“Dragon,” I breathed.
Hrrr, went a voice.
I jumped around.
In front of me was a tall white refrigerator. Two doors, top and bottom, hinged to the right. On top of the fridge sat the thing I’d come to find: the listening dragon.
It was, as my mind had expected it to be, tall and green and spiky and cute. It had trumpet-shaped nostrils, large oval eyes, a wide curling tail, and flattish back feet.
And the most enormous petal-like ears.
It smiled, almost ruefully, and looked down at the fridge.
“Should I open it?” I asked.
The dragon sniffed. It looked around and drummed its claws.
I reached for the top door and pulled it open.
On the middle shelf of three was a small box.
Meow, said a voice from the floor.
I pushed the door half closed and looked down.
The cat I’d been following was sitting beside an empty food bowl. It flicked its ears when it saw I’d noticed it.
I opened the door again and took out the box. It didn’t look big enough to store any food. All I found inside was a folded piece of paper.
It said WRONG DOOR.
The listening dragon shrugged.
I put the box away and opened the bottom refrigerator door.
A blast of icy air swept out. As it cleared, I saw an amazing scene inside. A young polar bear was sitting on a sheet of ice, with water lapping gently in front of him — an image more real than anything I’d watched on a tele:screen. I felt that if I climbed inside the fridge I would hear the crunch of ice underfoot. I shivered and rubbed my arms. “Who are you? What is this world?”
The ice bear tipped his head to one side. His small brown eyes were packed with wonder. “This is Ki:mera,” he said. His voice was gruff, but as sharp as the pale blue sky around him. “My name is Avrel. I am the Teller of Ways.”
“Ways?” I asked.
“Legends,” he said.
I thought about this. “Are you here to tell a story?”
He tilted his head to the opposite side. “You are the story, Agawin. And we have been waiting for you.” A slight wind swept across him, tugging at his fur. A host of bears was behind him now, sitting, paws together, like the cat by his food bowl, as if they had an appointment with destiny.
“What do you want me to do?” I whispered. I feared this perfect image might crack if my voice was raised any louder than that.
Between his feet, a book appeared. The pages flickered until the wind dropped. On one leaf was a beautiful sketch of the listening dragon. I recognized the ears, even though the drawing was upside down to me. On the opposite page was what looked like a scorch mark. Avrel blew on the book. It turned right around.
“You must lead us to Ingavar,” he said.
I looked at the mark. On the page, it was just a simple squiggle: a wavy line with a shorter line through it, thicker at one end, finished in a slight triangular spike. It looked like it might have been a signature. The longer I looked the more structured it appeared, until I could see real depth in it and something began to trigger in me. A memory of a language.
Dragontongue.
“Agawin, where are you?” Elizabeth’s voice. She sounded close. Very slightly concerned.
I closed the fridge door, shutting out the bears. The cat’s food bowl vanished. The cat himself was twizzling his ears, trying to locate where the voice was coming from. He scuttled away, low down, looking guilty. Likewise, the listening dragon gulped, as if he should not have been a party to this. He dibbled a paw and disappeared in a blink. The fridge he’d been sitting on disappeared with him.
“Ah, there you are.” Elizabeth slipped her hand around my shoulder. We were back in a plain square room again. Warm pink walls. Friendly. Soothing. The kind of place where an active mind might put away any worrying thoughts and drift on an ocean of eternal calm. I smiled at Elizabeth and she at me. The firebird Gryffen landed on her shoulder. He poked his inquisitive gaze here and there, but I was fairly sure he had seen nothing. Already, my memories of the bears were fading, but I was clinging to that mark as though my life depended on it — or someone else’s did. For in that very thin slice of time, that tiny shudder in the unity of “now,” I had managed to find a translation. With it came a whole new raft of meaning. I had unwrapped a very great secret. I had seen the name of the listening dragon. I held Elizabeth’s hand and repeated the name over and over in my mind.
Ganzfeld.
Ganzfeld.
Ganzfeld.
You look surprised,” Zanna said, squaring up to David. “Or do my gothic roots still make you cringe? Suits me, don’t you think? The dark. The Shadow.”
He stared at the crusted scales on her cheeks. The coils at her temples. The row of thorns on the back of each hand. In some ways, she did look strangely alluring. But the Ix in her would always be repellent to the Fain in him. “You’re not her,” he said quietly. “You’re not Zanna.”
She flicked a spiteful glance at Rosa, who could do little more than gulp and shy away. “Am I beautiful, Commander?”
“Yes,” said Tam.
“Would you die for me and give me your shade?”
“I would.” He touched a hand to his darkling heart.
Zanna stepped forward, dabbing a finger at the trickle of blood on David’s cheek. “Would you desert me in the heat of a battle?”
“Never, Pri:magon.”
David tried to look away, but she caught his chin and applied enough sideways pressure to make him face her again. “Hear that, David? He wouldn’t run away.” She angled her dark lips close to his. “He wouldn’t disappear across a huge time nexus, leaving me and my friends to fend for ourselves.”
“I warned you things would be different,” he said, trying not to flinch as her nails dug in.
Burying a snort in the back of her throat, she brought her mouth up close to his ear. “Don’t try to be brave. The war is won. The Shadow controls this part of the nexus. Very soon we’ll have the rest — and more.” He heard the slither of her darkling tongue. “Now, be a good Fain and tell me what you’ve done with Alexa….”
He thought about this, then whispered back, “Shouldn’t you be asking Gwilanna that? Where is the evil old witch by the way?”
“Pri:magon, the dragon is rising,” said Lucy.
Zanna pulled away and turned toward the crater. “Behold, David, the last dragon on Earth!”
“Hhh!” gasped Rosa as Gawain’s studded head emerged from the lava pool, followed by his wings and the rest of his body. Lava ran away in runnels down his breast, making crowns of fire where it dripped into the pool. He was an adult now, as wild and impressive as a dragon could be. He was showing no obvious darkling mutations, but the green had leached from his scales and wings and there was no hint of violet in his tortured eyes. He was the antithesis of all his kind.
A black dragon.
He stared at the newcomers in the chamber. When he saw David, his optical triggers contracted in a rush and he reared back, flaring his smoking nostrils. A jet of fire burst from his gaping mouth, split into forks by his enormous fangs. Even David must have feared being turned to ash. But the blast hit an unseen barrier between them and dispersed in harmless scribbles of flame. Gawain extended his wings to their fullest and with a whip of his tail went spiraling around his invisible cell.
“Impressive,” David said, blowing out the air his lungs had been grasping. He brushed Rosa’s hand to check how she was. Her auma was off the scale. “Not only infected but imprisoned as well.”
“Better for you that he is,” growled Zanna. “Oh, and in case you were thinking of trying, you can’t commingle with him through the field.”
“What have you done to him?” Rosa demanded. “Why is he in that … place?”
“Like you care,” said Lucy, showing her teeth. “He’s nothing but a myth in your imagineered world.”
“Better a myth than a servant to you.”
“He’s digging,” David put in quickly, trying to defuse any further conflict. He raised his hands in mock surrender and stepped up to the point where the fire had petered out. He prodded the force field, making it dent. Gawain put his dark head forward and roared.
I know, I know, David said in his thoughts. I will get you out of there. But why are you so very angry with me? And how have they gained control of you …?
“Digging?” Rosa said, as if she’d eaten something sour.
“I use the term loosely,” David muttered, looking at the glowing rocks in the crater. “They’re trying to reach into the Fire Eternal. Nothing but a dragon could cope with the heat.” He turned and rattled a question at Zanna. “How are you making him work for you? A dragon would rather go into stasis than give itself up to the Ix:Collective.”
Zanna threw him an all-knowing smile. “If I was to allow you to commingle with him, David, you’d find that he’s not completely … himself. You mentioned Gwilanna just now.”
The color drained from David’s face. He flashed another look at the dragon’s eyes. “She’s illumined — to Gawain?”
“A marriage made here, on the peak of the island, under the light of a crescent moon. Just like it always was in legend.”
“In your dreams,” snarled Rosa. “What have you done with Guinevere and Thoran?”
“Will you keep that under control?” Zanna barked.
Tam found a piece of cloth and snapped it tight between his hands. “Be warned, girl. Next time, I gag you.”
“And Gretel,” David added quickly. “What about Gretel? No room in this world for your potions dragon, Pri:magon?”
“Gone,” she said, without remorse. “Written out of time. All of them. Elizabeth Pennykettle included.” She gestured at Tam to put David back with Rosa again.
David raised his hands and rejoined Rosa without the need for force. “That’s not possible. I can feel the auma of Thoran within me.”
“A weak Ki:meran echo,” Zanna said. “A hangover from your Travels across the nexus. Try it, David. Try to shift into Ingavar. You must have felt him fading when you battled the wolves. The same goes for Grockle, your tame dragon. In this timeline, your connection to him is nonexistent.”
Rosa shifted her feet, hopeful, perhaps, that David would change and fight their way out of there. But as it became clear that he wasn’t going to risk it, she vented her feelings about Zanna instead. “Why me?” she hissed at him, under her breath.
“Shush,” he said from the corner of his mouth. “They’re not joking about the gag.”
But she wouldn’t give up. “Why me who fades out of time and not her?”
“What are you talking about?” Zanna snapped.
“We’re confused,” David said, loud enough to drown Rosa out. “If Liz was lost when the timeline altered, how do you explain the presence of Lucy?”
The darkling girl raised her chin.
“Or you, for that matter?”
“Lucy was selected. Like Tam. Like me. All of us were taken from Scuffenbury Hill and reinserted at this timepoint to aid the inversion.”
“Inversion?” said Rosa.
“Do you repeat everything you hear?” growled Lucy.
“Let’s come back to the ‘inversion,’” David said quickly. “Tell me about Gwilanna and the … selection process.”
Zanna pressed her hands together, making the bangles slip down her arm. Her scar was still prominent, but the lines were dark and scabbed right over. The darkling infection had tried to erase them, but had not entirely succeeded, David thought. Perhaps there was still a chance to reach the real Zanna underneath. “With Guinevere gone,” she said, “the dragon soon lost his will to live. He settled on the island and watched the moon. We sent Gwilanna to hide among the rocks and wait.”
“She caught his fire tear?” Rosa scoffed. “No way. It would have burned her inside out.”
“His tear was shed though?” David queried.
Zanna nodded.
“Then how did he survive?”
“Because of me,” said a voice.
Tam and Lucy stood to attention as a figure dropped down from a ledge above Zanna. A man so full of darkling twists that it was almost impossible to see any true humanity in him. A spiked tail dragged along the floor behind him. Pointed wings rose above his shoulder line.
Zanna turned to the captives and said, “David, Rosa, let me introduce you. This is my betrothed. The Shadow Prime. His name is Voss.”
He could hear the hum of the universe, right down to the space within atoms. That’s what Ganzfeld, “the listener,” could do. Now I had seen him and learned his name, my memories of him were strong and clear. I remembered how Elizabeth would blow him a kiss every time she opened the refrigerator door. How she would ask him what was happening in the Crescent. How, with one subtle twist of his ears, he would always have some sort of answer for her. The thing that puzzled me most about him was why he’d never been referred to by name. But then, no one had ever asked.
That night, I let the question float in my dreams. And my dreams came back with a surprising answer. I found myself sitting on a pillar of ice, listening to the words of the polar bear Avrel. He had an engaging story to tell. He tipped his snout toward the northern sky. “One night,” he began, “Gaia was playing with the dancing lights, when she caught an array of interested stars and joined them together in the shape of a dragon. This pleased her so much that she brought her creation down to the ice. Fearful that the wind would blow him away, she took clay from the land so his body would be solid. She colored him green with grass she had found. She tickled his feet until he drummed them into claws. She pulled his tail until he flicked it into a pleasing arrow. She caught two feathers from a passing bird and stroked them on his back until his wings folded out. Two ribbons of light, one green, one violet, she gave to him next to provide him with eyes. And when the sun came up to chase away the night, she let the first ray enter the dragon’s mouth and burn there forever as a spark of fire. Only one thing was missing. Ears. Gaia looked for more stars with which to make them, but the night, by now, had blossomed into morning. She thought of flowers and their beautiful petals. But none were in bloom this far north at that time. Then her dragon did a very strange thing. He jerked his head as if he could hear something. He bent forward and touched the ice, then scraped a small chunk of it into his paws. Hrrr, he said, (for he could speak, of course). The ridges of his eyes came together in a frown. He held the ice close to his heart, as if he could sense it calling to him. Immediately, a white bear rolled into view. He was padding along with heavy paws as though he wished the ice would swallow him up. When he saw the dragon he staggered to a halt. He squinted in the way that only bears can. Gaia hid behind a nearby ridge, curious to see what this meeting would bring.
“The bear sniffed at the dragon. ‘What are you?’ he grunted. His gaze suggested he had seen many dragons, but never one quite as unusual as this.
“The dragon tilted his head to one side.
“‘I am Thoran,’ said the bear. ‘Who are you?’ There was a deal of impatience in his ruffled voice, but it was clearly hiding a mountain of sorrow.
“The dragon tipped his head the opposite way.
“A rumbling tumbling grumbling noise bobbled around in Thoran’s throat. He could have walked on or swatted the dragon aside. Instead, he lowered his black-tipped snout and blew a great draft of air across his head. His aim was to clear the creature’s hearing, but the result was a lot more lasting than that. His misty breath settled in two fine clouds, which the north wind set in the shape of ears. Magnificent ears. Big and bold. Twice the size of any found on a bear.
“Thoran stood back, wondering how this had happened. Already that day, he had seen a human companion die and break up into flying … fairies. Now there was this. A little green dragon with ears made out of his grief-stricken breath. What kind of magical world had he entered?
“Hrrr! went the dragon.
r /> “Thoran gave a roar and shuffled back. He was not afraid, just mildly puzzled. The dragon had spoken in a strange variation of the usual tongue. In that brief warm puff of air, the creature had described everything Thoran had gone through that day — and the days before. His journey north, his escape with Guinevere, the fire tear that had created the ice they were standing on. What’s more, he understood how Thoran was feeling.
“‘How?’ said the great bear. ‘How can you know this?’
“Hrrr! went the dragon. I heard your auma.
“And now it was at work with its nimble paws, flashing away at the nugget of ice it had first scraped up. Somehow the chunk had doubled in size. The dragon split it open and breathed inside. A spark ignited and nestled at its center, yet the ice refused to melt.
“The dragon shaped the ice into a ball again. And it grew again. And again. And again. Until it was so large that he could only carry it above his head. Hrrr, he said, meaning, Thank you for the ears. This is for you. And he lobbed the ball at the mystified bear.
“‘What should I do with it?’ Thoran asked. He was looking at the ball and paying no attention to the dragon now. When he looked up, the dragon was drifting away, hand in hand with one of the strange little fairies Guinevere’s body had broken into….’”
There, Avrel’s story came to an end. In my dream, he began to turn away.
“Wait!” I shouted. “Is this how the listener came to be with Elizabeth?”
Avrel paused and blew a snort of air. “Ganzfeld has always been her guiding force. The others were made in the image of him.”
Others. Others. My mind began to spin. “Why did she never speak his name?”
“Because she did not know it and she liked him as he was — her faithful listening dragon.”