Early Spring, Year 25 of the reign of Emperor Fiederis
Reveri frowned, staring up at the arch that dominated the room with wary interest. There was something different about it today. Something colder about the room than usual.
(Her hair prickled, standing on end like in the quiet before a storm. There was power here.)
Fangeris was flitting about the room, muttering to himself as he did. Scraps of hide were scattered everywhere, covered in charcoal marks from his scribbling and erasing -- a chaotic mess that she nevertheless understood. He was a brilliant young man (dragging her to brilliance by his side), wasted on the tailors.
(His mind didn't move that way, she had found. Fabric and leather was too... mundane to encompass his thoughts.)
And yet what other path was there for him? With no training and no money, jumping into the adventurer's life was a death sentence.
(He knew, and he chaffed at that knowledge, and she did what she could to sooth his restlessness away. But there was only so much she, a child like him in the eyes of the world, could do.)
"Revi, can you check something for me?" Fangeris asked, not looking up from the scrap of hide he held. "I think I've almost solved this bit, but I'd like you to look at it too."
Obligingly, she advanced into the room, stepping over the scattered hides with care. There was a method to this madness, no matter what the others said, and disturbing it would be worse than not answering his call.
The hide she accepted from him was nearly grey with charcoal dust, the sigils written on it barely legible due to being erased and rewritten so many times.
(He'd taught her this language. Sigil by painstaking sigil, they'd learned it together -- a language so old it was only found in the crumbling fragments of religious texts; a language so forgotten they didn't even know how to speak it. It was their secret, their language. A thing of graceful curves and sharp points, more art than script, the sigils often flowed one into the next.)
(The arch was absolutely covered in it.)
It only took her a moment to see what Fangeris was talking about, squinting past the grey dust and focusing on the sigils. A vertical line of curves and points, broken by a jarring blank spot near the end -- this was from the arch, a sketch of what was there. To the right of that, a collection of sigils written one by one, tracing the same line down.
He'd almost found all of them, Reveri determined, as she mentally flowed the sigils into each other. This was her skill -- she wasn't as quick at reading them, or as skilled at writing them out singly, but Fangeris couldn't write them as a single line the way they were on the arch. And that was critical: some sigils, they'd found, looked almost identical except for where they started and finished.
"Fourth down," she said, pointing at the sigil. "That should be Aul, not Ani. Eleventh down, Coj, not Juk. Fourteenth down, Un, not En."
He grumbled, but took the hide back and erased the sigils she pointed out, replacing them with the ones she'd mentioned. Reveri nodded -- now they flowed properly, one to the next. They'd need to carefully consult their translations later, to see what the sentence could possibly be, but for now she was pleased that they'd deciphered the sigils at least.
But there was still that jarringly empty patch. It didn't fit with the rest. They'd found twenty other such patches, scattered over the arch like stars in the sky - it was as if the makers of the arch had known less about the script than they did. It was why the translation was taking so long, why even five years later they were still puzzling over a handful of lines like this one.
But they'd filled the other blanks, finding the sigils that fit like finding the missing piece of a puzzle. This was the last... though at least not the most difficult. Though, almost anything could fit into this blank - indeed, she could only rule out twenty-two sigils from a language of nearly five hundred. Hopefully, the translation would rule out a few more.
(Hopefully, the translation would rule out all but one.)
"It is... all moments... change... place of life... something? What in the world were they aiming for with this one?" Fangeris muttered, as he glanced between the hide and the collection of translations they'd compiled slowly. "It is time to change... time to change what?"
Reveri frowned, leaning over the hides next to him. "World. Something world? It is time to change... this... something world... for... other world? It is time to change this something world for another?"
"That's what I get too," Fangeris agreed. "But I don't think that really helps figure out what's supposed to be in that blank spot."
"It has to be a descriptor, though."
Fangeris grabbed another hide and wrote down the sigils they had, then began to write out potential sigils to one side. Together, they sorted through the list, discarding sigil after sigil till only five remained.
"Restless, corrupt, empty, faded, or bright?" Reveri stared at the list in puzzlement, then shook her head. "Bright doesn't work with the chant."
(The chant was a creepy thing, she felt. No matter how benign the words looked together, there was something... off about the whole thing. Like they were missing something vital in the translation.)
He erased bright from the list. "Restless is three sigils. I don't think it fits?"
At her head shake, he erased restless as well. "It is time to change this corrupt world for another... It is time to change this empty world for another... It is time to change this faded world for another..."
"Faded." Reveri broke in, with an uneasy glance at the arch behind them.
(Her neck prickled. It was not a nice thing.)
Fangeris made a noise of acknowledgment, as he wrote the sigil into the line of the rest, then presented it to her. "I suppose it does make sense, like one of those poems mum's constantly swooning about."
She eyed the resulting line, and nodded in acceptance. It flowed correctly, and made about as much sense as the rest. "You get to carve this one."
His groan was music to her ears.
Lygarde dropped to the pile of cushions with a sigh, stretching out atop the brightly colored pile. Beside him, his brother grinned down at him, offering a bread roll.
"You won't believe what mum's gone and done this time!" Alchany began chattering as Lygarde accepted the roll and started to nibble. "She said my current Master's a stodgy idiot who wouldn't know his bum from his toes, and that he's completely wrong about the use of atey wort because he says it's used as a tea to calm the nerves and mum says that's stupid because atey wort is for bruises only 'cause people that eat it go stupid in the head and either die or kill other people, and that Master Orius should have his Mastery revoked if he can't keep up with what the newest discoveries are."
Lygarde hummed in acknowledgment as he kept eating, letting his twin's chatter wash over him. He'd had a difficult day at the leatherworks, and laying here in their secret base, eating herb bread made by his mother and listening to his twin chatter was relaxing. Some days he truly hated his new Master; the man was a perfectionist, criticizing every little error no matter how small.
Today the man had been in a right fettle - one of the newest apprentices had ruined an entire batch of expensive deer leather by mistaking it - somehow! - for cowhide and using it for practice. That early morning discovery had set the tone for the entire day; nothing was good enough, and even Nellas, the golden boy of the leatherworks and their Master's favorite, couldn't escape the harsh words.
"Ah, Lygarde, you've finally escaped," a new voice interrupted Alchany's chatter, and they both looked up. Sencia gifted both with a smile and crossed the cushion covered room to settle down gracefully on the nest of cushions she had long claimed as her own. "Alchany was worried when we didn't see you on our way out of the city."
"I was not!" squawked Alchany, as he finally paused in his rambling to fix their oldest friend with the stink-eye. "I was annoyed, not worried! We've been planning this camp-out for weeks and it would be just like my dearest twin to skip out on it."
Lygarde gave that statement the attention it deserved -- none at all. The way Alchany's bare foot had shifted to touch his shoulder during the earlier ramblings, and the careful way those ramblings had focused only on Alchany's blundering Master and nothing that could be construed as anything about Lygarde's work told it all.
"Mhm," Sencia agreed, hazel eyes glittering with mischief. "And the way you completely ignored me earlier was just a result of your annoyance."
Alchany stuck his tongue out at Sencia, then reached down to tug a lock of his twin's red hair. "Hey, want to just lay here, or do you want to see what Geris' up to?"
"Is he poking at that arch again?" Lygarde asked, as he finished the last of the roll and licked a finger to pick up the few crumbs that had fallen to his chest and the pillows below.
Sencia's smile turned indulgent. "Of course he is."
Lygarde frowned. "Are the little twins with him, or are they still at the dyer's shop?"
"They're with him," Sencia replied. "As is Reveri."
"Well, I suppose if he's going to blow himself up one of these days, he might as well blow all of us up together," Lygarde said dryly, as he pushed himself to his feet. He offered his arm to Sencia and carefully made his way over the uneven carpet of pillows to the door.
Geris had brought the five of them here one afternoon, nearly three years ago, after Lygarde had shown up at their fountain in a towering fury. He'd only recently begun to learn from his new Master, and had his first taste of the man's sharp tongue and critical eye.
Their youngest member had teased him out of his bad mood with promises of a secret far away from everything, when even Alchany could barely say anything without getting snapped at. Intrigued, Lygarde had agreed to see this secret -- and of course the other four followed them out through the eastern gate and into the marshy land beyond.
The complex hidden below the ground had truly been a surprise, and had shocked him out of the rest of his bad mood. The room full of pillows was another wonderful surprise, and had quickly become his favorite room of the entire complex, even outdoing the room that had been dedicated to his personal use.
Lygarde didn't know which of them had been more surprised when Reveri had walked in on the group -- certainly, she had nearly dropped the basket of glowstones that she'd been carrying at time.
"These are my other friends," Geris had told her. "The ones I'm always telling you about."
And that had been enough for her -- she'd merely nodded in acceptance and continued into the room to change the glowstones out for brighter ones.
"Reveri figured out how to charge them!" Geris had told them proudly, and even Sencia had looked at the little girl with surprise. Glowstones were a carefully guarded secret, held jealously by the Lightsmith's guild. "She spied on the apprentices several times, and learned how to do it."
And with that, the quiet little girl -- though not so little anymore, Lygarde mused, as she'd recently shot up to nearly the Rin twins' height -- had inserted herself into their group. Though she rarely came to play with them in the fountain square, she was almost always at the secret base when they arrived.
The three of them paused at the door leading into the arch room. The floor was scattered with bits of hide as usual, laying out in random patterns or piles that none-the-less made sense to Geris and Reveri.
Lygarde glanced through the room, then frowned as he didn't see the Rin twins. "I thought you said they were here?"
Sencia shook her head. "They were earlier, but I've been in my room practicing for a candlemark or two."
"Hey, Revi, Geris!" Alchany called out, waving his arms in big sweeping gestures. "How's it going?"
The two looked up from the scraps that they'd gathered all around them.
"We think we've solved it," Geris said. Next to him, Revi set a scrap down and nodded her head in agreement. "Could you help us clean all this up? We don't need it out anymore."
Sencia smiled indulgently, as she moved into the room and started carefully picking up the scraps and stacking them in her arms. "Of course we'll help. Right boys?"
"Course we will!" Alchany chirped, moving into the room and snatching up pieces left and right. "Come on, brother!"
Lygarde snorted, then shrugged and began to pick up the bits that his excitable brother left behind or dropped in his crazy path through the room. Maybe with having 'solved' the arch, Geris would finally be content to let it lie. The thing gave him the creeps, like one of the heavily scarred mercenaries that sometimes frequented the leatherworks and had a tendency to eye the younger 'prentices like candy whenever they walked into the main shop.
"Thanks," Geris told them. He pointed at the only other door in the room besides the one they entered through. "Just drop it all in the room through there."
Between the five of them, the whole room was cleaned up in a short while -- of course, it helped that Beirin and Morian appeared once more, having been summoned by Reveri at some point. Lygarde honestly couldn't believe how many pieces of leather were scattered about the room, over half so dark with charcoal dust that they looked nearly black and shed dust with every movement he made.
In the end, his hands were grey with charcoal and his clothes little better, but the room was empty of the scattered research materials. It made the place seem larger, and somehow the lack of human mess... changed things. The arch felt like it was looming over him, taking on a menacing air. He really, really didn't like this room.
"I think we should all get cleaned up," Sencia suggested, as she eyed each of them in turn.
"And then can we do the chant? Please?" Geris clasped his hands in front of his chest and looked up at Sencia with wide, pleading eyes.
Lygarde nearly choked on his laughter -- Geris looked so... so cute like that! A far cry from his normal behavior. And then what he had asked actually registered, and Lygarde was certain his face had paled several shades, a feeling of doom gathering in the pit of his stomach.
Sencia merely rolled her eyes, "Fine. We'll come back and let you play cultist. But then we need to make dinner and plan where we'll go tomorrow.
"Nor--"
"No northern forest!" She barked, interrupting Alchany before he could get more than a syllable out. Her glare was enough to make Lygarde edge away from his twin. "The last time we went in there, we got lost, were chased by a mother badger, tumbled down a slope into a river, and got washed downstream back into the plains. My lute has never been the same since!"
Alchany rubbed at the back of his head and smiled sheepishly. "Er, sorry?"
Sencia snorted. "Sure you are. Come on, everyone, time to wash up before we play."
"Yes mother!"
Lygarde grinned as he watched his brother flee from an annoyed Sencia, premonition temporarily forgotten. He really loved his friends.
Sencia glanced across the ritual room, her gaze meeting Lygarde's, and smiled faintly. Lygarde merely rolled his eyes and huffed -- he'd never been the most enthusiastic about the obsession of their youngest members with the unfinished arch.
In fact, he rather felt it was a dangerous thing and should be left alone.
She felt it was a harmless fascination -- after all, none of them had lessons in magecraft, or even a lick of talent at it, so why should she worry? If standing around the dark green stone arch and playing at being cultists for an afternoon made Geris and Revi happy, why not? It wasn't like they hadn't done crazier things as kids -- the time they'd all run away into the northern forests certainly came to mind.
"It is time to change the world -- reach across space into another land; transport across space into another land!"
A shiver raced down her spine when Geris began to chant.
(There was something about the chant that nagged at her.)
"My call echoes through the world. Come, come, I reach out to you! You dark and deceptive beast of time, heed my cry and answer!"
Perhaps this wasn't the best of ideas, Sencia reflected, as she cast another glance across the circle to Lygarde.
(It seemed familiar.)
"Ripples spread from your touch; change races from your steps. Come, come, I reach out to you! Heed my cry and answer!"
The room seemed... darker. Larger. As if they stood upon a platform perched on the edge of a void.
(Surely it was just her imagination.)
"I reach across space into another land -- (Come, come, I reach out to you!) -- I beckon across space into another land -- (Heed my cry and answer!) -- It is time to change this faded world for another!"
The words weren't even being spoken in the original language, how could they have an actual effect?
(She was just being silly.)
"You dark and deceptive beast called time, answer my call!"
The Rin twins looked even paler than usual; their eyes wild and darting, as if they could see something in the shadows that she didn't.
(There was nothing there. There could be nothing there.)
"You dark and deceptive beast called time, answer my call!"
Nothing in her experience -- or even in any of the bardic lays she'd memorized -- spoke of the strange green-gold lightning that was beginning to crackle between the arch.
(It wasn't often her knowledge failed her like that. It felt like tettering on the edge of a cliff.)
"Ripples on the surface of the world; shatter, shatter, shatter and be reborn!"
The world exploded.
Sencia clutched at her chest, squeezing her eyes shut as sheets of green and gold light raced outward from the arch. Even behind her closed eyelids, she could see the chaotic pulses of light.
She felt stretched. Twisted. Broken.
There wasn't enough air (There was too much air!) -- Frigid like ice (burning like the noonday sun) -- Drowning in the air (desiccating under water)...
A groan to her left. Alchany, if their positions remained the same. "Anyone catch the bastard horse that ran me over?"
Sencia dragged in a gulp of air (beautiful, wonderful air...) and forced herself to exhale. To start breathing again.
"Ran us over, you mean," one of the Rin twins groaned.
"Well, that was the most brilliant idea we've ever had." Lygarde said.
"Definitely up there with the northern forest," a Rin twin agreed.
She pushed herself up (when had she laid down?) and took stock of their surroundings. It should have been simple: A grey rock room with glowstones mounted on the walls to give light. A tall arch of dark green stone in the center. Nothing fancy.
Instead, she found herself surrounded by trees. By grass below her hands. By a clear blue sky overhead.
Sencia took a deep breath (leaf litter and crushed grass), exhaled, took another (there was no time to panic), began to categorize the world. Broad leaf trees meant they weren't back in the northern forest. Brambles to one side of the clearing were heavy with berries -- a jump through time, then, or such a dramatic displacement of location they were unlikely to get back home in any sort of reasonable time frame.
(Personally, she bet on a jump through time. Wonderful.)
"Uhm, this wasn't supposed to happen?" Geris' voice was sheepish. "Sencia? Do you know where we are?"
She shook her head. "No. Just that we're not in the northern forest. We'll need to find people before I can begin to really guess."
"Sencia?" Lygarde's voice came out strangled. When she glanced over at him, she frowned to see his face drained of all color and his pupils blown so wide she could see them even at this distance. "Sencia? Are there brown dragons anywhere in the world?"
"Yes, but there shouldn't be any here. Browns tend to be found in savannas or veldts, and rarely in badlands or deserts. None of which is where we are." She'd even seen some, once. They were lithe, mid-sized creatures, taking much after the birds of prey that hunted those lands, though large enough that humans were but a snack to them. No one tamed browns.
Alchany turned to face her and immediately squeaked in fright.
Her stomach sank.
Bracing herself, Sencia twisted around.
(How did she miss that?)
The brown dragon was settled comfortably on its haunches, taking up a vast portion of the clearing. Behind her, she sensed more than heard as her friends slowly climbed to their feet, but she couldn't get her body to cooperate.
(She'd seen a brown stoop once. Seen it grow from a tiny silhouette in the sky to a beast the size of a house in the time it took her to exhale. Seen it land claws first atop a great bull elephant. The elephant died without making a sound.)
The sun, she absently noted, was shining such that the brown's shadow fell behind it.
"Eh? Wh-- Luro?" a sleepy voice cut across her shock and froze her friends in place. She didn't recognize it in the slightest. "Better be important, y'great lug, I was havin' a great dream there."
A head popped up over the brown's great shoulder, black hair mussed by sleep and eyes barely cracked open. "Oh, you lot are awake."
(No one tamed browns.)
The man scrubbed a hand across his face, then calmly walked down the dragon's arm.
(No one tamed browns.)
He stopped a few feet in front of them, scanning them with a jaded gaze. "Well don't you all look like something the cat dragged in. I'm D'lar, and the lug behind me is Lurothath."
Sencia licked her lips, trying to bring moisture back to her parched throat, as she finally managed to get her legs to cooperate so she could stand and meet this D'lar on (somewhat) equal ground.
"I'm Sencia. The red haired twins are Alchany and Lygarde. Brown haired twins are Beirin and Morian. The other girl is Reveri, and the pale red head is Geris," she introduced them all in a rush.
(No one tamed browns.)
D'lar glanced over his shoulder at the brown -- at Lurothath -- and frowned. "Really? All of them? Fine. Call Tasirth so we can get all of them to the Weyr at the same time."
"Excuse me," Sencia interrupted, a frown on her face. "What, precisely, is going on?"
He stared at her blankly, then sighed. "Luro's not the best of search-dragons, but he's pretty sure all seven of you are capable of bonding to a dragon. So, we're going to wait for Tasirth -- he's a bronze, by the way -- and his rider Kawaz to arrive so we can transport all of you to Aneris Weyr at the same time."
"Eh? Bond?" Alchany broke in, taking a few steps forward to stand at her shoulder. "You mean like a mage to a familiar?"
"We're not mages," Lygarde said as he moved to stand at her other shoulder. "Though I suppose that has to be wrong, since we're... wherever we are."
D'lar arched an eyebrow at them, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his lips. "Well, at least I understand your fear now. Bet dragons are mean and nasty beasts on whatever world you're from, aren't they?"
Sencia's mind stalled. Another world?! She cast a side-long glance at the bramble bush. At the trees that surrounded the clearing. At the grass under her feet.
"Yeah, it's a bit odd, isn't it?" D'lar said. "Cold places have needle leaf trees, warm places have broad leaf trees, grass is always grass -- though sometimes I've seen it be purple or orange --, and berry bushes almost always look similar. It really messed me up the first time I left Pern and went to Nyracii. Everything was so similar that the differences were even more jarring."
"Then how can we understand each other?" one of the Rin twins asked.
D'lar shrugged. "Magic. Dragons. Parallel worlds. Take your pick, everyone has their favorite theory."
"Anyway," he continued. "Here's the short explanation. Dragons like Lurothath need to bond -- that is, mentally joining their mind to another being's, usually a human like us -- to survive. Typically, this happens during hatching. A dragon like Lurothath will die if their bond dies, and the reverse is also usually true."
"Wait, hold on," Fangeris piped up. "So this 'bonding' is basically a mutual suicide pact? Why would anyone wa--"
Reveri clamped her hand tightly over Geris' mouth, sending a rigid smile at D'lar as she did.
Lurothath snorted, his great head shifting down to look more closely at the seven of them. ::Why? Maybe because constant companionship is worth it, little flame.::
The sound of wingbeats interrupted them, as a dark form appeared over the treetops and flared its wings into a stall. Carefully, oh so carefully, the great beast settled into the last remaining bit of clearing -- Sencia noted that Lurothath had shuffled over until he was nearly tangled in the trees, giving way before the ancient-bronze colored dragon that dwarfed him.
Suddenly, the clearing felt very small.
"Well? Let's all get back to Aneris, then." D'lar cheerfully stated. "And think about it this way! If you bond, you'll be able to go wherever and whenever you want, even back to your own world."
The seven of them exchanged looks: cautious, wary, questioning. Geris was the most excited of them all -- comments about suicide pacts aside, this was the adventure he had dreamed about, Sencia was sure. Lygarde had already accepted these new circumstances with his normal aplomb, while his twin seemed to be looking forward to meeting new people and learning new customs. The Rin twins looked speculative, eyeing the two dragons that had landed in the clearing with thoughful gazes. Reveri was her typical ambivalent self, willing to follow because Geris and the rest of her friends were leading the way.
"Very well," Sencia spoke for all of them. "We accept."