I've got another small project to share with you today as the final editing and formatting process for The Unshorn Thread continues. I wrote this one in celebration of a friend's video game project: Flight Rising. The game has been in development for quite a while and looks both fun and dazzlingly beautiful. The game is based on the raising of your own flight of dragons. The lore of the game is also fairly layered and interesting. There are a number of dragon deities for instance. It is this group of deities that inspired me to write my little story "The Discordant Assemblage". The story is told as a series of vignettes, each of which showcases a different one of these dragon gods. All images used in this post are original work, done by members of the Flight Rising team. Here's a link if you'd like more info on Flight Rising.
And here's my homage to the hard work of the Flight Rising Team:
The Discordant
Assemblage
The Tidelord awoke with a start. His eyes darted about in the silty murk.
Something was amiss upon the current. He could not place a talon upon precisely
what it was, and this disconcerted him. As always he had this day kept a weather
eye upon the shiftings of the sands and the tugging of the innumerable tidal
eddies that whispered of events both past and yet to be. He had not slept long.
Yet now, at his waking, it was as if all the sea had gone wild. The sands
bubbled and frothed as if dredging themselves for plunder. The eddies, rather
than winding their own paths across the sea, pulled and pushed in unison like
the beating of a drowned heart.
It unsettled him. So attuned was The
Tidelord to the whispers of the sea that little ever happened below the waves
which he had not expected. Yet here, before his very snout and everywhere else
he could sense, was an event he had not foretold. A shiver ran across his
gills, enticing him to stand. He did so rapidly, violently churning up the
waters of the cave he had selected to bed down within for the afternoon. Silt
spun and coursed about the tight space, obscuring The Tidelord’s view of the
sea. Flecks of gold dust and mother of pearl whirled about before his eyes.
Their properties as conductors of the wisdom of the sea had been what had drawn
him to this resting place, yet now — even flung before his all-gleaning eyes —
they remained silent.
The Tidelord roared with the
indignity of their silence. His voice buffeted about the cave and went pulsing
out across the sea. His eyes shone a fierce cobalt blue, lending his gaze the
ability to cut through the silt and the muck which bubbled up from the seabed. With
one mighty stroke of his wings, he swam free of the cave, and there beheld yet
another unnerving sight. All along the seabed, erupting from beneath the
shifting sands, were hundreds of lost treasures. In his immediate vicinity, the
Tidelord could see an exquisite marble statue, a cache of very large and
pearl-pregnant oysters and even the scrying glass he had known to be hidden
somewhere in these sands.
Yet none of it mattered. The plunder and
prophetic tales that it would speak to him was as nothing to the pulsing sway
of the sea herself. He needed to know what was going on, needed to glean what
sort of force might be at work upon the fabric of his realm. For that he would
need focus, would need the deep knowledge. He would have to seek the place
which his flights dared not enter. He would need to delve down, down and down
again to the vents of the chasm-floor. He would need to breathe in their
sulfuric vapors and scratch away at their molten mouths. Only then would the
sea tell him truly what had stricken her. Another beat of his mighty wings and
he was off, keening into the deep a warning to those who might lie in his way.
The Tidelord was angry, and all other denizens of the sea would do well to be
wary this day.
Fussing won’t do now, fussing won’t do. That the shift has already begun must be read as a grand sign. Yes, a grand sign in the affirmative of my actions. Nothing to do now but forge ahead — where did I leave that tome? It’s all fine and good, fine and good. As long as I didn’t misread anything. Oh where is that infernal book? Well. It’s likely fine. I’ll... wing it. I’m sure I remember the timing of the next bit. Yes, I’m sure of it.
It tore at him, the strange
migratory feeling. The caves of his brethren were perfect, had stood perfect
for millennia. There was no place better, and The Earthshaker knew it... and
yet. Yet here it was, this strange itching beneath his stone skin, impossible
to nurse and ever growing. He swapped corners of the great hall, one for the
next, yet nothing provided comfort. A sigh like an avalanche rumbled up from
his belly.
He had never felt this way before. Even
during the long-lost years of his youth, The Earthshaker had dug in, had
preferred to gain the most intimate knowledge of every stone and gem in the
labyrinthine mine below the great hall. Rather that than seeking a shortened
life out in the wild and untamed world beyond the shrine of the Pillar. And
yet...
But no, for now he had hit upon it
in earnest. The Pillar of the World was his to guard, and his alone. He gazed
along the grand court of Dragonhome, finding in an instant the beatific shape
of the Pillar. ‘What would mother say?’ he mused to himself, smiling at the
thought. He had not remembered his mother for aeons, and yet here she was upon
his mind. ‘Truly this feeling of unsettledness must be a horrendous notion to
evoke her memory,’ he thought. What would The Earthmother say to this wanton
disregard for home and hearth and duty? ‘I must have grown too long in the moss
to even entertain the idea,’ he assured himself.
And yet... here he stood: the final
guard of all the first. Mother had gone, and the rest of his brood as well. The
second breed was naught to those of his ilk, and they could no more defend the
Pillar than they could cease squabbling amongst their own flight. Yet had it
not been the way of the first brood to sojourn in their centuries after their
weaning from The Earthmother? And had The Earthshaker not foregone this rite,
the better to know the Pillar and its locale? He shifted his great weight once
more, finding no relief.
It tugged at him, this unknown
commodity, which he had so recently purchased at the cost of his own solace.
‘The Pillar has stood since time immemorial,’ it whispered to him. ‘It can
stand alone for what scant few hours you leave it.’
“I cannot abandon the Pillar!” he
said aloud, his cavernous and ill-practiced voice caroming across the great
hall. He expelled a dry and haughty sigh, letting his massive head thunder down
against the floor of the hall, the impact of this adding to the echoes of his
voice which could now be heard reverberating like a tidal surge against the
stalactites and endless causeways of the caverns below his chamber. He listened
as the sound slowly began to die away, listened for the silence that
cohabitated with him, which defined his natural environ.
Yet the silence did not come. If
anything the surging sound that he had taken for echo seemed to be growing. Had
his voice awakened some denizen of the deep caverns? He knew of no creature
which dwelled in the earth which made such a sound. And he knew every denizen
of the under-earth by name and voice.
The Earthshaker listened closer. ‘What is this new sound?’ he wondered. ‘First
I am gripped by a sensation both alien to my nature and my way of living, and
now the unknown rises to greet me from the very place I know best in the world?
It is a strange day indeed.’
The thought suddenly struck him that the exploration of his own
labyrinthine den would not necessitate his leaving the Pillar unattended, that
it might too provide the discovery and movement his stony frame itched to take
up. The Earthshaker stood. He sounded his intent to whatever it was that
rumbled and tumbled and swelled in the deep places of the earth.
“The Earthshaker comes!” he bellowed. “Let all that lurk in the deep
places of the earth kowtow to their lord, for I am among them this day!”
A smile cracked across his cheek, and The Earthshaker delved into the
darkness, his eyes smoldering with a glee he had not felt in many an age.
And yet... was it not all too convenient?
Did this new sound, this new presence, not precisely fulfill the need which had
so nearly taken The Earthshaker from his all-too-important post? The
Earthshaker mused on this as he rumbled down and down into the earth. He could
not help but feel as if he had forgotten something, something ancient and
important. Very, very important...
Ah, here it is! No... no that is a lovely tome but not the right one. A pity. There are ever so many interesting scrawlings in that one. That last bit went less smoothly than I thought it would. But then, this is a very volatile — no, I’ll say exciting — a very exciting bit of work. I doubt anyone’s truly completed it in the last thousand years. Oh! What a charming thought. To be the first in a millennium! Oh, they’ll envy me from the four corners of the realm... that is if I pull it off. I’ll go from my notes until I find the damn book. There aren’t many places left to look after all! Let’s see here... Oh. This bit is simple as catching a canary and baking it in a pie! Notes will suffice for this! Oh, it’ll be fine! I do wish I’d written anything about the following step though. I’ve plum forgotten all about the specifics. Oh well... spilt milk, and not worth crying over the death of the cow, as they say.Do they say that? Well, something like it anyway...
“Something is wrong in The Green,” thought The Gladekeeper. “There is a
tinny taste to the soil and a fell damp to the air.” It left a lingering flavor
in the veins of her roots, one she did not deign nourishing. She expelled three
short bursts of spore from her uppermost branches, sending the little bits of
life out to see what there was to be caught along the breezes. They would
return shortly with news of the air and the sky.
The Gladekeeper would not be idle as she awaited their return. She walked
silently to the banks of The Source. Tiny aromatic bubbles rose from the depths
of the well, releasing long-captured nutrients back into The Green. The Gladekeeper
dipped her toes into The Source, allowing her claws to sink deep into the silty
bank. Her roots stretched down and down into the fertile soil. Here there was
no tinny corruption, and here she could see far into the earth’s deep heart.
Her roots wound and gathered the deep nutrients of The Source. Images poured
into her mind.
In the past these visions would be of growth and of green, sapling and
sage. Today, however, there were images of fracture and of fault, of heat
unwanted and of blade. Her closed eyes darted about beneath the bark of her
eyelids. One image seemed to surface most frequently. It was a storm without
rain, a tremor without impetus. The Gladekeeper held this image in her mind as
she drank from the deep water. Upon her shoulder, just above the waterline,
began to grow a new stalk. It was warped and stretched, and gleamed with odd
colors as it grew. A leaf, and then another unfurled from the twisted thing.
They were deepest purple and orange like fire, and they singed her skin as they
grew. A bud and then a flower popped up from between the leaves. The orchid
opened its petals: long, stringy cords of maroon velvet. They were speckled
with black and orange spots which seemed to engulf one another as they grew.
The orchid’s maw was a wretched, stinking wound of a thing, bubbling forth with
sulfuric pollen.
The Gladekeeper took a single look at the
thing and sheared it from her shoulder. The flower burnt to ash before it could
find the ground. Seeing this last ill omen, The Gladekeeper dredged herself up
from the waters of The Source. She stood straight and tall, calling back to her
the spores which she had loosed moments before. They returned to her in an
instant, bringing with them the scent of discord in the southern straits. She
would have to leave The Green to see to this threat. And so she began the
complex task of exiting her home. It would grow without her presence within its
green heart, but there would be much tending to do upon her return. The
maintaining of the Viridian Labyrinth was an ever-constant task, and the
flights would begin to become isolated from water and sky and earth if she was
gone too long, such was the crush of The Green. The forest parted for her as
she went, hungrily eating up the path again behind her.
Ah! Here it is! The tome of The Sealshatterer! What a fine find it was, hidden in that stormy desert of a wasted plane. I veritably rescued it from an instantaneous destruction at the hand of those bothersome storms, and look at what it does for me in return! I shall be remembered by the flights of every realm for this. I shall shape the lands to my liking and reap their hidden bounty far more completely than even the first of our pristine order! And here at last I begin to be able to see the fruits of my labors. Now let’s see... AH! “Let the strait boil and the earth rise. Let the glades putrefy and the sky flow red with fiery aether! En Phobos annum, Aequitas et olethron!” Oh my! Oh, that IS tantalizing! I can feel it upon the back of my neck. The gravity of the starry sky draws great. It shall be soon!I wonder if I have tome to scrounge up a snack. Oh, that would make the moment perfect... what’s in the larder?
“Sir, we’ve got a net loss in sector beta-niner, please advise.”
“Beta what?!”
“B9. Someone took our stuff in grid B9... sir.”
“Honestly, Stephens, I don’t know why I went and designed an alphanumeric
grid if you’re just going to mess with the names, and did you seriously just
say ‘niner’ in groupchat?”
“Sorry sir, but I really think...”
“And that’s another thing, Stephens: I have like... the coolest name ever
and you’re just gonna call me ‘sir’? What kind of a wasted opportunity is that?
Ok now try your alert again in proper procedure. We’ve had this chat system up
for like... a week now. You gotta get used to doing it right or you’re gonna
suck all the awesome out of it.”
“Ok, ok! Agent Stephens to Stormcatcher! We have a confirmed loss of
archaic assets in grid... B9.”
“You sunk my battleship!”
“See... I knew! I knew you were gonna do that!”
“Hahahaha! Point for Stormcatcher!”
“Dude! Can you just pull up your map and look at what grid I’m reporting?
For like a minute?”
“Stephens, your new code name is killjoy. Now seriously what can be so...
aww, $#!+. You said B9, didn’t you.”
“Yeah, beta-niner.”
“Ohmygod! Dude! This is so not the time to screw around! Do you know what
we were keeping in grid B9?!”
“Um, yeah. That’s why I called it in. Way bigger deal than the crackers
Gregory’s been pilfering from the pantry, you know?”
“He’s been WHAT?!”
“Sir, er, Stormcatcher. Grid B9!”
“Okokok. Ugh. The thing is I know of one and
only one %#@&-bird who would take my junk! I hate that guy! Ok, seriously,
now that I think about it, I really am pissed. I was gonna figure out how to
read that thing one of these centuries. It was on my list... right after...
‘duct tape Plaguebringer to Flamecaller for the hell of it’. See? I was
practically doing this already! Ok, where’s that new doo-hickey I was messing
with earlier? Grab me a lightning rod and a copper coil from the cellars. It’s
boom-stick time!”
Oh. My. We still have Rambra loin in here. Score one for papa Arcanist! Ok, now back to the show. I can already hear the magnetosphere sundering. I wish I had fire breath. Flamecaller gets all the convenience abilities. Oh well. Raw Rambra loin it is. Time for a bit of geoscrying to see how the core elements are doing. With luck they’ll have risen another thousand feet.
Hello. What’s this? Wow, is that ever a power spike. And it has a sort of a rhythmic pulse to it. Could it be alive? Wow, I wonder if I woke something up from way down there. If I did, and if it’s angry, whatever flights are down there are in for a world of hurt. Geez, it’s still rising! As if the thing is... wait. Swapping to perpendicular swipes at the scrying glass might... no! He never leaves home! How the... but that would leave the Pillar unguarded. And that would be entirely interesting if I wasn’t doing something ridiculously important!Why would The Earthshaker be here? Ugh. He’ll be here to mess with my magicks, I just know it. Good thing he’s the... oh, COME ON!”
The water was too warm, even for the surface. The Tidelord did not like
others disturbing his domain, especially those who did not come close enough
for him to eat them in retribution. He burst forth from the sea, carrying with
him a torrent of whitewater. The sky above the waves glowed a deep and lustrous
violet. The Tidelord was not sure, but this struck him as irregular. Circular
arcs of cloud wove in and out of one another, whirling in concentric arcs above
his head. In their center was visible something that looked like a very large
or very close star. This he knew was wrong. As he began to crash back to the
sea, he spotted the offender. High amongst the clouds, sitting upon a floating
bit of earth, was The Arcanist, a scrying sphere in his claws.
Just before he sank back into the sea, The Tidelord let out a piercing
scream. So directed and violent was it, that the last thing The Tidelord saw
before he was back in the world below the waves was the shattering of The
Arcanist’s sphere.
The Tidelord circled about, hoping that his first volley had enraged the
interloper enough to incite a frontal attack. He welcomed the challenge.
That crazy buffoon! Now how am I to control the impacts? Oh, I hate him.
— “I hate you, do you hear me?!”
The Earthshaker emerged from the newfound exit of his labyrinthine cave
to a sight like nothing he had beheld before. The waves of the northern channel
swirled and bubbled, and beneath them could be seen the leathery wings of The
Tidelord. Above he could see the wiry frame of The Arcanist, shaking his frail
fists in what appeared to be a shade of pink anger.
This much was no great surprise, but the rest of the atmosphere was
worrisome. The Pillar of the World gave of radiating waves of energy, the pulse
of the earth he had come to call it, but the air here was crisp with a
dangerous current, as if the very air might explode at any moment.
There was a sense of earth here too, but not the true earth. It was a
foreign earth and carried with it a deadly rumbling. The Earthshaker looked up
to the heavens, searching for the source. The thing that he saw was like to the
harbinger of the end days: a giant whirling, burning mountain of immense
density and destructive power. It was just like the stone that had brought
about the end of the first age, Phobos. But Phobos had already fallen, there
was no way that it could be called from the heavens again... and yet...
‘If that truly is Phobos, I must stop this madness,’ The Earthshaker
thought to himself. ‘But what can I do, here upon the shore and so far below
the fall of the end-bringing stone?
The Gladekeeper stepped lightly out from the edge of the Viridian Labyrinth.
She had known what it was she would behold since her spores had told her, but
to truly behold such an unnatural, wicked happening as this... it took her
aback to see. The Arcanist was at fault here, she knew that, and so she found
him out at once. He was floating high above the earth, upon a mountain in the
sky. Her eyes glowed bright and she began to shape her leaves for flight. She
would eat The Arcanist this day and rid the world of his blighted unnatural
existence once and for all. Just as she had prepped her leaves, widening and
strengthening them, for flight, a voice stammered to life beside her.
“E-excuse me, ma’am,” it said. “I have never spoken to another such as I,
and I can sense that you are somehow altered in form from myself, yet you may
be nigh as ancient a being as myself. In the spirit of whatever kindred nature
there lies between us, I ask you for your aid.”
“Did... you just call me ancient?” The Gladekeeper knew she was a great
and well-cultivated being, but to be called ancient was overstepping a bit, she
thought.
When she turned to behold the creature that beheld her, she was shocked
to have to crane her neck upward. Nothing living, save for the Viridian
Mother-tree of The Green, stood taller than herself. And yet this creature,
this stonework dragon-god stood a good thirty feet taller than she.
“You...” she gasped, “you must be The Earthshaker, the oldest of our ilk.
Yet I was ever told that none had ever seen you leave your throne beside the
Pillar of the World. What is it that you are doing here?”
“I am indeed The Earthshaker,” he replied, “and I would ask you the favor
of delaying your assault upon The Arcanist a moment — that is what you were
planning on doing, is it not?”
“It is,” she replied, “and believe me, there is no creature more in need
of my wrath this day.”
“I agree with you,” rumbled the voice of The Earthshaker, “but if you
turn your eyes skyward, you shall see that he has somehow conjured or created
the Phobos stone high in the sky. I believe he wishes to destroy this place, or
at least to rip it asunder for some private reason of his own. I believe I can
stop this event, but I would need to commune with Phobos directly, and for that
I shall need to be closer.”
“You do not expect me to carry you upon my back into the heavens, do
you?” asked The Gladekeeper.
“I do not know if that is within your power,” said The Earthshaker, “but
I must commune with Phobos. What solution can you give me?”
The Gladekeeper thought for a moment. Then, digging her roots into the
earth, she began a rumbling chanting, her eyes closed in meditation.
Three?! There are three of them down there now?! I didn’t even see the Gladekeeper coming without scrying. I’ll need to mount defenses. Oh, that I still had my scrying sphere. I hate that Tidelord, I hate him! Well... what’s done is done. What other manner of defenses can I mount?
“Lightning PUNCH!”
Ow! What the hellfire was —
“Lightning PUNCH! Oh, that was epic! I floored him! Stephens, log the
Lighting Extendo-Gloves as officially awesome in the ledgers.”
“Sir, that’s not the official shorthand for...”
“Dude — buzzkill — write the word awesome in the ledger, ok? I just
totally bushwhacked The Arcanist. I think he’s out cold! These things OWN!”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“What did you just call me?”
“Uh... Affirmative... your holy lordship?”
“Did you for reals forget my name again?!”
“Oh! Nope. Nope, I did not.”
“buzzkill... what’s my name, B%#&@?”
“Sigh... Stormcatcher.”
“YEAH it is! Hells yeah! Now where’s my stolen bookie-wook?”
Root and vine rose like massive arms from the earth. The roots grew and
grew until they were as strong as steel and as wide as the Pillar of the World
itself. Vine wrapped and knotted and braided its way about the roots, forming a
grand and elastic mesh. When the mesh was complete, The Gladekeeper motioned
for The Earthshaker to get in. Then, with all her might she stretched the vines
to their utmost and flung the great stone dragon-god into the sky.
‘I wonder if he’ll shatter upon impact,’ she thought. ‘Ah well, it serves
him right for calling me ancient.
Why, in the wide world of adjectives, he went with ancient is beyond me. Seasoned maybe, or primal... venerable even.’
She did not wait to see the impact.
The Earthshaker realized quickly the folly of his plan. He had neglected
to tell The Gladekeeper how close he had needed to get, and so she, likely out
of an over-abundance of care, had shot him directly at the Phobos stone.
Communing would take a few minutes, after which he would be able to impose his
will upon the stone. Rock was rock, after all, no matter how foreign.
This was all a moot point, however, for he would collide with Phobos far
before he would be able to commune with the stone. This left him with one
decidedly indelicate way of dealing with the Phobos stone. He lowered his head,
and gritted his marble teeth. This was likely going to smart.
The impact was violent beyond his reckoning. For a moment he felt as if
he had been the one to shatter. The sensation of rock crumbling away against
his limbs and head was like being ripped apart. Phobos was one hell of a dense
stone.
When The Earthshaker emerged from the far side of Phobos he was whole,
but delirious. He had chipped here and there, but the end-bringer was shattered. As he fell back to
earth, The Earthshaker smiled, and then promptly lost consciousness.
He awoke drenched in saltwater. Beside him upon the land stood The
Tidelord. A hissing, drowned voice greeted his still-pounding ears.
“Thisss once the ssssea has risen to sssave the earth,” said The
Tidelord. “Recompensssse has been paid. If the earth or its treasures descend
into the depthsss again, the ssssea shall sssswallow them whole. The earth
hasss been warned.”
The Arcanist awoke alone upon his floating isle. The sky was clear and
the stone was gone from the heavens. His scrying globe lay in pieces, the tome
was gone, and he had a raging headache. His place in eternal memory, it seemed,
had been stolen away this day.
‘There are many more books,’ he
consoled himself, ‘and many days yet
before the end-times to make my mark.’
He would return to the watchtower for the day, bury his nose in another
tome for the night, and rise again on the indigo wings of knowledge in the
morning.
The End
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