up by the commotion, found himself inside a beautiful living tent of branches and flowers.

Their spirits high again, the boys got back to lively talking, mostly about what to make for dinner. Juel left that matter to Bala who seemed to know a thing or two about cooking and actually making food taste nice.

A true Lifekeeper is always observant, even in little things. Especially in little things. And Juel was a true Lifekeeper. He noticed that Milian had brought his idea to Orion and not him. That would not do. It was time to start setting things right.

“Good job, man!” Juel patted Milian on the shoulder, hoping that the praise sounded as sincere as he wanted. “Just one thing: in the future, if you have something important to say, come to me first. Keeping the leader uninformed can be dangerous to the whole team.”

“Okay,” Milian shrugged. “Whatever you say…”

“Jarmin!” Juel turned to the little boy. “I want to apologise for that joke I made yesterday. It was stupid. Please, forgive me.”

He said no more, leaving his companions to their thoughts. While the whole gradient of moods and opinions was shifting and rearranging behind his back, Juel grabbed his backpack from the pile, unrolled his sleeping bag, and started preparing for the night. He knew he was doing the right thing now, both for the mission’s and his own sake. Juel had hated Sainar’s decision to send him on this very questionable journey with a bunch of children. Now, he had finally made peace with that.

“Those guys are not all that bad,” he told himself. “They’re all my brothers of the Order. They’re all warriors, even the youngest ones. Maybe even little Jarmin is worth something, we’ll see; he is a powerful ambasiath too, after all… As to me, my master has always said that I must learn to keep my pride in check. All right, I will. Trust can be powerful, so let’s make them trust their leader.”

The wayfarer soup the young Lifekeepers had for dinner tasted like a proper homemade meal with Bala’s spices and Irin’s birds thrown in. The rain did finally start and quenched the campfire but, luckily, the diadem tent turned out to be a good enough shelter that kept both water and wind away.

Soon, night swallowed the world outside the tent; rain swallowed the sounds that could warn you about a danger. From time to time, a cold water droplet or a wet purple-white petal fell from the tent’s roof on the boys sleeping below. Sleeping. Jarmin no longer felt safe among them when there was no one to look out for danger. He felt alone and painfully vulnerable now. The No Man’s Land with all the nightmarish creatures Oasis had been talking about that day was close. Even worse: Kosta had mentioned that some of them – moroks – can wander outside the unstable lands and attack travellers even beyond Firaska. What if one – or a whole pack of them! – was prowling about the grasslands or maybe even lurking outside the tent right now?

Jarmin sat and wrapped his blanket around himself, shivering. He was so scared already that Orion’s unexpected whisper had almost made him jump.

“Can’t sleep, Jarmin?” asked Orion and added, looking around, “Well, you’re not alone. Looks like we’re all awake.”

One after the other, the boys raised their shaggy heads and exchanged looks in the dark.

“I’ve never been so close to the No Man’s Land,” whispered Kosta. His voice sounded even worse now when the air was cold and damp. “I know that it’s a rare thing that some dark creature sneaks beyond Firaskian patrols but it’s not impossible.”

“Orion…” said Jarmin with a pitiful sniff. “What are moroks like?”

“Oh no, no scary stories in the nighttime!” answered Orion with a nervous laugh. “That would be bad for the team’s morale.”

“Okay… But maybe you can tell me a fun story then?”

The pure hope in little Jarmin’s voice was too touching for him to refuse.

“Well, I know some stories. They’re not as cool as Oasis’s are, of course…” said Orion.

He even yawned as a part of play-acting and it worked: the listeners’ interest spiced up now, everyone moved closer; Pai promptly cast a light spell to scare all the night fears away and create a proper storytelling atmosphere. The spell – Fiat-lux, as Pai named it – resembled a classic Liht only remotely. It was much more flammable; every droplet that fell onto it from the leaky roof went up in vapour with a sharp hiss as it would on a hot frying pan. Also, Fiat-lux was a rather unstable light source, it flickered like a candle in the wind. That only suited the story-time, though.

“How about a cool real-life story?” asked Orion. “Our Sainar is not the only one who remembers his family history three millennia into the past!”

“Ah, yes, Aranta said you’re a descendant of that pirate…” Lainuver tried to chime in but Orion frantically waved his hands. “I’ll get to that! Story first!”

***

Three thousand years ago, there lived a great pirate Ziga-Ziga. It’s unknown whether his ambassa or his talent was the reason, but no one could match him in his bravery and his cunning except his friend Orion the son of stars. Together, they raided ships. Together, they spent their bloody gold on deeds good and evil.

But it wasn’t only the joy of piracy that the two friends had in common. Often, they stood together on the bow of Lafarg, Ziga’s giant trimaran, and looked at the horizon, where the charted sea ended and Ocean Fayera began. They talked of unknown lands and dreamed of visiting them one day, but for a long while, the dreams just remained dreams.

But one day, following the calling of his heart, Ziga left Orion in charge of his fleet and sailed to the uncharted sea alone. He returned a different man. There were wonders in Ocean Fayera he had never known existed: islands made of pure ice and inhabited by wingless birds; giant sea monsters as big as ten Lafargs combined but as tame as little lambs; and there was a large continent no one had ever visited before. It was a land of wild, unstable magic and emerald dragons.

Unlike Kuldaganian pocket dragonlighters and nomadic yellow dragons – mindless monsters with morbid curiosity and voracious appetite – emerald dragons were intelligent. They had a civilization and a language of their own. They knew love and friendship. They were a lot like humans, actually, only they lived much longer: up to two thousand years.

Ziga had never learned their language but the dragons, being far smarter than he, had learned his. They didn’t stop there: next, they learned to take human form.

The world of humans interested them greatly. After all, dragons, intelligent and mindless alike, are naturally very curious. But, while interesting, our world seemed too dangerous and frightening for them. Back then, not a single dragon had followed Ziga back to the charted Omnis.

Back in the known sea, Ziga returned to his old trade. He told everyone about the dragons, he sang of them, he wrote about them but no one seemed to take him seriously. His tales spawned fairytales, his ballads inspired funny verses, his writings got ridiculed and criticized for no one would believe a pirate’s word. Not a single human had followed Ziga’s call to visit the dragon continent. After a while, disappointed, Ziga began forgetting it too, falling more and more into his old ways.

But everything changed after he met a very special girl – Meralli. It was a girl given to Orion by the sea itself; she had no memories of her past; she spoke in poems; she seemed alien to this world… like a dragon that had taken human form and forgotten about that. Ziga fell in love with Meralli the moment he saw her. But upon finding the love of his life, he lost his best friend: he and Orion had a fight over Meralli. In the end, Ziga won the girl’s heart and Orion made peace with him but things could no longer be the same between the old friends.

Next time Ziga heard the call of Ocean Fayera again, he answered it. He left everything to Orion – his fleet, his riches, and his blessing – and sailed to the emerald continent on a little dimaran – Jovibarba (that’s where our surname comes from!). He took no one with him but his wife Meralli and their little daughter.

Ziga lived and died among the dragons but some of his descendants chose a different path.

A part of our family moved back to Omnis about a thousand years ago. In the beginning, there was so much dragon blood in the descendants of Ziga and Meralli that they could take dragon form at will and lived for centuries. But as they mixed with humans, their dragon traits faded over time.

Now look at me. The only dragon trait I have is curiosity. Well, maybe audacity is too.

***

The story cheered the audience up. That and the cosily warm Fiat-lux under the ceiling helped the young Lifekeepers shake off the uneasy feeling the night was giving them.

“So, when dragons take human form,” asked Milian, “where does the excess mass go?”

“Ah, a scientist to the bone…” Pai gave him a condescending smile. “They’re natural mages, all of them. And mages have their ways of bending the laws of physics a little bit.”

“Natural mages… And no need for stabilizers. Cool,” said Milian thoughtfully. “Ah, why can’t we humans be like that?”

“We can’t do a lot of things,” Bala smiled. “Just look at us, compared to animals: no fur, no claws; blunt teeth, poor eyes, poor sense of smell… My master says that the lack of something always gets compensated with another thing: a weak person can compensate for their weakness with intelligence or cunning, for example. This is exactly what we as a species do. If we could naturally stabilize magic, we may not have developed civilization, we would have been just… animals.”

“You’re quoting the enemy now,” Orion made a sly remark.

“True,” nodded Milian. “This goes back to Helga before she became Vlada the Warrior. But, to be fair, the book where I saw that quote had been written a very long time before Erhaben.”

“I always thought that it’s not wise to hate a creation only because you hate its creator,” agreed Bala. “Helga spoke the truth…”

“You’re treading on a very thin ice here!” shouted Irin. He had been trying to keep quiet but his patience had finally run out. “Have you forgotten everything that the Order has taught you? You,” he pointed at Orion, “the one who is so proud of his ancestor, a bloody pirate! Maybe you’re proud of your name as well?”

“I am,” was Jovib’s calm reply.

“It’s the name of the worldholders’ minion!” Irion growled.

“For a Lifekeeper, you’re too fast to judge, Irin,” Orion shook his head. He remained unruffled under the younger boy’s angry gaze; there was even a tone of pity in his voice. “The world is not black and white, it’s not even grey. There’s always a No Man’s Land between good and evil where any anomaly can happen.”

“Go back to sleep. Everyone.” That was Juel’s voice. Low, cold, commanding voice. “I’ll set a lookout so we all can feel safe. Irin, you will take the first watch. Orion will change you in two hours. Then Lainuver. And kill the light lest it blinds the lookouts to the dark.”