Old Ideas, New Visions

By Penny Nichols

Rtan rode the eagle in the shadow of the windship, the polished wooden vessel carried by a large, yellow balloon encircled by vast, white sails. It carried a rare and special ore that could be forged into weapons radiating energy on a wavelength that harmed multi-dimensional creatures, or cut through the spells tying them to the wrong world. The strong wind at their back felt like a fortunate blessing as it pressed against him, even if the wizards back at Mine Ridge Fortress had scheduled General Zkan to leave with favorable winds. The dozen ariel knights surrounding it wore different colored cloths over chainmail armor, Rtan’s dark blue, so their commander could tell them apart at a distance.   

The Citadel of Gari Dego, perched on a mountain top, came into view first as a dazzling blur, silver runes at the highest levels energized to keep the portal to their homeworld open. The mountain peaks were havens amid the sea of billowing, toxic clouds.  The mountain had the strongest magical radiance, so the Citadel had to be there to fuel the runes.

He hadn’t been sleeping well, especially when off duty at the Citadel, but knew if he complained he’d be taken off duty. Everyone dreamed, but ever since he’d been assigned to this world, they had turned against him. People he’d dreamed of before kept turning into reptilian versions of their real selves and trying to eat him or drag him down into darkness. He told himself he’d just been fighting Sethians too long. Other knights had bags under their eyes, too, but still did their duty.

Featherwhip lurched up and angled to show his rider the telltale rippling in colorful clouds revealing enemy movement, so Rtan leaned the opposite way to keep steady but had learned to trust his steed’s instincts and followed his lead.  He’d raised and trained Featherwhip for a life of adventure and protection of all civilized peoples, and if not for the knights of the sky, some evil predators would be able to attack and retreat at will.

The Sethians had to be almost ready to strike, or they wouldn’t have flown so close. Rtan unlatched his crossbow, still tied to the saddle with a long rope, four bolts already cocked, ready to be trigged one at a time or all at once. The eagle curved and angled to give him a good line of sight, but he saw ripples in the fog everywhere.  The entire squad was about to have their hands full.  Despite the riders always killing more Sethians than the reverse, the enemy ranks continued to grow, perhaps slowly drawing upon the population of an entire world.

Come on, come on, let’s get this over with.

The poisonous clouds below were heavier than the air they breathed, but normal to the Sethians who called this world home.  His gas mask and air tank hung on the opposite side from his weapons. At the Citadel, the lower atmosphere was being mined, for lack of a better word, for use back home. The toxic gases were being taken home and pumped into goblin tunnels.  It struck many warriors as a dishonorable form of warfare. To fight the enemy in their underground homes would cost too many lives, yet leaving them down there always meant another inevitable invasion.  With this new way of war, the days of their raiders escaping human retribution were fading fast.      

A horde of Sethians burst out of the clouds, billows of gas flung any which way.  They carried long bows, arrows at the ready, but couldn’t use them while flapping their wings.  Rtan waited for the right moment, and when the Sethians folded back their wings and arched to aim and release their arrows, he took advantage of that moment of stillness to send a bolt at the one closest to him. 

A dozen arrows came at him, and the eagle dipped to begin a dodge so he never knew if his bolt hit or not.  Despite his mount’s ariel maneuvers, the Sethians surrounded them.  He released the other three bolts at three different targets, and when he reached for his quiver to reload, they charged as one. Dropping the crossbow, he raised his shield and lance, urging the eagle with a swing of his own balance to fly straight at the biggest.

More thanks to Featherwhip than himself, they rammed the lance through their enemy, but then Sethians were upon them. He drew his sword and fought back while the eagle jerked about, trying to bite and claw.  But his mount couldn’t wear enough armor for full protection and still fly, so more Sethians attacked Featherwhip than him.  Using longer spears than in previous battles, a pair of them kept him busy defending himself while his eagle screamed in pain, impaled from below. 

Featherwhip twirled, folding its wings to fall through the pack. Disoriented, Rtan barely managed to get his breathing mask on, the leather tight against his skin, before they fell into the cotton blanket of sunrise hues.  He felt around for the eagle’s mask, but the tube had been cut.  Wounded, the eagle spread his wings and shakily glided ever downwards through the rainbow of toxins, landing with a jolt, skidding along the dirt.

Cutting himself loose with a dagger, Rtan struggled up until his ankle sharply rebuked his effort.  Using his sword as a cane, he succeeded the second time. His other shoulder throbbed, and he carefully rolled it, glad to feel it wasn’t broken.  It was like trying to see through a fog under a thunderstorm, but examining his unconscious mount, he knew he couldn’t save him.  Between the poisonous air and blood loss, even an alchemist couldn’t have helped.  He hugged Featherwhip around the neck, wishing he knew if the eagle blamed him, or understood why the Sethians needed to be fought. Anywhere his people settled, Sethians attacked, but only raids, unable to breathe long at the mountain peak heights.  Warfare never stopped, so there was no chance to learn each other’s language, nor for the wizards to figure out what had upset the lizardry natives.  Once, the Allies of Light rooted out a Sethian settlement to get them away from the shipping lane. They fought in a series of elegantly carved caves staring out from cliff faces over the sparse fungi forests where the Sethians hunted their prey.  The cost in silver runes for weapons and explosive alchemies had been exorbitant, and too many men and eagles died just from damage to their breathing masks.

Wall carvings suggested they worshipped dragons, but no dragons, mindful or mindless, had been seen since they’d arrived.  Like all superstitious people, they imagined a god like themselves writ large, unable to fathom the true abstractions that governed the world.  Order. Chaos. Life. Death.  Then again, the knights had only explored a small patch of the world, and beastly dragons had vast hunting grounds and long naps, while the wise star dragons lived far apart to avoid the overlapping of their dreams, unless they fell in love. 

Once his people had been like the Sethians, led by priests who found magical places and decreed them holy. Druids made their staves from trees growing on ley line intersections, the streams of power pooling magic, and priests ascended mountains to commune with the heavens and pronounce their commands.  But with progress, wizards made their own staffs from trees and more reliable astrologers replaced the priests.

But to survive, Rtan had to move on, and without wasting time.  Featherwhip’s gas tank was too heavy for him to carry, so he had to soldier on without it.  A nearby tree looked more like a giant mushroom, with a black top to absorb what light made it through the thick air, the rest of the surface grilled like filters to capture nutrients that poisoned humans.  There were animals that ate them, and animals that ate those animals, but humans didn’t smell like their food so mindless predators were the least of his concerns. Sethians wouldn’t eat a person, but they could smell them, and the air tank he now strapped to his back only had an hour left.

Unable to see which way to go, he closed his eyes, remembering his descent, intuiting which way to find the Citadel.  Riders were screened for spatial orientation and trained to perfect it, yet if he picked the wrong direction, he would die and no one would come looking. His body would lie there, unwanted by fungus or bacteria unable to digest him.

Picking a direction, he marched with his shield strapped to his free arm, refusing to second guess himself. Once a rider stopped trusting his well-honed intuition, he might as well hang up his stirrups. Thinking too much led to too little, too late.  A little voice in the back of his mind hoped the Sethians would be focused on bringing down the ship and leave him to die. Guilt drew his attention upwards, but he had never held a weapon that could reach high enough to do any good now.

By the time he passed one tree, two more came into vague sight.  Every swirl of the fog caused his heart to jump.  He found a pile of dung so large it could only have been left behind by one of the slow crawling creatures described in the scouting manual as a spiked armadillo, the only animal the Sethians didn’t bother hunting. At long range, Sethians hunted by smell, so Rtan smeared it over his armor. 

As the ground grew steeper, he took it as a sign he’d made the right decision.  Finally.

At the base of a cliff face, he sheathed his sword, dropped his shield, and climbed as best he could with three limbs, his shoulders straining from doing more of the work than they should have. He’d never make it to the Citadel’s main entrance, but there was another way in. The Sethians used to have a temple dug out of the mountain, their priests using the magical radiance of the place for their “miracles” just as druids had used the ancient trees.  Wizards now forced the mystical energies into continuous, reliable magic that religions weren’t known for, and reliable magic was how the wizards had chased out the Sethian priests unassisted by their fickle deities.  

The air from his tank thinned. He’d been well trained to recognize how much air he was breathing, both for using the air tanks and for telling if he had flown too high.  Climbing onto a wide ledge, he stopped a moment to rest, looking up at the metal slab welded over the entrance to the old temple, reinforced with defensive runes.  A young dragon of Ariel could have flown through it when it had been open.  Along the sides, carvings of Sethians prostrating themselves before their god could still be made out despite erosion, and over all that still half a dragon in relief. 

Rtan found a human-sized door in the slab, placed there in case someone in trouble needed in.  Wizards always had contingences, ever since the days when casting a spell was a dangerous wrestling match with the laws of nature.  Knights of the Wind sometimes debated if the arrogance of wizards came from their victories, or was needed to dare the moral risks of their profession in the first place.

Rtan put his hand on the rune lock, which tickled as the rune sensed his blood and skin to be human and the door opened inward.  He stumbled into the darkness, but the ceiling began glowing even as the door closed.  Two loud hums competed as prickling magic decontaminated him and air he could breathe replaced the alien gas. In the old days, the magic couldn’t tell the difference between alien bacteria and the half-humanity each person combined with another person’s to create children, so lots of people were accidentally rendered infertile, but those days were long past.

He crossed his fingers anyway.

Once it was all over, he took off his mask, breathed deep, and using his sword for support, walked into the main tunnel, lit by small crystals embedded in the ceiling. A rumbling bellow mixed with heavy footfalls echoed from the other end.  The tunnel still had a slight stink that outside would have warned him of a leak in his mask.  He supposed even the best wizard could never completely cleanse the tunnel of this world’s natural atmosphere.

Two stone golems lumbered towards him, tough and strong but too heavy for combat and no amount of rune knowledge could make them smart.  All they could do was as the runes inscribed upon them told them to, unless a wizard personally took control by wearing an inscribed helm.  Golems were used down here since long-term exposure to direct magical energy had side effects, but he didn’t plan on lingering around long enough for the deeper recesses of his soul to manifest physically. 

“Sword is out,” said the golems in unison, and each raising a hand.

“I’m using it as a staff.”

“Sword is out.”  Runes on their hands began glowing. He didn’t have to be able to read them to know he didn’t want them to go off, and dropped his sword.

The golems lowered their hands.

“Come this way,” announced the golems in unison.

“I am injured. I cannot walk.” People had to talk to golems like they were dim.

A golem picked him up like a child and they marched down the tunnel.  The floor angled slightly downward. Images of Sethians had been carved so they stood out while the longer carvings of dragons appeared more deeply embedded in the world.  Since before even the elves, star dragons had spread across the galaxy, in states of near hibernation while riding solar winds to new light gravity worlds. Their civilization was a series of dreams expressed as cities of art and philosophy, lectures and debates, all connected by dreamspace, which had the same apparent relationships to the “emptiness” that minds had to bodies. Dragons could dream so vividly their cities could be wandered into by distracted mortals who lived more in their own minds than the world, delighting the dragons with philosophical and artistic variety making their long lives worth living.  But beastly dragons had none of that, unable to cultivate spiritual magic due to their cruelty.

From ahead came a slow, pulsing whine along with light dimming and brightening in time with the sound. As they walked closer, his eyes had trouble adjusting to the strobing.  The higher pitch of the whine became annoying.  The golems entered a large cavern and trod upon a ledge that went up the side, cut straight through the superstitious icons.  The high roof appeared too smooth to be natural, yet the lake above had formed before the wizards came, so this room had to be of Sethian construction.  Below stretched a reservoir of heavy poisonous fog. It puzzled him why the wizards hadn’t pumped that out, until a bellowing groan and shaking of heavy chains startled him, shifting the fog as if something moved down there.

A golem worked a chain, lowering a cage to them.  Three lengths of crystals stuck out from walls at different angles like rough daggers, drawing magic upwards, faintly shimmering like heat.  Only two were needed, one for the portal and another for all their other magical needs, but wizards loved their back up plans. As the elevator came into sight, he wondered if Sethians weren’t just making up their religion.

The golem carrying him stepped into the lift and the other pulled on the chain, lifting them.  He watched the fog until the cage rose into the shaft, leaving him alone with a golem and a little light from a crystal in the ceiling.

The door opened and the golem put him down next to an apprentice healer who helped him into a wheelchair.  A wizard shoved a clipboard at him.  “Sign this form.”

Rtan read it over. “It’s a nondisclosure form.” In accordance with this oath he could only talk about what he had observed below with the wizard who wrote the agreement, or else he’d have a stroke and his mind would drown in blood.

“You entered the tower through a restricted area and you don’t have clearance. Sign it or your healing will be done in a cell awaiting trial for your crime.”

“My eagle was killed under me and I barely escaped with my life and you’re giving me grief about how I got in?”

“Eagles are just trained animals and rules are rules. You should know that by now.”

“Eagles are not just trained animals,” he groused, signing the form. “If intelligence is the ability to individually adapt to the environment, then in the air they are smarter than we are.”

“Fish are better swimmers than we are, and if eagles were as smart as some of you knights claimed, then it would be illegal to train them as your mounts.”

Rtan wished there was a way to prove once and for all if the giant eagles were conscious or not, but that class of spells was considered the first step towards mind control, so to be safe no one was allowed to learn them. Humans steered well away from elves because it was so hard to tell when an elf was communicating telepathically, or manipulating the defenseless minds of mortals. Yet at the same time, it was elves on their light ships that had spent centuries travelling from world to world and star to star, building the portals allowing themselves and mortals to travel between them in a blink of an eye.  

That night the nightmares returned vengeful and hot, sweeping through invigorating clouds, bursting through stone, and the Citadel crumbled. Rtan snapped awake in a hospital bed. The long room of cots lit by lanterns hanging from above, dim enough for the wounded to sleep but just bright enough for healers to check their progress.  The other patients were sailors from the airship.  Given the Sethian tactic of attacking the eagles, if a knight went down, he probably died, so Rtan wasn’t surprised to not see any of his team.

The next day he was well enough to walk and went in search of food. Despite the stone walls and supporting arches, stretching high in every room, the Citadel felt fragile. He imagined Sethians bursting through the plentiful tall windows despite the defensive runes in the glass, or the possibility of a dragon busting up through the floor.  If it had been a dragon down there. 

Down in the mess, he drank hot bean soup, black, ignoring the riders and officers around him, looking at him with pity.  To be a rider again, he’d have to travel to the eagle’s native world, steal an egg, and raise one from a hatchling. He hesitated, remembering the stillness in Featherwhip’s eyes, and didn’t want to be the cause of that again.

Several of the riders’ eyes appeared nearly as did as Featherwhip’s had, and the staff was sullen in their duties. Just as he wondered how many of them were having nightmares, a fight broke out behind him.  He turned around just in time to see a furious rider stab a servant in the shoulder and other riders leapt to restrain him from a second thrust.  The riders dragged their screaming comrade away and other servants carried their fellow to the hospital, a towel wrapped aournd the wound.

“That’s the third attack since your squad left,” said a nearby rider.

“Goblin dream sorcerors,” muttered another. “They must have realized what we’re doing here. They strike across the emptiness.”

From an inner balcony, he looked down on the glistening portal where laborers carried in fresh fruits and vegetables, a cool harvest breeze at their back.  When the runes were activated, there was a brief warming, but then it touched the inner dimension at the heart of all planes of existence, and its emptiness sucked heat out of air for the second before the interspatial tunnel formed, connecting this room with the environment on the other side. 

Rtan wondered how long it would take to evacuate the Citadel if defending it became impossible.  The wizards had assured everyone the Sethians lacked the magic to breach their defenses, so more knights, soldiers, and staff worked here than ever before, not to mention eagles, but they were slowly losing their minds.

Rtan wanted to talk to someone, but he didn’t trust that man precisely because he’d insisted on the oath.  

But he could still act.  He could learn the truth for certain.

If there was an intelligent dragon down there, his people had done a great wrong to obtain these war supplies, and he should free it. Except if the dragon was the source of magic empowering the portal, they could all be trapped on this hazardous world. Either way, he risked his people back home never gaining the power they needed to defend themselves.  He hoped the mountain was a ley line intersection, and the dragon chose this place to sleep for that reason.  Except why then had the wizards kept it chained in place?  If it was a wise old sage of their dreamy civilization, and his nightmares a cry for help, he could ask it for advice about how to free it.  As for the blood oath, it only applied to what he saw the first time, clues that something was held captive. This time he would see the actual dragon, circumventing the oath.  

Signing out breathing apparatus and climbing gear, he went to the lowest balcony he could.  Before he could touch the rune that would lower the bars, a guard stopped him. “I’m sorry, sir, I need written authorization to let you out.”

“Members of my team might still be out there.”

“None of them could have made it back.”

“I did.”

“Their air supplies would have given out by now.”

“Not if they also carried the air tanks of their mounts.” Which would be heavy, but if they were uninjured, possible. “I have to at least have a look around.”

With reluncant sympathy, the guard touched the rune and the bars slide away like a mouth retracting its teeth. Rtan began his descent.

Having climbed all the way down to the small, outer door, he entered and allowed the golems to escort him back down the tunnel.  But instead of following them back to the elevator, he ran to the edge of the fogged-over pit, the golems lumbering after him with outstretched hands.  He pulled the mask back over his face and slid down.  At the bottom, he jumped forward just in time to avoid golems landing on him. Their impact cracked their own bodies, but Rtan ran deeper into puffy hues.  Huge chains clanked as something moved ahead, and a loud snort rocked him back on his heels.  Pulling his dagger from sheer fear, he treaded carefully, until a wide beam of dim light forced him to squint, the reptilian slit widening. 

Once close enough, he saw the muscles around the eye, pain feeding malice worse than hunger, the steel muzzle, intelligence focused into a cunning intent on escape no matter the collateral revenge.  The wizards had been draining its spiritual energies from its soul to distill into magic. The once wise dragon’s spiritual dreams had turned into nightmares, cunning fantasies of vengeance flaring until, eventually, all the dragon’s magic would be sucked dry.      

An explosion shook the earth, the steel barrier to the outside crumpling with a long, drawn-out scream, and Sethian hissing echoed.