Draka

High above the coast of north-eastern Mallin I turned towards the mountains. I ignored the need that pulled me north, and the jealousy drawing me back south. I beat my wings, angled myself down, and just let my speed build until I was screaming through the air, then worked hard to maintain the highest speed I could. I crossed the forest in record time; twenty minutes, twenty-five at the most. By the time I reached the high hills I was practically kissing the trees, and only then did I steer south in a long, wide curve; at the speed I was going, even my Strength didn’t let me hold my wings stable enough for a tight turn, my joints creaking and my muscles trembling when I tried it.

When I was going the right way, on the right side of the forest, I tried to let go. I took all my worries about what was right, and what was smart, and long-term consequences, and I tried to stuff them down into a corner of my mind. I tried to just let Instinct take over, to think like a dragon, to act like a dragon, hoping that it would relieve the pressure that had been building up these last few days, and prevent me from exploding and doing something awful when it mattered. I tried to find an outlet. Luckily, I knew where to start.

My new people had been driven from their homes by monsters. That was of course very convenient for me, but it also demanded a response. It didn’t matter that the offense had been committed before my new humans belonged to me; the guilty party, trolls in this case, must suffer the consequences nonetheless. Both because they might wander south, into my territory, and to show my people what I was willing to do for them.

I was being responsible, really.

I knew myself well enough to understand that I might not be able to kill a troupe of trolls on my own, but it would be good to know where they were. Taking a look wouldn’t hurt. I could have taken Jekrie or some other human and had them show me where Piter’s Clearing and Sweet Creek were, but humans were so slow and fragile. If I could not find the ruined settlements I might have to fly one up to show me, but for now I would rather not be held back.

I amused myself on the way by swooping after birds. I knew from before that most animals were just regular, non-advanced examples of their species, even here in the north, but the monstrous versions were far more common. The thing with birds, though, was that I was bad at identifying them. Back home I was alright; Cockatoos, lorikeets, magpies — swoopy bastards that they were — and bin chickens, I could recognise most birds I saw on any given day. Here, though? If I saw a bird chances were good that I had no idea what kind it was. On top of that, many bird species were small enough that I had a very hard time deciding if I was looking at a monstrous example of one species, or just a regular specimen of a larger one. Except for something like an eagle, of course, but they steered well clear of me, as they should.

Not that it mattered either way. Dragons did not prey on birds. I knew that now. Hunting birds was simply too much effort for too little food. Most birds that I could catch were too agile, and those that weren’t were too fast. Of course, once I had started, pride demanded that I keep going until I succeeded. I had to try over and over and over again before I managed to grab some kind of long, skinny waterfowl out of the air. It was deceptively fatty and delicious and it satisfied my pride, but that didn’t justify spending nearly an hour doing aerial maneuvers when I could have taken a deer or a goat in half the time.

My little hunt had taken me to the vicinity of the bandit camp I had helped destroy several months ago, and while that brought with it a surge of pleasant memories of enemies slaughtered and plunder taken, it also told me that I had gone too far. Jekrie had estimated that they’d traveled forty to forty-five miles south, and by my estimations that meant that I’d need to backtrack a dozen miles or more.

That was easily done, of course. I had a fair sense of distance, and soon I decreased my speed and began searching the ground for streams. I had little to go on besides the names of the settlements and an approximate distance from my mountain, but it was only reasonable to assume that they would be in clearings near water.

I followed the first stream I found east into the forest. It soon joined a wider and faster one, which picked up more water as it went. When I’d followed it halfway to the coast it was a proper little river, but I was also much too far east. It was getting dark by then, but that didn’t bother me. I turned around and followed it back upstream, then began flying zig-zags across the area. I saw plenty of likely breaks in the trees that caught my interest, but one by one they turned out to be bogs, fens, natural clearings or old, old ruins that nature had not quite taken over yet. I was beginning to get annoyed with my lack of progress when finally, after more than an hour of searching, I found the remains of Sweet Creek.

The settlement lay on the bend of a gentle creek, and it had been torn apart. Houses lay collapsed, walls torn out or broken in, and stains and the smell of old blood combined to tell me well enough what I already knew. Not everyone had escaped Sweet Creek alive.

Only animals moved there. There was a complete lack of human remains, but otherwise no sign that the trolls had returned since the place had been destroyed. I returned to the air, searching slowly and carefully. I knew that Piter’s Clearing was somewhat close, so I stuck to an area a few miles around Sweet Creek, and it paid off.

Piter’s Clearing lay on a different, faster tributary to the river I’d followed east. It was a larger settlement than Sweet Creek, but it had fared no better. The only building still somewhat whole was what I assumed to be a communal barn, a large structure on the edge of the settlement. And there, as I stalked through the ruins of the village, I found the trolls.

There were six of them, and they had turned the barn into a charnel house. The gnawed bones of humans and animals alike were strewn across the floor and lay in piles, and among those piles the trolls slept, safe in the knowledge that nothing on this island was stupid enough to attack them. For once that included me. I watched them dispassionately. I looked at what they had done, and I refused to let the human in me drive me to violence. It was funny, in a way. For once it was Conscience that screamed and raged and spat bloody oaths of vengeance and death in the name of these victims that we would never know, that should be nothing to us, and it was Instinct that held us back. Why should we risk pain and death for these unknown humans? They were long gone. We knew where the trolls were, and we had friends who knew how to kill the creatures. So long as they were content to remain here and deplete the local wildlife, there was no rush.

I forced myself to leave them behind. I walked out of the village and followed the water downstream, gritting my teeth as my carefully smothered Conscience resurfaced and cursed me for a coward. Which was ridiculous, of course. I was being careful. Patient. We would be back, soon, to destroy the creatures. And walking away had not been easy. I had wanted to leap in and do as much damage as possible to the closest of the bastards, then run off into the night as they woke in the confusion. But I remembered Tiny. I remembered very well how quickly a troll could go from sleeping to beating the ever-living hell out of me. And now there were six of them.

If I had not been trying so damned hard to be a dragon, we would have been weeping bitter tears of impotent rage. But I was, and I was not going to risk our life over some unfortunate souls who I had never met. I certainly wouldn’t feel any guilt about postponing their inevitable vengeance.

But I remembered Tiny. Tiny had beat the hell out of me.

Tiny had lost.

Tiny had been smaller than average. But I had been smaller then, too.

And I wanted so very, very much to destroy something.

Sunrise found me, like so many sunrises, in a tree. Again, I had failed to dreamwalk, but I didn’t let it bother me. I had other concerns. I was well rested and a little hungry, the Need was stronger than ever, and I was filled with anticipation.

I watched the trolls leave the barn. Much like Tiny’s troupe, this one consisted of one huge male and several females. And they behaved the same as well, their morning ritual of wrestling, smacking each other around, and roaring in each other’s faces being comfortingly familiar to me.

When they each went off in a different direction I chose to follow the smallest one. Not only because I wanted to kill one of them with as little damage to myself as possible, but because she was going in the opposite direction from the male, heading almost directly north.

Her behavior quickly struck me as odd. It was the way she moved. As I followed her in the treetops I didn’t see any of the hunting behavior that I’d observed in Tiny. There was none of the sniffing or stalking. Instead, this troll moved with purpose and direction, along a crude path of trampled undergrowth, broken branches and torn out bushes. She wasn’t looking for something to eat, I decided. She was going somewhere.

I hadn’t seen that kind of purpose in a troll before, and I was understandably curious. Where was she going, along an already broken track? And why was she so eager? As she got farther she picked up speed, and soon I couldn’t stay close enough to see her in the well-lit forest, forcing me to shift back and follow her at a distance by long, flying leaps.

I decided to call her Speedy.

I felt the answer before I saw it, though I had no idea what it was. The draw I’d felt, the Need, the urge to go north, became a kind of pressure. Not against my skin or muscles but, for lack of a better explanation, against my soul. Not uncomfortable, just… there. As we followed the pressure it was soon accompanied by a sense of location, not much different from the gentle pings I still felt from the south and south-east where my hoard and Herald and Mak were. Finally the sense got strong enough that, rather than following Speedy, I let my curiosity and hunger get the better of me and flew ahead on my own.

It was only a short hop of less than a minute. There was nothing special about the location, really. It was a small glade. The trees surrounding it were perhaps a little denser, the forest floor a little darker. The undergrowth might once have been a little thicker, but it had been torn and trampled. The only thing that made the place truly special, the source of the pressure and the sense of location, and the troll’s goal, was what I found there.

Suspended in the air, about a foot off the ground and wreathed in swirling shadow, was a Nest Heart.

I had only ever seen one, months before, but it was unmistakable. Sitting out in the open the way it was, in the middle of the day, I could see that the area around it was much darker than it should be. The light around it seemed to fall into it, gently distorting as it got closer to the swirling mass of shadow before vanishing as though the heart drank it in.

When I switched to shadowsight it shone. It was a swirling lens of pure light, fixed on a beam of gold that passed through it from the earth into the sky. It was, beyond any doubt, one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and I needed it.

When Speedy arrived she did so at a run, crashing into the glade and skidding to a halt before the heart, giving off a sense of having made it just in time. Once there she began to circle it, giving off soft crooning sounds as she reached out with a gentleness that should be impossible for such large, shovel-like hands. She traced her fingers through the wisps of shadow, and in my shadowsight the heart responded.

I didn’t see any magic coming from her, but as she crooned and caressed the heart the golden beam that pierced it began slowly pulsing, brighter with each cycle, and the heart responded by swirling just a little faster with each pulse. I couldn’t say how long it went on. I sat hidden in my tree watching, frozen by fascination as the heart grew brighter and brighter and swirled faster and faster, until it was so bright that it should have been blinding and whirled so fast that it and everything for feet around it was a blur and then, without warning, the world went white. I blinked away my shadowsight, and even with my excellent night vision the area around the heart was as dark as the deepest depths of my mountain.

When the darkness cleared there were two trolls in the glade.

The Heart still hung in the air, the shadows spinning around it lazily, but it looked diminished. Thinner, almost, as though there was less of it. And beside it, groaning on the ground, lay a troll. A male. It was only a little larger than Speedy, though nowhere near as large as the two I’d seen before, but it was, for anatomical reasons, unmistakably male.

My curiosity had cost me my chance to kill Speedy. I was sure of that. I was not going to attack two trolls at once, even if one of them was groggy on the ground. I valued my own skin too much for something like that. But the Heart called to me, so I sat patiently in my tree as Speedy shuffled over to the male, grunting and crooning softly as she pushed at his shoulder. After a short while of that the male finally turned his face to look at her, growling in annoyance.

Speedy popped him. One long arm rose, and the shovel hand came down, palm flat on his face. His hands went up to cover himself and he growled angrily, so she popped him again, and that, it seemed, was that. He gave a petulant groan that I could only interpret as, “Okay, okay!” and then, with Speedy’s help, he got unsteadily to his feet.

Speedy looked around, seeming unsure of herself. She looked back the way she’d come and huffed disdainfully, then sniffed the air as the male took some stumbling steps, tearing at the bushes and branches around the edge of the clearing.

With a grunt Speedy seemed to make up her mind. She took the male by the arm, and pulled him towards the north-east. Away from the other trolls, away from the Heart, and away from me.

I watched them go, wondering what exactly I’d just seen. A new troll being, what? Born? Created from nothing, or brought here from somewhere else? Was this how all trolls came into the world? Did it matter? Where before there had been six trolls there were now seven, but two of those had taken off, away from the others. Was I seeing the birth of a new troupe?

I knew two things. First, I needed to ask the others, my family — I grinned at the thought — about this. Second, I was finally free to indulge my curiosity, and satisfy my Need.

It was time to take a closer look at the Nest Heart.

I’d been curious about the things when I first saw one in the gremlin nest, back when I’d first met my family. That curiosity had only grown when I realized how much my own tendrils of shadow, limned with the golden glow of magic, resembled what I’d seen. I’d been somewhat disappointed when I hadn’t found a Heart in either the valkin-held tunnels or near the trolls we’d killed; I’d wanted to see one again. Now I had one right in front of me, and it was gorgeous.

It was a little less than it had been, sure. Thinner, less substantial. Lesser even than how I remembered the Heart in the gremlin nest. Bringing a whole troll into the world must have taken a lot out of it. But it was here, and it was mine, and it awakened a whole new kind of desire in me. I descended the tree, and the closer I got to the Heart the stronger the urge got to eat it.

I couldn’t describe it any other way. I wanted to take this beautiful thing and consume it, to strip it layer by layer and draw it into me, make it part of me, like the nest-killing crystal had done.

The pressure that had led me here had never gone away, though it had reduced in strength when the Heart was depleted. Like the heat of a flame it increased exponentially as I got close, and I got the impression that it wanted me to consume it. It wanted to be in me, to become a part of me, and all I had to do was…

I reached out with one trembling finger, touched the swirling wisps of shadow, and let them flow into me. It was as easy as breathing in. Layer by layer the Heart spun, unwinding itself, flowing in through my palm, down my arm, and into my chest. I felt it settle around my own heart, wrapping it in a warmth that began as quite pleasant. It was almost comforting, and the act of drawing the stuff of the Heart into myself was pleasurable on a level only matched by burying my face in my hoard. But as I drew in more and more the heat grew more intense, quickly turning into an uncomfortable tingle and then into a painful, burning heat. But I didn’t stop. I refused. The desire to devour the Heart entirely, the pleasure of taking it into myself, was so great that I forced myself to clench my jaw and endure the fire that seared me from the inside, body and soul. The Heart grew thinner and thinner, less and less substantial, and in my shadowsight the pillar of light that pinned it to the earth became thin as a needle. The pain grew to the point where I almost lost my resolve, almost began to fear that the heat inside me would turn me to ash, or burn out my soul, or something equally terrible.

Without fanfare, the needle of light vanished. The last wisp of shadow streamed into my hand and settled around my heart, and for one blessed moment the pain became so intense that I couldn’t feel it anymore.

Then the miniature sun around my heart exploded outwards, filling every part of me, and I passed out.