Dragon Aster Trilogy

11: HOLDING ON



Sybl opened her eyes to the feeling of someone staring at her. She peered up as the person holding her seemed to stop breathing, before focusing with his two beautiful, light blue eyes on her. She was either dead and he was an angel, or she was alive and dreaming. Both she would accept forever.

The man didn’t say anything as his long, straight blond hair fell over his shoulders as he looked away from her and to the right side of the room. He seemed content to hold her even with her being awake.

“Oh by all the caels it’s true... Cirrus tell me that’s not a human?”

Cirrus didn’t answer the fret in the doorway. Sybl looked his way as well as she sat up on her own. She was surprised enough by the other man’s appearance to get to her feet and slowly back away to the window of the room.

“No...no no no. This isn’t going to work. Take her back—like NOW. She doesn’t belong here, and I don’t know what madness you’ve evolved out of from your Curse, but this is not going to work.”

“This is not something you can understand,” replied the one who had been holding her.

Sybl stayed quiet as the young man, complete with clouded orange eyes that might have meant he was blind sent his entire disproval her way with a stern frown. His dark-blue hair was cut short without much care to its evenness or neatness.

“What I can understand is that this human kid is going to make you as messed up as Rose did to me. If she doesn’t, she will still grow old and die and I am NOT going through that again, Cirrus! For the sake of any decency left in this world we just buried—”

“Cecil, shut up,” another man said sternly as he came into the room. “The Princess can understand everything you are saying in Torian.”

Cecil clearly wasn’t expecting that as his expression changed to concern on looking back at Sybl. But it wasn’t much. “You could have told me...”

“If you were listening to her psi like the rest of us, your self-proclaimed brilliance would have actually been useful for once.”

Sybl’s way out was blocked off as the ghastly thin, tall man looked her way with orange eyes and frail, dark green hair that fell just to his shoulders. He could have easily been the tallest person she ever faced. He might even be a treant of some kind. If he didn’t look less likely to kill her than Cecil, she might have really begun to panic.

“No one is going to hurt you. Calm down,” Cirrus spoke to her thoughts.

“Just who are you people? And why do you sound like that dragon?” Sybl looked at Cirrus as he continued to sit against the wall in total calmness, while she was anything but.

Cecil only fretted some more with a loud tapping of his boot against the ground, as if having an argument within his own mind. Then he threw up his arms with a loud sigh and retreated back into the hallway.

“Sybl you aren’t dreaming or trapped in a nightmare, you need to first and foremost understand this. I don’t want you losing anymore glass slippers by running from us,” the tall one said.

“That’s not how—” Sybl stopped there as the man smiled at her in waiting for its end. He suddenly seemed familiar, and she had no idea how someone who wasn’t a human could be such to her. She looked at her shoe and wiggled her toes, finding it still damp inside.

“The story goes. Yes, Lintrance knows that, but it doesn’t stop my older cousin from messing with it,” Cirrus added.

“I don’t think there is any proper way to tell you what we are. Perhaps Cirrus could show you around,” Lintrance suggested.

Cirrus was already getting to his feet before he asked.

“You can trust him.”

Sybl remembered the terrifying wolf-like creatures and the giant winged cat from earlier. Now she was somehow in a room of human-looking dragons. “You were able to fly out?” she asked Cirrus.

“You can’t fly out of a pluma’s field, Princess. They control all the Thread in one and can snap you and your wings out of the sky with little effort,” Lintrance answered for him.

“So what were you trying to do? Blow me out by hiding till that cat-thing and those wolves arrived?” Sybl asked.

“Cirrus, seriously?” Lintrance questioned.

“I didn’t want to scare her. And I wasn’t about to unsomn so the plumas could sense me. The Pack you love so much didn’t look in the mood to share her, either. For your idea of a truce, they still snapped enough bones in my body to make me think otherwise.”

Sybl gulped as Lintrance looked to her to follow Cirrus as he left the room.

“No one is going to hurt you while you’re here. You have my word on that,” Lintrance said.

She figured it was all she had for the time being, as she partially nodded and followed after Cirrus.

They passed through several corridors and through some larger caverns, before stopping when the shelves of glowing water on the walls ceased to end. The white light drew her curiosity closer. She touched the water that fell down the brown stone as a thin, perfectly-even waterfall. Only it fell at a fraction of the speed of what it should have. Even gravity was a mess in this place.

“It’s the aeri in the water that makes it glow. The water around Toria is infused with enough of it to make it rise entirely against its outside walls, instead of fall,” Cirrus explained.

“Aeri being magic?”

“Aeri being the life energy that keeps us alive. Humans die without water, air, and food and we die without aeri, which is a lighter form of all three.”

“So you don’t eat?” Sybl asked.

“We eat, but mostly the dragoons do as we tend to use more energy in a short amount of time.” He continued on, and she followed him upstairs until they came to the wooden door of a room. He fiddled with the lock for a moment before it opened, and he stepped inside first. The room was heavy with dust. Cirrus walked through it to the wooden shelf across from the bed.

“Is this your room?” Sybl found it unusual for a guy’s room, as a lot of linen and clothes lying about were pink, white and red.

“No, it was my mother’s when she was alive.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She died before—I mean shortly after I was born,” Cirrus quickly corrected. He pulled a box carved of translucent stone from the shelf and dusted it off. “But I still feel as if I never missed her like I should.”

Sybl was curious to what he held now, as it looked like several cards. He handed them to her, and she looked them over. The first was a driver’s license dated thirty-two years ago. “‘Felstaff, Alexia.’ Heh, and its from my province, that’s neat. She looks so much like you.”

“Well, so much for believing that everyone else was wrong,” Cirrus added with a smile that already knew she was going to say just that.

“So your mother was a human?”

“Yes. My father along with a rather long story decided to head through the Gate the mer had built in Mer City, and landed right next to her. From what he’s told me, it was more or less a kidnapping for love at first sight.”

“There’s a way back to Earth?” Sybl asked out of curiosity.

“Not on this side of the world. Not anymore. Cecil was working on the Gate that his human Bond, Rose, used to go to Earth and find her parents at the town of Berion. That was recently destroyed, and no one seems to know how despite everyone in the town being right there when it happened. So it goes without saying that I am rather curious to how you got here.”

“I wish I knew myself. One moment I was at the back of my foster home, trying to figure out where everyone had up and vanished to, and next I was in that field of flowers with you breathing on me,” Sybl said.

Cirrus laughed as he pulled the memory of her fainting from the sight of Lintrance and sent it right back to the front of her thoughts. “I already said that I didn’t want to scare you, nor could I take to my human form on the field of our enemies. You’re lucky to be alive. Awl’s don’t usually take particular interest in someone unless they wish to kill them.”

“It was a creepy cat, not an owl.”

Cirrus was left confused for a moment as she compared the Fate weaver to a small bird in her mind. “Awls are servants of Hino, from your world. They are demons; half evil spirits and half usually of a human-like body. They have souls because of their god, and as such are also enemies of the Great Dragon, Aragmoth. They can cause a great deal of Animus destruction in a short amount of time.”

“What’s Animus?”

“Spiritual Thread that makes it possible for Ancients and Eminor to exist on Aster. When they utilize it, they can become a solid form. When they have a host, they can use it much more easily, as that energy is more densely channeled,” Cirrus explained.

“So you couldn’t be a dragon on Earth?”

“We could, but from the stories of how my father returned from your world from trying it, I can only imagine it’s exhausting and extremely dangerous. It wasn’t easy from what I’ve heard to patch him up.”

Sybl browsed through the cards that included several memberships and a birth certificate, before handing them back to him.

“Come, there’s more to show you.” Cirrus put the cards back in the box before returning it to the shelf. Then he headed out from the room with her following.

They walked for a few minutes more before the small hallways opened to a much wider and higher cavern of a hall, or what might have been an impressive one once. The pillars and white stone that had fallen all about made it look more like a catastrophe of rubble now. But what caught her interest the most was the white stone slabs near the end of it.

Sybl walked over to them and climbed over a few, before stopping on an elevated platform of the same stone that had survived for the most part. “What happened here?”

Cirrus looked at her for a while after he caught up, as if expecting her to know already. “Six months ago, our enemies, being the pluma like you saw at the Canyon, invaded these Caverns and brought the Fay Wall down. This was where we used to shelter our daorans and young.”

“That must have been horrible. But how do a bunch of winged cats do all this?”

“It was our first encounter with the Aeger, which is a sickness that drives the more simpler Ancients and Eminor out of control. They didn’t feel pain, and they didn’t stop until they had what they came for which was the lives of our most innocent. This Wall was considered to be a bone of Aragmoth, but as strong as it was, it didn’t stand a chance against a hundred plumas. They cut the life Threads to it and sent it crumbling down. We went back for vengeance, and although we killed most of them, we lost our Prince to the monsters.” Cirrus didn’t say anything more as he headed back the way they came and changed direction towards a strong wind coming from somewhere.

Sybl caught her hair as a blast of it blew her back before she could enter the next place Cirrus did. She caught the side of the rough wall and pulled herself into the room, before looking across to the abyss of the chasm that cut into the mountain. Then she looked at the giant holes that were responsible for the wind. It was almost powerful enough to lift her off of her feet. “Have these winds ever stopped?”

“Only once,” Cirrus replied, unmoved by the wind.

Sybl decided to leave it at that as his expression returned to what it had been at the ruins of the Fay Wall.

“We made the wrong choice. Revenge against an enemy wasn’t the answer to a sickness, and it brought us less than nothing in the end.”

She scrambled to try and catch him, before the wind picked her up and set her afloat. “Help!”

Cirrus seemed content to use her to change the topic before he could reflect the pain of his past onto her any further. He used the wind to set her over the Chasm as he focused in on her more simpler thoughts. Like her particular one on falling. “I’m sorry, did you just say you wanted down?”

“Yes. Please. But not—”

Sybl cried out in terror as she thought she was going to die when he dropped her. Then a surge of wind lifted her back up to the top again where his hand awaited hers. Her legs shook on trying to stand upright.

“If you were more specific with your escaping thoughts, things like this would be easier to avoid.”

“Point...taken...” Sybl said as she trembled a couple more times. “Just how do I do that?”

“You have to learn how to focus, and I wouldn’t be cheating if I didn’t have an Ancient to help with that. Your anxiety makes too much noise and any single thought you try to direct gets shaken off path by it.”

“I have an excuse to be full of anxiety,” Sybl said with another shudder. “I have a whole list of ‘em!”

“No, not anymore. Now give it a try. Think something to me without thinking of a hundred other things at the same time.”

“Um, okay.” Sybl looked at his eyes as she thought about the blue sky she might never see again on Earth.

“Try harder.”

She closed her eyes and thought about his name being that of cloud. Her focus was still failing as a rush of wind pushed her back and closer to the edge of the chasm. “Okay okay I got this!” Sybl pleaded. She tried again, before catching sight of something moving along the wall. When she looked closer, it proved to be a transparent shape of a dragon, but not so much as a fifth the size she had remembered it before. “Dragon?”

It was still the wrong answer as the spirit came straight at and through her in a rush of wind. The force of it all was strong enough to lift and throw her backwards off the edge, before the hands of a solid dragon caught her and twisted them back upright. Then Cirrus flew back up and through his chosen tunnel at the speed of a roller coaster. He carefully navigated the tunnels as she hung on for dear life, before the light on the other side could be seen and he rose up into it. Then he climbed higher as his command over the wind propelled the force of his wings straight upwards.