The Ballad Of A Semi-Benevolent Dragon

Chapter 19: The Fox And The Dream

The lands of the kitsune straddled the borders of the physical world and the dreaming lands. Hikari's people had come here in the aftermath of the Fifth Catastrophe, desperate for safe haven after almost being wiped out by first the Exiled Star and then those who hated them for the part they'd played in summoning the vile creature from the Greater Darkness.

There, her people had met Dreamsong. The muse dragon could easily have destroyed them. She was, after all, a primordial dragon, a being who had witnessed the glories of the First Age and the terror of the Broken God. Instead, Dreamsong had taken them under her wing. She had sheltered them, trained them, and done her best to help them recover from the mistakes of the Fifth Age.

And then Hikari's mother had betrayed her and become the Sixth Catastrophe. Even then, Dreamsong had been unable to raise a hand against her, for she had loved Hikari's mother as though she were her own daughter. It had fallen to others to strike her mother down, and as right as they had been to do so, there was a part of Hikari that could not help but hate them.

She could still remember those far off days, back when she had been so very young and so very sure that the world was a place of hope and wonder and joy. Her father's shoulders had been so broad, and the grey in his hair had made him seem dashing instead of weary. Those had been good days, perhaps the very best days of her life.

That palace by the lake with her mother and father and all her friends even now, there were still days when she wished she could go back there and live in those golden years forever. But those days were gone. Her mother had chosen her path, and others had chosen to stand against her.

The last time she'd seen her Uncle Doomwing, the mighty dragon had been clinging to life, wounded almost to his death by a spear of god-metal that her mother had somehow managed to obtain. He had destroyed the spear and laid low her mother, but the effort of it had all but killed him. Her Uncle Marcus had stood sentry over him, doing everything he could to heal him.

Hikari had wanted to go to them, to offer what aid she could, but all she could see was the wrath in the vampire's gaze, the savage fury within him as he drained himself and his sword of every scrap of power he could spare. Not far from them, surrounded by mountains of the dead, was her father.

She had seen him fall, had seen him blind and bereft of any weapons save his fists. The sight of it still haunted her dreams from time to time.

And what had she done during that final battle?

Nothing.

She had done nothing.

She had loved her mother, had loved her and idolised her and thought her the most wonderful and amazing person in the whole world. To see what she became, to see the choices that she made Hikari had always wondered if there had been something she could have done. Had she missed some sign of her mother's growing obsession? Had there been a moment, however fleeting, when words would have been enough to stay her hand?

She had not been able to bring herself to fight her mother, no matter what sort of person she had become.

Yet Hikari had not agreed with her mother's course of action. Even as her kitsune kin had clamoured to support her mother and set aside their mischievous but peaceful ways in favour of war and treachery, she had not joined them. Instead, she had hidden herself and fled.

She had been too much of a coward to stop her mother, and she could not stomach the thought of joining her. Instead, she had watched as her mother tore the world apart, only to be faced by a coalition led by her father and her friends. In the end, both of her parents had died, many of her friends had been wounded, and all she had done was watch.

The shame of it the absolute and unbearable shame of it

Her thoughts had taken her to dark places then until, in the midst of yet another nightmare, Dreamsong had reached out to her. The dragon was wracked with grief. She had seen someone she viewed as a daughter die, and she had feared Hikari lost as well.

"Come home," Dreamsong had begged her. "The kitsune need you."

Unspoken was how much Dreamsong needed her and how much Hikari needed the dragon.

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So Hikari had gone home. She had arrived to find the lands of the kitsune in complete disarray. Kagami had been the leader of the kitsune, and her death had left Hikari's half-siblings squabbling for the right to succeed her.

It sickened her. Her mother had once had more than a dozen children, hardly surprising given how old she had been. Only four of them, including Hikari, had survived. The others had all perished, either at her mother's side or fighting against her. Her three half-siblings had already formed factions and were tearing at each other like jackals fighting over the scraps left by a lion.

Hikari had planned to stay out of the succession dispute, but then she had seen the madness that lurked in her half-siblings' eyes. She had seen it before in her mother's eyes. They spoke of mustering what strength they could and striking while the rest of the world struggled to recover. They were few in number, yes, but their enemies had taken massive casualties. Already, the great kingdom her father had forged was disintegrating as her other half-siblings fought each other in defiance of his will and testament.

Hikari had made a decision then because she could not have lived with herself if she had failed a second time. She had challenged for leadership, and with Dreamsong's help and tutelage, she had won. She had forced her half-siblings to kneel, and they had been made to obey.

She was younger than all of them, yes, but the blood that flowed through her veins was mighty. She did not know who their fathers had been her mother had never told her although she had always left offerings for them on the anniversaries of their deaths but Hikari's father had been Elerion the Valiant, the greatest of human kings and a hero known throughout the world.

The power a kitsune wielded was shown by how many tails they had. Her mother had possessed nine, and her sheer power had rendered her immune to the passage of time. Her mother had not aged a day in thousands of years, and only death in battle had put an end to her life. Hikari had possessed two tails when her mother had turned against the world. By the time her mother was dead and the Sixth Age came to an end, she had possessed three.

During the succession dispute which had taken almost a century to complete, Hikari had allowed Dreamsong to train her even more harshly than she had trained her mother. She had become the youngest kitsune ever to reach five tails, and that had given her the power she needed to make her half-siblings surrender.

They had grown lazy and overconfident, certain that none could oppose them. The higher ranks of the kitsune including her older and stronger siblings had all perished in the final battle of the Sixth Age.

It had been roughly a thousand years since her mother's passing, and Hikari had not slacked in her training or pursuit of power. She needed to be strong enough that none could challenge her leadership. She would not allow the mistakes of the past to be repeated. She would ensure that when the kitsune finally left their seclusion and re-entered the world, it would be as a benevolent force that respected free will and the right of others to choose their own fate. They would not hold themselves above others but would see them as partners.

To change the attitude of the kitsune had not been easy, and it was still a work in progress. But Hikari was mighty, and she had all the time in the world. A century ago, she had finally obtained her ninth tail. Age no longer wearied her, and there was no kitsune alive who could even think of challenging her and winning.

Normally, Hikari would be spending afternoons like this in the academy for the young. It was always easier to teach the young than to change the minds of the old, and she had done her best to make them aware of the mistakes of the past and how they could do better in the future. Many of those who opposed Hikari's views had simply died over the years, succumbing to old age. Those few who remained had realised that her victory was as inevitable as the tides and had secluded themselves, unwilling to face her yet unable to challenge her rule.

It gave her no joy to see the dark clouds of bitterness that hung around them, for she was all too familiar with such feelings herself.

On this afternoon, however, Dreamsong had summoned her. It was rare for the dragon to call for her so formally, and even rarer that the dragon insist upon an immediate meeting. In the manner of most primordial dragons, Dreamsong did not view time the same way as others. To her, a decade and a century were not so different, and she would go from periods of great activity to slumbering for years at a time.

As Hikari approached the ornate archway that marked one of the places where the border between the physical world and the dreaming lands was especially thin, the guards saluted her. One was an older male whilst the other was a younger woman. Both had three tails.

"My lady." The male bowed. "Will you be seeing Dreamsong?"

The dragon insisted on no titles, for she had no need of them. Her name along was enough. For who did not know Dreamsong, weaver of dreams, binder of memories, and master of wills?

"Yes." Hikari nodded at the guards. "I should not be long. If I am gone longer than an hour, then send word to the palace. They will know what to do."

Time in the dreaming lands was a strange concept. It existed, certainly, but its flow could be strange and erratic. Spending more than an hour of time in the deep dreaming where Dreamsong dwelt was not safe, even for her. Should that happen, her followers had instructions to ring the great bell that was housed in the palace.

It was a gift from Doomwing, made for her mother who had often lingered too long in the dreaming lands. When rung, its call could be heard even in the deep dreaming, and its echoes would open a path for Hikari to take back to the borderlands where the realm of the kitsune lay.

Her lips curled. For someone so poor at dream walking, Doomwing had proven more than adept at devising countermeasures against it.

Hikari took a deep breath and stepped through the arch and into the dreaming lands.

The world around her fell away, and she was immediately assailed by a wall of sensations, memories, and fantasies. The dreaming lands were influenced by all who dreamed, and they could be likened to a sea. Currents of desire could easily drag off the unwary, and the shadows lurking beneath the fleeting, ephemeral dreams of normal people could be fearsome creatures indeed, beasts wrought of the ancient nightmares and everlasting terrors that haunted all dreaming folk. But not all denizens of the dreaming lands were evil.

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There were shining lights of hope, creatures of radiance and glory that were wrought from dreams of freedom and noble aspirations. Others were more mundane, wandering collections of humdrum thoughts and desires a tumbleweed of dreams concerning new shoes or vines of workplace ambition growing across a wall of stolid boredom.

Hikari was the ruler of the kitsune, and she was no nave dreamer. She cast her power out, and the ever-shifting, twisting miasma of the dreaming lands before her solidified into a road of paved stone that reminded her of the reliable thoroughfares her father had been so proud of. She walked forward, the road extending before her as walls of stone rose up on either side to block out the dreams or nightmares that fought for attention and sought to feed off her psychic might.

Deeper she went into the dreaming lands until even the paved road of her will gave way to a place of fog and shadow where only the oldest and greatest of dreams could live. This was the deep dreaming, the collective subconscious fed by the dreams of all living creatures. Here, titans of the past could be seen, the towering forms of the Seven Gods lingering long, long, long after their passing, their forms sustained by the unwavering memories and immutable wills of the primordial dragons and the few others to have lived in that ancient epoch.

Further off in the distance was the twisting, ever-flowing shadow of a tree so big its branches seem to encompass the whole of the deep dreaming. This was the memory of Mother Tree, a memory fed not only by the primordial dragons and their ilk but also by the First Daughters who had inherited her memories.

There, curled up against the trunk of that enormous tree was Dreamsong and it spoke to the sheer size of Mother Tree that a dragon who was almost a mile long could look so small beside her.

Hikari had met several primordial dragons in her life. They had all been mighty beyond measure, but she could honestly say that none of them had been so beautiful as Dreamsong. The dragon was long and serpentine, far slenderer than Doomwing, to the point that she seemed almost ephemeral. Her scales were a ceaselessly shifting river of purples, from vivid violet to gleaming amethyst, shimmering lilac, and abyssal indigo. Her wings were ghostly things, less like sails and more like clouds, and her eyes were a piercing magenta.

As Hikari approached, Dreamsong got up onto her haunches. Her long neck curved toward her, and her magenta eyes blazed in the eerie twilight of the deep dreaming. In response, the dreams around them fled, and only the shadow of Mother Tree remained, still and silent, yet somehow radiating warmth and affection.

Dreamsong had told Hikari of how Mother Tree had fallen, but it was telling that in their dreams, she and her fellows dragons did not see their great foe. Instead, they saw Mother Tree as she had been before, a tree whose great boughs had sheltered them when they were small and whose touch had comforted them when the Broken God had slain so many of their kin.

"How are you?" Hikari asked.

"" It took a moment for Dreamsong's eyes to truly focus on her in the here and now. The currents of the deep dreaming were all but impossible to read, even for her, but Dreamsong was as far beyond even Hikari as Doomwing was beyond the greatest of human mages. She could glimpse the futures held in the currents of the deep dreaming and tease small nuggets of prophesy from them from time to time. "I am well."

Hikari raised an eyebrow. "You sent for me."

Dreamsong nodded, and the emptiness around them shifted. Flashes of ruby and sapphire flitted past, and Hikari realised that the dragon was showing her a new current, one that had only recently grown prominent in the dreaming world. "He has awakened once more, but I do not think he means to slumber again as he has done in the past."

The 'he' she referred to needed no explanation. Only one creature in the world had scales of such vivid blue and red.

"What has Doomwing been doing?" Hikari asked.

Dreamsong looked at her but saw beyond her. "He seeks to build an empire of his own, as does Marcus in the far north."

"For what reason?" Hikari asked quietly. "Has he fallen?" If Doomwing were to fall prey to the same mistakes as her mother, it would be disastrous.

Dreamsong chuckled. "No. Boredom."

"Boredom?" Hikari asked incredulously. "He is building an empire because he is bored?"

"Yes and because he wishes to outdo Marcus."

Despite the gravity of the situation, Hikari couldn't help but laugh. "Those two idiots," she said, her voice heavy with fondness. Elsewhere, she might have tried to conceal her emotions, but not here. Here, in the deep dreaming, all desire were laid bare. Even without looking, Hikari knew that behind her stood wispy outlines of her mother, father, and friends relics of those brief years when the world had been pure and perfect. "That would be just like them."

"An umbral veil has appeared in the far north. I believe Marcus means to make a kingdom there, a new vampire homeland to replace what was lost."

"Didn't Doomwing blow up the old vampire homelands?" Hikari asked.

Dreamsong nodded. "In his defence, we all agreed to it. It was the best option at the time."

"Is that so?"

In terms of raw destructive power, Doomwing might be the most gifted of the primordial dragons once his magic was taken into account. Frostfang could have done it. The winter dragon rarely left the far north since he could freeze entire kingdoms if he wasn't careful. There was also Ashheart. The tectonic dragon was the largest of the primordial dragons, perhaps half again as large as Doomwing, but he was also the slowest and worst at flying. Yet his was the might of the burning heart of the earth, and Doomwing had once told her of how he could heave up mountains with his power or tear great rifts in the earth that could swallow whole kingdoms.

Yes, every single one of the primordial dragons could have destroyed the vampire homelands, but perhaps only Doomwing could have done it so quickly and so utterly. The umbral veil that had protected those lands had shattered like glass, and his magic had torn through the air, the ground, and even the water, sundering and breaking, tearing root and branch, leaving only silence and absolute desolation in its wake.

That had been at the end of the Fourth Age.

It had taken until the middle of the Sixth Age before anything had grown there again, and even then, it had only been weeds of the most stunted and twisted variety. From what Dreamsong had told her, several enterprising dryads had taken root there recently, and they were having some success in restoring the land to some semblance of normalcy although it would likely take another thousand years before anything of worth could grow there without their aid.

"The Fourth Catastrophe was stronger than you would think and far more vicious. He had learned to draw strength from the very land itself, binding himself to the vampire homelands to add to his already misbegotten powers. Destroying them so utterly was an important way of weakening him and dealing with many of his followers." Dreamsong's gaze turned distant. "Though it pained me to see part of the dreaming lands go silent. Vampires dream, you know, and not all of their dreams were cruel."

"So Doomwing is establishing an empire for himself, as is Marcus. Is that all you wished to tell me?" Hikari asked.

"The time is soon approaching when you will reveal the kitsune to the world again." Dreamsong had not asked her about it, but she knew of it all the same. After all, Hikari had dreamt of little else recently. "You will need allies in the world, people to vouch for you and yours."

"And you would have me seek out Doomwing and Marcus?" Hikari stiffened. "I" She had lived more than a thousand years, yet the thought of seeing those two again had her feeling like a small child a child who had done wrong and did not wish to face it. "I do not know if I can. I did not stand with them."

"Nor did I," Dreamsong said, her voice a low, mournful sound like the crashing of the tides against some distant shore of tumbled cliffs and broken stones. "And yet if I spoke to Doomwing now, I know he would not turn me away."

"You have known him since the First Age. I knew him for less than two decades."

"Despite how he may act or what he may say, Doomwing has had many friends over the years." Dreamsong's coils gleamed purple in the twilight, and for a moment, they were somewhere else, and the great dragon's hoard lay about them. The greatest of her treasures were memories and dreams caught turned into crystals that could be viewed and experienced on a whim. The moment passed, and they were once more beside the shadow of Mother Tree, and Hikari had to fight to keep from asking for memories of the good days, for the crystals that contained moments forever lost to the passage of time. "But almost all of his friends are dead, Hikari. I think he would be pleased to know that even one more of them still lives and is well."

"I" Hikari took a deep, deep breath. If she was going to bring the kitsune back into the world, then she would, at some point, have to meet with Doomwing and Marcus. "I shall consider it."

"He is training someone," Dreamsong said. "A young woman with eyes like your father and dreams like his. She even broke her leg kicking his construct out of frustration."

Hikari chuckled. That had happened to her father, and he had never stopped complaining about it. "Is she?"

"A distant descendant, but his blood flows more truly in her than it has in many others."

"As I said, I will consider it." Hikari turned, but not before catching a glimpse of the current of desire trailing after Dreamsong. "And perhaps you should leave this place for a time as well. It has been a long time since you've seen your fellows."

Dreamsong stilled, and then her sinuous body moved, gliding across the ground in almost serpentine fashion. "Perhaps the north. There are new dreams there from hatchlings with hearts of winter ice. It would be remiss of me to not visit at least once before they are grown and leave the nest."

Hikari had just left the dreaming lands and walked back through the ornate arch when she realised what Dreamsong's words meant.

"Frostfang has hatchlings?" She snorted inelegantly, ignoring the shocked stares from the two kitsune standing guard. "Good luck, Marcus. Hopefully, they don't cause you any trouble."