Tremble, Ye Who Walk The Earth

The earth spirits were groaning today. Not their usual keening—reverent. Light shifted amid the husk of the canopy left behind, leaves rustling too high above to be heard. Even leaves couldn’t have drowned out the spirits’ aching cries, Falón supposed. Nor would they have matched the wave of creaking and cracking emanating from the undergrowth battling his dragonish bulk. His wings pressed to his sides, tighter. The spindly trees that crept up through the cracks in the forest’s metal floor—now they were keening. Young elementals. Falón knew he shouldn’t, but… why not? After all, he hadn’t made even seen the spirits. He heaved himself onward in the dusk, not daring to open his eyes to the carnage of wood breaking on the weapons of man that matted the ground.

Falón listened instead to the voice that had called him here, to the eighth forest. Called to break his hermitage, his self-imposed isolation. It was Icco whose summons could be heard on the wind currents, and Icco alone who knew Falón was not lightly to be disturbed.

A breathy voice descended upon him from the dead canopy above, the sound of tutting deriding the dragon’s violence against the forest’s denizens. Soft clinking rose from the swords beneath his claws as wind whirled around him, shaking blades and shields loose from the mud-and-metal-congealed path. You are alone again, Icco said to his mind, loftily smug in its assessment. Speak with your voice, Falón, for I so ache to again hear a voice. Metal fell back to the ground in a mix of dull thuds and harsh clangs as the dirt-covered wind spirit settled in the nook of a thin, two-pronged branch yet undisturbed by Falón’s wake.

“Why am I here, Icco?” Falón could not force curiosity into his voice. The question lingered, flat, not moving along the breeze caressing the trunks of the eighth forest’s taller, upper canopy trees.

The spirit sighed, the sound as mournful as when Falón had last heard it, and the earth spirits sighed with it, delirious, lazy, and childlike. Look at what has happened, Falón, Icco breathed towards Falón’s earholes, into the newly-demolished clearing, the new earth children have awoken without a home! With the last words, Falón felt the air shivering around him turn prickly, and an earthy sweetness filled his grey, scaled snout. Sap.

Falón at last willed himself to see the earth spirits. Their fuzzy, bleached bodies betrayed incorporeality every time their edges blurred, glowed… shifted. “Let them burrow. Or fly. They have no need of trees.” He closed his eyes once again. “Why am I here, Icco?”

Icco laughed like the dragons had once done, Above. We servants are each others’ keepers. Exiles, too, keep each other.

Falón opened his eyes to slits, and began to turn for the forest’s edge.

Icco continued, wind buffeting Falón’s wings, And where does a earth-creature go that cannot burrow? Or fly? Or cling to even the sturdiest tree? At once, Icco released the wall of air that had enclosed Falón, revealing the faintest sound of a Human child… sobbing.

Something welled deep inside Falón, something he could not name. He schooled his jaw back into its flat ambivalence, pinned his wings high on either of his sides, but he could not block out the child’s cries. They were desperate. Alone.

The dull grey of Falón’s body would camouflage him in this dead forest, the scales wan shadows of their former shimmering beauty. He knew this. The child would not have seen him approaching in the distance, nor could he possibly see Falón’s retreating form.

But… what was the child doing here? The muscled spines ridging Falón’s skull flared. An Exile!

Icco’s body of wind shuddered in reproach from its perch on the branch. Speak freely, Falón. Tell me why a Human would be Exiled. A grey parrot alighted on a jagged rock—no, an abandoned war machine—and croaked like a raven.

Croaked, “Tremble!”

The bird was not perturbed by the gathering wind in this foliage-littered clearing, nor did it seem to feel the curse of the cold metal beneath its tiny feet.

“Tremble!” it croaked again. A sudden gust of wind from Icco ruffled its feathers, grey and pristine as everything should be. But… its voice…

“The child is different,” Falón spoke aloud again, “defective like all Below.” Ire filled his words.

Without warning, Icco leapt from its careening position in the warped tree, and rushed at the parrot with currents of wind formed into lances. The bird’s muted greys merged with a deep red as Icco broke its wings against the metal contraption half-submerged in the thick, muddy floor. Falón watched, bewildered, as the bird croaked “Tremble!” again, pitched higher in shrieking anguish. Icco’s wind swirled in a frenzy around the small creature. Bones snapped, feathers wrenched from the bird’s grey skin in the miniature hurricane encasing it. Beak ripped open, and the grey parrot’s tiny skull lost its eyes in the torrent of air Icco had blasted at this small, innocent, defective creature.

And just like that, it was over. The bloody, plucked carcass landed between the dragon’s claws. Falón did not flinch. He lowered his head, sniffing at the red juices dribbling out of the small body.

My gift for the child. Icco’s voice had changed, now beginning to rumble deep in Falón’s mind. A warning. Tremble. Gathering the tendrils of its air powers lingering in the forest, Icco brushed past Falón’s grey skull one last time, and twirled off through the disintegrating canopy above.

Falón watched the spirit go, eyes fixed on the clouds passing over the forest. He watched until he could no longer ignore the wild pleas piercing through the trees. He did not want to do this. Did not want to claim this Human, and he certainly did not want to offer it the first viable food he had come across in many grey moons.

But Icco’s wrath would be severe, as would be the loss of company, if Falón did not do as Icco wished.

He gently scooped up the dead bird between his front fangs. The shrieking was incessant now—something was not going well for the child, Falón guessed. He moved in the direction of that piercing sound, continuing his path of undergrowth destruction. The earth spirits had ceased groaning, and now, with Icco gone, had taken to chittering and scampering in their beast forms. Sturdier trees stretched out of Falón’s way, bark screaming and seams ripping up along their twisted trunks.

A crack sounded not far off, and the child let out a yelp. Falón’s spines flared, quivered, and lay close along his skull, and the dragon fell into a low, crouching lope, his pace quickening with every stride. Dead leaves rattled as he pushed through the undergrowth, the noise signalling his approach. There was no turning back now. The Human’s cries had turned to whimpers—then silence. Falón had been seen.

He stalked onward, not bothering to mask his heavy footfalls with what little magic he had left. Above him, shivering in the cold dusk air, was a small shape wedged in the crook of a branch. The child. Each of its movements shuddered through the thin, dying tree—each shake had the wiry trunk calling out in agony as it bent to its little burden.

Falón reached the base of the tree and placed his own burden on a shield between his forelegs, the bird’s body now mangled beyond recognition. He gently pushed the shield away, a platter discarded, and spoke, willing the wind to carry his whisper to the treetops.

“I can carry you down.”

No response, other than a cringing hunch that sent tremors through the trees.

Sighing, pushing the wind around him to mimic a wind spirit’s tendrils, Falón breathed again, “Be ready, young one.”

The child breathed heavily—too heavily. Too rapidly. Falón could hear its emphatic hyperventilation even from here below, two full wingspans beneath where the Human was perched. In a panic Falón sent his tendrils of dragonwind shooting to the canopy, where the mat of intertwined branches and twigs had begun to crumble around the child’s body. Almost immediately, Falón could feel the pang, the sharp void below his heart where his power had once lain. Complacent and taken for granted.

Now, though, just as Icco had instructed him, he sought out the residual magic fossilised in his memory and soul. The resulting air stream was a weak wisp, weaker than what it had been once, long ago, and weaker still than Icco’s natural might. But it was his. It had not been wrested from his being, like all of his other gifts deemed “unnatural”. No. Falón had learned to wield what remained of his gifted magic, and now delicately wove it through the layered, grey plant matter in a winding path towards the Human.

“Be still,” Falón breathed along the wind current. The child, rigid in the forked branch, held its breath. Salt from its tears tinged the wind. Falón hesitated, startled by the foreign scent.

A moment too long.

A resounding CRACK burst from the tree’s dry limb, and the dragon’s claws raked the ground beneath him, razor-sharp talons grating—screeching—along rusted iron, bronze, and steel. The child cried out, but its voice was stolen by the sudden plummet towards the forest floor. Two wingspans beneath it.

Falón yanked back his arms of wind, whipping through the arid canopy. It shattered, crumbling to dust, like a swallow’s nest crushed in a dragon’s whirlwind. Falón did not notice the earth spirits screech as their forest ceiling was torn. His eyes narrowed on the silently falling body now one wingspan above him.

His violently twisting air tendrils lunged forward desperately—there! With a sudden wrench, corkscrewing downwards, Falón threw his wind around the child.

There, not even a shoulder’s height from an upturned, rusted sword, Falón cocooned the child. He slowed its fall in a cradle of wind and suspended it above him.

He’d knelt in the panic of catching the little bundle. Now, he pulled it towards himself along the wind current tethered to his heart. He knelt further, to the side, and lay an atrophying wing as a protective layer between the sharpness of the ground and the child, who now lay, motionless, on the soft underside of the wing.

Falón brushed its brittle hair from its eyes. Like all unwanted beings flung from the world Above, the child, a Human boy, was completely grey. The tufted hair was a dusty charcoal shade, his babyish skin only slightly lighter than that. Mottled by bruises and dirt.

Remembering Humans’ mortality slowed time for Falón. He lay there, on his side, watching the little boy. In his face he saw the world before there ever was a world Above or a world Below. When his companion… Dainion… fell in this, the eighth forest. It was here that eighth and final War concluded and Humans gained their divinity. Dainion didn’t make it that far. A human, deemed defective and rejected by his fellows in their quest for supremacy over all “unnatural” worldly beings.

The little boy shifted. Falón started. Lost in his mind, he didn’t see the grey dusk sun finally give way to night. Auroric beams blared from Above—the only touches of colour granted to the unwanted defects Below, and the only thing keeping Falón sane these past centuries.

He watched them in the sky overhead, hours passing as his colour-starved eyes followed the greens and purples raining down through the hole he tore in the canopy. And he watched, still, as the beams were sapped of colour as soon as they touched this grey, forgotten world. The hole where his magic had been ached again, and Falón’s eyes closed.

The toddler shifted again. Falón opened his eyes again. Without so much as turning his head, he side-eyed the child, who was slowly curling his body to sit up.

A look of horror washed over its face, mouth agape and beads of sweat forming on his dark grey forehead as he realised where he was.

On the wing of a dragon.

The boy’s face crumpled, scrunched, and darker grey blotches sparked high on his cheeks.

“Child…” Falón rumbled, warning clear in his voice.

With a garbled cry, the little Human flung his sitting body over to the side, hiding his face in his arms as he willed himself away from the beast. In shock, Falón began pulling his wing in.

A mistake.

As the wing shifted, it created a jagged slope… down which the child tumbled. Directly onto a nest of swords fused by grey rust. The child screeched in pain.

Falón flipped onto his feet in a flurry of six-limbed haste, scales and claws protecting his flesh from the sharp metal coating the floor. The boy hadn’t been so lucky. He did not move, but for his neck, which bobbed with screaming sobs. It was the sound, Falón thought, of prey.

The child was out of breath. He had begun to hyperventilate again. Short, shallow breaths, and a rapidly rising and falling chest clashed with the chittering giggles of the young elemental spirits who saw a greater prize than the dead bird on the shield—a plump, young, Human boy.

Breaking his gaze away from its wandering path along invisible seams in the ground where spirit shadows were starting to flicker, Falón jerked his head back to the boy. He was little more than a baby. “Come, quickly,” he urged. He approached the child, whose wails returned in higher, more desperate pitch, who was dwarfed by the colossal dragon now before him. He did not move.

“On my back,” Falón growled, “or in my mouth.” He lowered his head and bared his teeth, expending a little of his wind magic to blow the rancid stench of his decaying fangs into the boy’s face.

He shuddered and choked, and then, without warning, spoke into his mind.

What do you want? A piercing shriek, and a sob shattered by gulping breaths.

The sound jingled like bells, crisp and ethereal. Not the sound of the grey world Below. Something clicked for Falón. The child here, now, in Exile… was deaf.

He answered, We must go, or the spirits here will take you. My magic is near depleted, but I will carry you. Quickly, now!

At his final words, jabbed directly into the child’s mind, the boy flinched. He looked again at Falón’s maw, cringed, and unceremoniously began clambering over the backs of his smoothly arched talons, up his leg, and onto his back. He dangled precariously to one side, holding onto one of the spikes that ridged his spine, too close together to properly sit abreast his mountainous back.

Dainion had never been able hold his seat, too. Falón huffed a laugh, dry as the forest around him, and empty as the spirits that he knew were still creeping toward him and the boy. An inexplicable determination filled him—they took Dainion, but he wouldn’t let them take this child.

Gently turning so as not to fling the child from his position on his back, Falón faced the crumpled forest path he had trodden not so long ago, before dusk, and before night had fallen, opening the seams of the natural world into doorways for the hungry earth spirits to emerge. He picked up the bird again.

And then… he launched headfirst into a loping run. Any remaining branches were torn down, the last fibres connecting them to their mother trees ripped away.

The child screamed. Falón clattered about the weapons on the ground, cursing his momentum for the jarring stop that made the toddler wail aloud again.

He arched his neck around, the movement no longer gracefully serpentine in his age. The boy was still holding on, flipped belly-up on his back, but Falón’s scales were no longer smooth and velveted. They were crisp—razors that had shredded the poor child’s arms, legs, its entire body.

The spirits jeered, trickling down like sap from their trees.

Falón was desperate. He spat out the grey bird’s flesh and stretched his head to gently pinch the fabric covering the boy between his front fangs. The boy arched and contorted his spine with four blaring cries of pain.

Don’t fling your limbs around, now, little one. With a slight flick of his head, Falón tossed him gently into the air, expending the last of his wind magic to cushion his fainting collapse into Falón’s jaws. There he held him, delicately, for just a moment, as if he held a bird’s tiny egg between his sharp, rotting teeth.

The spirits brushed against his tail, its spines shuddering and flexing at the taunt.

He began moving again—slowly this time. And, just as slowly, he built up speed. Arching his neck so that the base of his skull bore the brunt of the crashing branches around him, Falón began his sprint out of the forest once again.

The earth spirits were grey, too—pale, barely-corporeal masses that leered and swooped along their desecrated forest in blurs of maned hair and smoothly arched limbs. The weapons littering the floor were their playground, and they hooted and screeched with laughter as they matched Falón’s speed, nipping dangerously at his hind talons, his wings, his tail. Falón felt Icco’s presence soaring above him, cooing giggles that floated into the cacophony building in the forest.

Not daring to grit his teeth for the precious thing bundled inside, Falón cursed the spirit for leading him into this pandemonium. And now, he blessed the gods that the boy was deaf, that he wouldn’t hear the snarling and raucous shrieks of predatory delight chasing them to the eighth forest’s edge.

He was too slow.

The spirits were overtaking him now, having tired of their chasing game.

No. Falón pinned his wings close along his body, his aerodynamic instincts from ages past struggling to keep up with his underdeveloped, underused muscles.

“NO!” roaring in both body and mind, Falón tore deep into his being, grasping for whatever was left of his magic.

And there it was.

A sudden burst of speed sent Falón and the child in his mouth propelling forward along vicious currents of wind—reserves kept undisturbed in Falón’s isolation until now, magic pent up and released at this final push.

The toddler’s mind relayed a tremor of anxiety towards him. Not long now, child, Falón sent his attempt to soothe him as he bolted through the forest, mind in delirium as he relished the taste of magic on his body.

A final CRASH pierced the haze, and, with the world silent but for his thudding footfalls, Falón opened his eyes. He hadn’t realised they were shut. They were out of the forest, the line of trees starkly marking the boundaries between dead lands. Now, they were in the plain.

Cracked, dried, crumbling earth plated the landscape, and the dull, grey sun was beginning to curl its fingers of light over the horizon. The odd, withered shrub or short tree was dwarfed by the eighth forest at Falón’s back, and he knew none would offer shade on the journey back to Falón’s cave.

He lowered his jaw, and sent the boy inside tumbling—as gently as he could—onto the rock-hard ground beneath them. A sputter shook from the child’s mouth, and he looked at Falón in tentative reproach, and stood.

Falón looked towards home, towards the safe den he had found on his twentieth day of exile here in the flat, grey plains. I’m going to my cave, he spoke to the child, you may come, though I have no food for you.

A look of confusion. The boy stood there, watching him, a sound of questioning rising from his throat. The dragon heaved a few, last, gulping breaths, and, steadying himself from his unhinged race through the forest, looked back at the little creature. He was chubby—plump, like his family had known prosperity—but wounded on all sides. The bruises were worse now, and the skin that Falón’s scales had scraped off was starting to turn to bulbous, grey blisters. Even now, the boy held his arms slightly away from his sides, fingers splayed to avoid touching the wounds against each other.

Pity rose, swarming to fill the hole in Falón’s chest. Softly, Do you want food, child? A familiar meal may comfort the fat little thing. Falón nosed around the crumbling, plated ground, searching for the dead bird.

The child made a sound of distress and spoke back into Falón’s mind. You left the bird behind.

Icco would not be pleased.

Falón harrumphed coarsely, and motioned for the child to walk alongside him. No matter. Starving never killed anyone. Not here. Come.

Walking on the edges of his sore feet, the boy peered up at the giant creature stalking beside him as he toddled along, dust rising and sticking to his sweaty, dragon mucus-covered skin as they began their journey across the great fourth plain.

Who are you?

Falón. Who are you?

My name is Yarla! The boy puffed his chest a little at that, something about the name covering up his tear-stained cheeks. He hesitated.

Where is mamma? And my house?

Falón thought for a minute. Another. Until he could bear Yarla’s innocent query no longer, and until he could think of something to say. Your mamma is Above us. She sent you to a new house, with me.

Yarla opened his mouth in a gaping, delighted smile. A NEW house?!

A new house for a big boy. Falón didn’t know why he said that, but Yarla’s smug little smile came back.

I am a big boy.

Falón smiled, the muscles along his jaw feeling as old and creaky as the forest trees. But… he had to know. Yarla, why did mamma send you here? He knew the reason, of course. No naturally deaf child would be worthy of living Above. Nor would a dragon, flightless from birth.

Secret! Yarla clasped his hands in front of his mouth, as if trying to stifle the chortles coming out of it.

Falón stopped, staring in disbelief. You know, then?

Nooo!

The joshing upwards inflection irked him. Falón looked around himself, at rising sun and the heat beginning to shimmer above the ground. Then back at Yarla. How old are you?

Three!

“And can you hear me?” Falón moved his lips with only the slightest motions, his dragon tongue not lisping, not betraying his mouth working as he spoke amidst his swollen, rotting gums.

How old are you? Yarla jumped from one dry, cracked plate, to the next, making a game of not stepping in the miniature ravines crisscrossing the landscape.

Nodding to himself, Falón carried on, prodding Yarla once again to keep moving onward, towards the den. I am older than Above.

What’s Above?

That is where you come from. Everything there is perfect.

Why?

Falón considered. Because people wanted it like that.

I liked it like that, Yarla pouted. They are funny.

Who?

Yarla ignored him. When can I go back?

What? What was this child thinking? The dragon side-eyed the little figure trotting beside him in silence. What did he know of Above and Below? Of War and Humans? Nothing. He couldn’t know anything, and he couldn’t hear anything for it to be known.

They walked together for many silent hours. There were no birds overhead—only the flightless birds had been left here for the rest of the “defective” population to hunt, and they had long since crumbled in this barren plain. Dainion had once hunted a full pack of the magically mutated giant pheasants, back when the plain rippled with long grass. Before the fourth War had ravaged this, his and Falón’s allotted land. They had been heroes, gods—divine beings prowling the earth, Falón as flightless as the birds grown too fat and too heavy through the power of the magic seeping up through the earth’s pores. And Dainion, the marvel, had discovered mindspeak, to replace the tongue he had been born without.

But these wonders of magical evolutions did not come without cost, for the earth’s life-giving powers could never have been sustained by creatures of war, waste, and decay. Creatures whose warpath turned the world grey. Creatures who drained rather than restored life, manipulating the stolen powers to create their wondrous city in the sky Above.

And the earth’s magic retaliated in kind. Slighted, “unworthy” beings received magical gifts where they had none. Those upon whom magic was bestowed were changed beyond other Humans’ imaginings; people and creatures and every more-than-living thing in nature—the very essence of the world—all evolving in the ether snaking its way up from the world’s core. Evolving to fight back.

Falón was granted air manipulation, though he had yet to muster the strength to urge wind beneath his shrivelled wings. He and Dainion had led each charge in the eight Wars, all those years ago, speaking mind-to-mind along the rivers of magic coursing through the fibres of the earth.

Icco received—

Who is Icco?

Falón flinched. Had he been mindspeaking this whole time? Icco is a spirit of the air. A deity escaped from the pits of magic below, perhaps. Once a whisper, now a mighty gale.

Yarla thought for a few, long seconds, eyes glazed in the heat and glaring greys of the hardened soil beneath him. Then he stopped.

They want to know if you are getting stronger, Yarla said.

Silence.

Who? Who is “they”? Squinting his eyes in bemused suspicion, Falón… wait. Is “they”… them?

Are you stronger now than at the start?

Frenzy building now, Falón spun in a wide circle, checking for any signs of earth or air spirits that may have spoken to the boy. But the land was as desolate as when they first entered it. No, no, we’re crumbling. What was going on?

You are weaker?

No, no… and then, with a brief glimmer of hope, We are perfect now! The hole in Falón’s chest was aching terribly with hope, with fear, and with the rapid beating of his own, desiccating heart. Perfect! The magic fixed us. Yarla, tell them to bring us Above.

Yarla stared at him, his eyes seeming to grow larger, brighter, bluer, and his skin as rich as Dainion’s had once been. Colour was returning to the child. The dragon stared in dismay, his own scales not any closer to their deep, sea-green hue.

“Can you hear me, Yarla?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you answer me before?”

“I was listening to the big people Above.”

“And what did they say?”

The little boy seemed to listen to something, eyes glazing over again.

“What did they say, Yarla – are they coming back? Will they take me?”

No answer.

“WHAT DID THEY SAY!?” Falón roared, grey blobs of pus-filled spittle flying towards the child. He had saved Yarla, carried him like he once had done for Dainion. Like Dainion’s daughter, before she left and before the world turned grey.

Tremble.

The mind’s voice was so quiet, near imperceptible. But it thundered through Falón’s skull as he recalled the bird that Icco had killed. Icco had known that this… this child, this spy was here. And he sent the child the dead parrot, a symbol of captivity in Human hands, a pet destroyed and discarded in the greyed realm left behind.

The air spirit had spoken a riddle: Why would a Human send its own into Exile?

Tremble, Yarla repeated.

A Human’s own would not be Exiled—for they were perfect. Free of imperfections.

Tremble.

Falón closed his eyes again. He knelt, forelimbs scraping against the rough ground, spines flickering and deflating in anticipation.

Tremble. The child lifted his hand, spirals waving between him and Falón. The one power Humans had always had. Decay.

Falón had tried to save a life. He had tried to save millions in the eight Wars that ravaged this realm, all with his brother, his soul, Dainion, by his side. They were all lost, and all that fought the perfectly-formed Humans were still paying the price for their rebellion.

At least the debt was nearing its end for Falón.

As Yarla sent waves of grey energy towards him, glimpses of energy tethered between him, to the sky Above, Falón bowed his head.

And he crumbled to dust.