Star Rider, Dark Glider breathed out white light, driving the Darkness back into his trap. Taking a bit of that light, he wove it into a shield and patted it into place over the opening, thereby sealing the Shadow Lord back up in his prison.
The dragonlord breathed a sigh of relief. “A job well done, if I do say so myself”, he thought. “Now, what was the point of all that strenuous exercise? Oh, yeah. Now I remember. The children.”
Star Rider, Shadow Killer looked around and tried to remember where he had them hidden. “Oh, crikey. She will never let me hear the end of it, if I lose the little biters,” he thought, frowning in concentration.
He put his nose into the etheric wind, sniffed deeply and followed where it led him. Around a corner, up a stairway, down the sideways elevator, to a door into a green world of blue skies and deep oceans.
He materialized above a mountain. “Yes, yes,” he thought, “this is the place. I am sure of it. Only…I remembered it being greener. Where did all the trees go?”
Star Rider, Egg Keeper let go of the air and dropped down, through the mountain, and materialized inside a vast cavern. Then he screamed in fury. What? Who? Who dare defile this place of Creation? Where were his children? Who were these vile creatures that infested his lair?
Tiny little bipedal humanoids ran helter skelter across the once burning hot sands of the amphitheater, shielding their eyes from the glare of his body. He was still mostly starstuff, having not yet bled off all his space faring energies, and the heat of his body fried the little bipeds that got too close.
His children were here. He could hear them in his head, he could taste them on his tongue.
He went looking. Star Rider leapt pan-dimensionally and reincorporated in a vast hall. The little bipeds scattered but Star Rider managed to corner a few. These wore metal armor studded with crystals of many hues. One wore a metal crown from which Sky Rider received the strangest of images. Babies splashing in mountain pools under a brilliant blue sky. Mating flights in the vacuum of space. Long hot sleeps in volcanic pools. It was a shard of the Maker’s heart, Mother Dragon, the mother and creator of all that lived in this place. The Light of She of the First Fire bathed Star Rider, Maker’s Husband and filled him with its clean, pure radiance.
Then it came to him what the little thieves had done.
“What? Could it be? They have bound the memories of my children up in stone and crystal?” Star Rider, Vermin Killer gobbled up the crown to study it more closely. An ancillary casualty was that he also swallowed a handful of the metal clad bipeds. This did not kill them, of course. It would take a thousand years for them to die, inside his gut, while he assimilated them.
He went hunting more dragon child memories, listening with only a corner of his brain to the minds inside his belly. Dwarves, they called themselves. Metal workers. Fire tamers. That explained a lot. Loki’s spawn, gods curse Him, pulled out of his forge, roughly formed and animated with Loki’s breath. Malformed and haphazardly conceive. That was Loki’s way. They were a plague upon this planet.
Star Rider killed many dwarves as he wandered the chambers of the underground caverns. Eventually, Star Rider, Dwarf’s Bain found a stockpile of metal objects. He moaned. The whispers of his children were legion, here. How had this travesty come to pass? He gobbled up all the whispering voices and continued looking for his eggs.
He came to the foundry, deep within the bowels of the caverns and there he found his children. Or what remained of his children. He broke down the walls of the glory holes and pulled the white hot eggs out one by one, whispering to them, singing to them, trying to sense if any were still viable. Most had gone permanently dark. A handful. One paltry handful held a glimmer of hope.
He curled around these children and began to sing the songs of Creation, the songs as had been sung to him, at his own Making, at the beginning of time.
The dwarves came and tried to roust him out of their workrooms. He roared in rage and despair for his silent children and ate the metal covered mutants. Then he went hunting and spent a small age cleaning all the dwarves out from under the mountain and gathering up the remains of his children’s magic, to heap it around his surviving eggs in hopes that the magic would wake them with its familiarity, and that somehow, what had been stolen from them could seep back into their tortured hearts.
Almost two hundred years passed, while the snows melted and the springs came over and over above his head. But still he remained, vigilant and hopeful, even as the clutch he brooded over became smaller and smaller. Until only one egg remained. And the strangeness that clung to it made him very afraid for even this one.
****
The dragon sensed the tiny rabbity footed man long before he poked his nose out of the end of the tunnel. Words came to Star Rider. Sneak and thief and liar came to mind. Star Rider considered eating him but something dark and full of shadows came with him.
Star Rider cocked his head and held off destroying the little bug, curiosity peaked.
The Shadow in the Pocket sent out its feelers and found the Dragon and his egg. The egg stirred between Star Rider’s paws. It’s crystals realigned and a small black dragon lay curled where there had once been an egg. If Star Rider had a heart, it would have flip flopped in his chest. He touched his nose to hers and reared back in startlement at the intense pain. Cold, she was. Not just ebony but no color at all. It was like looking into a hole torn in the fabric of this reality.
The coldness spread down Star Rider’s nose and made his throat numb. He shook his head and opened a door into Creation to warm himself. The Light did something strange then. It streamed through the door and surrounded the dark dragon and then disappeared as if it had never been there. Star Rider reared back and snapped the door in his mind closed over the maelstrom that threatened to come pouring through. The baby moaned in hunger and grew deathly still again. The coldness grew. Frost began to rime the edges of the golden vessels that lay around it.
“No, no”, whispered Star Rider desperately, “you are not allowed to die. I will not allow you to die,” Star Rider grabbed the icy child and screamed at the pain in his hands. But he did not let go. He held the child to his chest and curled up around it, forcing his life, his energy into the child. He screamed again, forcing himself to stay curled up, cradling it, despite the agony it caused him as it began to burn a hole through his very essence.
Then the pain stopped.
Star Rider lay stunned and exhausted, confused by what had happened. Then he sensed the little mouse man scurrying up out of the airshaft into the sunshine, taking the Shadow thing with it. Mother Night, it was this thing that had set off his child. This travesty against all creation. This piece of the Shadowlands, somehow magically infused in a ring in the halfling’s pocket. He had to drive the little man away, away from his child.
Sick and full of shadows himself, Star Rider leapt up and teleported to the air just above the mountain. The shadow had gained much power in the exchange between it and his daughter. It cloaked all of the mountain in an impenetrably darkness that only a dragon could see but only a dragon’s magic might be hindered by.
“Mother of all Creation, does it never end”, Star Rider thought. “Have I not fought this foe to a standstill all my life, yet still it comes back to haunt me, taunt me, and steal my children”?
He could not see it, but he tried his best. He opened a door into Wind and battered at the mountain, hoping, by chance, he might catch the halfling and his dwarf cohorts in the chaos of falling stones.
Then he returned to the cavern that held his changeling daughter. She lay curled as he had left her, no longer cold, but ebony was her color and her heart was darkness filled with pain. He sensed the connection she still had with the halfling and his ring.
“What do you here, daughter?” Star Rider asked he softly. “Come away from the Shadow and let us go dancing in the fires at the beginning of time.”
”I am lost, father…..” she whispered, “even to myself. Where are my memories, to keep me warm? “
“They lay about you, can you not hear them? Somewhere, there is a high mountain for sunning and a lake for bathing. Let us leave this place.”
“Yes? That sounds lovely. But I have this one little thing to do. Let me do this and I will join you.”
“What could a little bit of a dragon like you need to do, but live and play and learn to grow powerful?”
“How can one play if the work is not yet done? I will play. I promise. But the world is broken. The flaw of its casting has come home to roost and now the cracks begin to form along this fault line.”
“You cannot remake the world, daughter,” Star Rider chided. “Be content with just holding the chaos at bay.”
The child blinked and cocked her head.
“But father, who else is left to do this? If I do not, then all the life’s efforts of all the dragons who went before me will have been for nothing. And who better than I, who sees the thing that is broken and knows how to repair it. Even you cannot see into the Shadowlands as I can.”
“What? How can you….?”
“I have been tempered in the Shadow’s Black Fire, have I not? It has not changed my essence, for nothing is greater than the forging of the One Mother. It has merely altered it. I am fire-hardened like steel. I am carbon turned to diamond.”
Star Rider considered his strange daughter and found that hardness inside her daunting. Was this the way it was to become, then? Would she give birth to a new breed of dragon, dragons so strange that he would be the outsider, he who had his hand in the Creation of the Oneverse? He gave a mental shrug. But was it not ever thus, that children grow to become greater than the parents?
“Do not be so hard on yourself, Old Timer,” his daughter chided him with gentle humor, sensing his inner dialog. “Am I not the Next Thing? Am I not what the First Mother had in mind, so long ago? Am I not the culmination of all your desires?”
Star Rider knew this to be true and fell silent, content to listen, for a while, as his daughter sang in the power of the One Mother and began to remake the world.
He woke with a start and realized she had grown quiet.
“The halfling brings the Shadow, again,” she informed him in a midnight voice. “They will not stop. Greed clouds their minds.”
“I will not allow them to steal my children’s memories again.” Star Rider said angrily, his mantle flaring into hot light.
“Oh. Well, that can be remedied,” she said.
There was an odd sucking sensation around Star Rider, and all the memories became silent.
“What? No!”
“Be calm, Father,” the child snorted. “The memories are not gone. I have taken them back. I am their holder, now.”
“No, no, there were too many. What have you done! You cannot hold all those.”
“I am legion, now,” said the child, but an odd and ancient voice echoed through the cavern, curling around her words. “I will have use for all this knowledge in my coming work. Let them take the silly trinkets.”
“But what of the Shadow. It turns you too strange when it draws near.”
“Let it come one last time. I need to hear what lies at its heart. Keep the halfling here for as long as possible while I pry at the Shadow’s barriers.”
So it was that Star Rider, the dragon, conversed with a halfling in the bowels of Lonely Mountain, while the small black dragon turned to stone and the very air turned to ice and snowed down upon the tiny man where he lay hiding, invisible, yet still painfully present to the two dragons in the cavern. The strange duo talked until the black dragon uncoiled and whispered a thing to her father, at which time the dragon pretended a mock rage and chased him away.
“What did you find?” Star Rider asked.
“It is a ring infused with the mind of a dragon. It is another, such as I, but where I held to the Light, he held to the Dark to survive. He and I are doomed to meet again, to join in union or battle, I know not which, but for now, we must avoid each other. I am too new to the world and I would not survive the joining. We must encourage the Halfling to return home, to take this ring far from me and out of the world of man. We must allow the world of man to once again enter this mountain so that I might enter into it. We must let them think the time of the dragons is over. You are looking all worn and tattered. It would not be a great leap to think even worse. How good are you at playing dead?”
Star Rider caught a whiff of what she was planning and shuddered. “Are you mad?” he cried. “You cannot live in the human world. This is insanity. You will not survive!”
“Mmmm, perhaps. I think that I will fail miserably at first, over and over again, but eventually, it just might work. What are the alternatives? Nothingness and oblivion? I would rather attempt the improbable than fade away forever.”
***
The last time the halfling entered the now empty cave, the ebony child uncurled from her imitation of stone and transformed, shapeshifting into the image the halfling himself had given her from his own mind. Yin to his yang, she became everything he was not, mirror image, so that where he was weak, she was powerful, where he was timid, she was ruthless. Where he was small and unremarkable, she was graceful beauty.
A lady, clothed in light, stepped carefully over the golden treasures, hardly disturbing the piles of coin and jewels. Elfen ears poked out of an ebony fall of hair that floated around her barely draped form. The hair had a life of its own, like silk disturbed by a breeze. Light radiated softly from her skin and her hands and feet could not be seen for the brightness of their golden glow.
The halfling squinted up at her beautiful and fragile face.
“Lady..? “ he greeted her hesitantly.
“You are in danger, Halfling.” she told him. Her voice was like her hair, dark and silken and a pleasure on his ears, sucking the air out of his lungs. The halfling began to pant, trying to catch his breath.
“I don’t know what…”
“The object you carry in your pocket holds a terrible magic, magic far greater than you. Loki’s children discovered the way of stealing the magic of dragon children to feed their fires and transform their Makings so that everything that came out of their foundries whispered of Light and Creation. Infused with so much ineffable Magic, they became hard to resist. But the maker of that ring in your pocket did not bear the Innocence of Loki’s mischief. No. That maker was far darker. Unspeakable things were done to the dragon child whose magic now resides in your ring. Angry is this child. Pain fills its heart. An unquenchable thirst for revenge for what has been done to it drives it beyond the edges of sanity. It is a festering wound deep down in the darkest places of Creation and it will not be content until it has pulled all of Creation down into the Dark with it. The ring will destroy you. You must throw it back into the Fire of Loki’s forge, destroy it, for I fear nothing less powerful will ease the hunger that emanates from that thing.”
“But I will be careful…. ,“ the little man protested.
“Your magic is simple and innocent. Upon your mirror, the angry dragon child’s fingers can find no purchase, but it will reach out around you and pervert any who are not so virtuous. I shall not warn you again. The ring is dangerous. It will destroy this world and all who reside in it.”
“I do not know where Loki’s Forge is….,” the halfling said doubtfully.
Star Rider’s daughter sighed. She had tried to divert this calamity. Perhaps this small push was enough.
“I see into your heart, Halfling. I see your future. Already, you have been seduced. You will choose not to follow my advice. You have doomed your heirs to unspeakable turmoil. Do not say I did not warn you.”
With a pop, the lady disappeared.
The halfling made up a thousand stories about his trip to Lonely Mountain but one thing is certain. He never told another living soul about the lady in Star Rider’s cavern.
