Fireclaws - Search for the Golden (2 page)

A few seconds later, Queen Maya herself opened the door and immediately enveloped me in a strong wordless hug and kiss on the cheek. The king stood just inside the door and mustered a weak grin. Whatever was bothering them had to be intensely personal as concern was etched on both their faces. Mentally, I took note that as usual, neither of them were dressed in royal fashions. Alex was wearing his standard Enchanter robe, and Maya a serviceable leather doublet over thick leggings and high boots. Honestly, they looked like people you would see on the street in any decent-sized town of this world.

King Alex was holding Belle, their little girl, seated on his massive arm with her arms possessively around his neck. She was a little over four years of age now and born with her mother’s exquisite beauty and her father’s magic. Alex stepped closer and Belle stretched out to give me a sweet kiss, did I mention she was also a charmer?

I’m pretty sure my face turned a few shades darker in embarrassment. Getting so much attention from your King, Queen, and Princess while you still have the dust and stink of the trail on your body was just wrong in my book. I bowed and went to one knee, trying to maintain decorum, just as Nia flew in and silently perched on Alex’s shoulder.

“Pardon my appearance, your majesties, but Nia said it was urgent.”

“Ryliss, you are a true sister to me.” Maya smiled, a small relieved tear running down her cheek and pulled me to my feet. “Why is it every time you come back from a mission you are so formal? It takes me a week or better to get you back to just calling me Maya, and then you leave again.”

I grinned and took an over-excited Belle from Alex, cuddling her in my arms and rocking her gently back and forth. The curly-haired little Enchanter put a hand alongside my face and giggled. “Auntie Ryliss, I lost two teeth while you were gone…see?” She displayed her most horrifying grin, complete with vacancies. “At this rate, I’ll be rich enough to buy a pony soon.”

“Rich?” I said aghast, looking at Maya for support. “Has someone been filling your head with that ‘tooth fairy’ nonsense again? Every dark elf knows that it is the Black Squirrel of Falworth that steals the teeth of children at night.”

“And what does the Squirrel do with the teeth, then?” Belle said wide-eyed.

“He puts them into a magical knothole in the biggest oak of the forest, and when he has them all, he waits and waits. When the child is older, a spirit animal, be it wolf, snake, bear or even Jag’uri, answers the call of the child’s soul. But since it is a spirit, it has no teeth in the real world, so it must go to the Squirrel to be judged. If the child and the spirit animal are worthy, the spirit animal gets its teeth and becomes much more powerful…so powerful that even if it is just a spirit, it can still reach out and devour delicious little girls like this!” I flipped her over in my arms and buried my face in her stomach, gnawing painlessly and growling, while Belle shrieked and struggled hysterically. Finally, I stopped to let her catch her breath and flipped her back upright.

Tears of laughter still streaming down her face, she reached up and grasped both of my ears firmly, looking me steadily in the eye. “If it’s all the same to you, Auntie Ryliss, I’ll take the silver that Nia puts under my pillow instead. Besides, my spirit animal is going to be a Vakha like Daddy and they don’t need sharp teeth.”

“Nia!” I protested, “You’re the tooth fairy?”

“Strictly part time.” She blushed, sitting casually on Alex’s shoulder.

“Belle, why don’t you run along now. I’m pretty sure you have some lessons to finish for your teacher,” Alex intoned with what I recognized as his official voice, as I placed her gently on her own feet.

“I suppose…” Belle said begrudgingly, as she headed for the door. She stopped and turned to smile at me. “But Ryliss, I’ll still want to hear a story about your trip later…please!”

“I will do my best, most exalted and beautiful Princess of the Realm,” I said with a deep bow. Belle did her best to portray a squinty-eyed glare of imperial disdain at my mocking tone and then burst into wild laughter and slipped through the door, closing it behind her.

Straightening up, I asked, “So what then is the emergency? Did Rosa lose a book or something?”

Alex’s face darkened with concern. “Actually, we lost something quite a bit bigger; two of them, in fact...the twins are missing!”

“Huh, what?” How do you lose a pair of forty-foot dragons?

“No one has seen them for ten days now, not even Higs. They haven’t been doing their handmaiden duties, and most worrisome of all, they haven’t shown up for bacon! We’ve been deliberately wafting it all over Sky Raven and no sign of them.” Maya added in a very worried tone.

“And they said nothing, and no one saw them leave?”

Alex shook his head. “We’ve searched the entire keep including the catacombs. I think they have a secret lair somewhere in the mountain, but even I can’t seem to find it. Reggie might be able to figure it out if he were here, but Lin and Jules are still out on one of their quests. They’ve been gone longer than Dusk and Dawn. We’ve had Hons out to search as well but he says if the place exists its shielded from magical detection somehow. Dragons being dragons and all.”

“Umm, Alex, you remember that I can’t move rock or summon earth elementals, right?”

“But you are a Druid, and I was hoping you could change form into something that could find their nest. Nia has looked, but she doesn’t have the nose for it. We desperately need to know they are alright,” he said firmly, and Maya wrapped her hands around his bicep and nodded in agreement.

“Ok,” I breathed out, “that sounds like a kingly command to me. Do you have any clues at all where it might be? Places where you see them frequently, that kind of thing?” I tilted my head, shifting into delver mode.

“I see them up by the back wall where we did pixie flight school all the time,” Nia piped in. “It’s pretty much sheer walls and straight down from there.”

“And that’s the farthest part of the fortress away from the magma flows, so it would be the coldest,” Alex added, and Maya seemed to concur. “That’s where I would start if I were you.”

“Right, I’ll need something from their rooms with their scent on it.”

“I’ll grab something,” Alex said, hurriedly disappearing from the room, obviously pleased to be doing something to contribute to the effort, while Maya cocked her head and grinned weakly.

“Don’t you remember what they smell like, Ryliss?” she chuckled. “Snakeskin with a side of bacon dressing?” I could tell that my Queen, sister, and friend was worried sick about what I might find.

“I remember what they smell like as a dark elf…but you don’t need a dark elf,” I deadpanned and watched as King Alex returned with an entire pile of bedding from the twin’s human beds. A little overkill, but it would do nicely.

“Anything else you need?”

“Well, if you had a fresh mug of that hot drink that tastes like dirt with chocolate in it…”

Maya just shook her head. Oh well, I began visualizing the animal’s form and function in my mind. I felt my arms stretch out stiffly of their own accord and my hands splayed out. Next, my clothes melted from my body to be replaced by short brown fur. While this was happening, I also lost a lot of body mass and height. Suddenly, I was only a foot tall and teetering on very unstable feet. Extended, my leathery wings helped hold me upright, but just barely. My long snout twitched as I took in the smells around me; first the sheets, then what the Royals had for breakfast. Ooh, was that a plate of grapes up on the nightstand?

“A weird bat of some kind?” Alex boomed out, now towering above me like a giant.

“She’s a fruit bat,” Nia supplied. “Some people call them flying foxes.”

“But aren’t they blind? How will this help us find the twins?”

Nia spotted where my eyes were fixated and flitted up to the nightstand. She picked up a juicy green grape, flew back, and dropped it over my head. I deftly snapped it out of the air - delicious! - and licked my thin little tongue over my lips to encourage another. “As you can see, they aren’t blind. In fact, they have excellent vision and their sense of smell is acute too…hold on, Polly wants another cracker.” Nia dropped another grape toward my head, which I appreciated far more than the snide comment. I would have glared at her, but it’s tough when you don’t have the facial muscles to squint menacingly.

Snack time over, I waddled over to the balcony edge, slipped through the railing and flung myself awkwardly into the air. Bat wings really don’t give you much of the coasting abilities of birds, so you have to flap continuously.

I started along the cliffs at the back of the keep, flying a grid pattern near the rocky walls. After an hour or more of “fruitless searching”...Wow! Flying makes you hungry and is a recipe for bad puns to boot...I finally caught a faint whiff of my quarry.

Near a folded back outcropping in the sheer rock face, I traced their scent. Flapping around the fold, I struggled to stay airborne. Fruit bats have the worst feet for grasping perches; it’s hard enough to snag a tree branch when you need one, but a stone outcropping just wasn’t going to happen. Low under the rock fold, I spotted a narrow dark cleft and dived for it, crashing inelegantly into the maw of a small fissure. I have to hand it to Dawn and Dusk, if this is their lair, it’s almost impossible to find. Only a shapeshifter, or a pixie-sized critter, would be able to get in. Of course, it wouldn’t be a problem for either dragon, as they are even better at changing forms than Druids.

The tunnel that faced me was barely big enough for a marmot, but the scent of the silvers was very strong here. It was pitch dark and flying foxes don’t have echo location nor the legs to go dungeon delving. Ok, marmot it is, then! The change wasn’t as dramatic as the previous one; both animals are roughly the same size, so it went quickly. Now I had four feet, buck teeth, attitude and an urge to steal bright shiny objects.

I followed the tunnel, guided primarily by my sense of smell. After a hundred body lengths or so, I could pick up some sounds - long, irregular, drawn-out grating noises. My rodent brain advised caution as another fifty lengths of my body emptied me out into a large natural chamber.

This place was big and marmot’s vision is nearsighted and more attuned to movements, so it’s not an ideal surveying form. I was forced to change back to my dark elf natural self. As my eyes adjusted, I spun in place taking it all in. I was in a large cavern with beautiful stalactites reaching down like crystal arms from the ceiling. The place was dimly lit by several species of glowing mosses growing in patches on the walls and rocks. A small waterfall bounced down along the rocks at the back of the chamber, splashing and gurgling, until it finished its journey in a crystalline pool, one side of which overflowed into some coarse gravel and disappeared. The strange thought struck me that if this were near the ocean, the scene before me is exactly where you would expect to find a mermaid calmly brushing her hair, languishing half out of the water. But it only took a cursory sniff to reaffirm that this was rain water or snow melt, and the water itself probably carved this wonderland over the span of eons.

As lovely as it all was, I shivered slightly as I finished my look around. The temperature in this place was definitely on the chilly side. The splashing water and cool humid air gave everything a hazy, dewy look. The harsh grating sounds were louder now, and they seemed to originate in a chamber on the back side of the pool. Watching my step on the slippery stones, I walked around the waterfall and stepped inside.

Every sound in this room seemed to echo and I sensed this was the larger chamber of the two. At least the footing seemed dryer as my boots sunk into smooth, clean sand, but light was almost non-existent. Even dark elves need a little light to see, so I retrieved a small glow orb from my pocket and activated it with a whispered word. Waiting patiently as the magic ramped up slowly, I heard a loud snort and then some lip-smacking sounds, followed by more of the harsh, deep grating sounds, which I now recognized as snoring. And all of this was centered directly in front of me in the inky darkness.

Usually in this type of situation - but wait, who am I kidding? - I’ve never been in this type of situation. Usually in this situation, a rational dark elf would have been hesitant if not outright panicked. But as the range of the light slowly extended, I quickly recognized the bright silver scales, a thick tail, a taloned back leg and enormous bodies of the twins. Finally, the light revealed both silver dragons curled up together on the cold sand floor asleep!

A cursory glance revealed no blood or signs of injury, and by the rhythmic rise and fall of their massive chests, I would have to say they were breathing just fine, too. I shook my head in wonder at what all the fuss was about. Walking forward, I confronted them.

“Alright, you two! The nap’s over, you’ve got everyone worried, you know!” No reaction, so I tried another tactic. “Hey Dawn, Dusk! There’s fresh bacon in the chow hall!” Still no response. I walked over and cautiously nudged Dusk with my foot, and she still didn’t move a hair. Finally, I reached back and screamed at the top of my lungs, “WAKE UP, LIZARD LIPS!” Other than almost deafening myself, still no results.

These girls were seriously out of it. Puzzled, I walked over to the head of the nearest dragon, which seemed to be Dawn. She was stretched out comfortably with her chin on the soft sand, volumes of air whistling through her large nostrils like a blacksmith’s bellows.