Life Seed, page 17
Elias screamed. He vaguely registered Tristan doing the same.
The white wurl clamped its jaws shut and tilted its head to the side, fixing the Life Seed with an unblinking stare. The echoes of its roar took a long time to fade, and Elias could have sworn he could still hear the cry inside his mind for a few seconds after the creature had gone silent.
The echoes died down eventually, though, and Elias realized he was lying on the ground, curled around the Seed, looking up at the white wurl. Slowly, with trembling legs, he managed to stand up.
“Back away carefully,” Tristan whispered. Elias didn’t dare turn around to look at him.
“Okay,” Elias muttered, mostly to himself. Behind him, he could hear Tristan taking slow, stealthy steps. Praying he wouldn’t trip on one of the vines, Elias followed suit.
They hadn’t taken more than three or four steps before the white wurl lifted its head and, with a fluid and almost languid motion, uncoiled its tail so it circled around the perimeter of the gallery, covering it almost completely. A quick, panicky look back confirmed what Elias feared. The exit was now blocked by the appendage, and the only way out now was one of the jagged holes on the rock face, which led down into nothing.
“This was a trap,” Tristan said under his breath. “I was right. They herded us here.”
“What do we do?” Elias asked, trying to keep the panic from his voice.
“You tell me. This was your idea. Give them the Seed and let’s go.”
Elias swallowed the lump in his throat. He looked up at the imposing, threatening bulk of the white wurl and felt as if his legs would give way once again. Tristan was right, though. Returning the Life Seed had been his idea. And he needed to finish what he had started.
He took a step forward, then another. The wurl didn’t move at all. It might have been an iridescent statue, were it not for the fact that its eyes glittered with intelligence. Another step. Elias couldn’t believe he was doing this. The creature was big enough to eat him in a single bite, and there was something strange about it. The other wurl Elias had seen had been intimidating, sure, but remained essentially animals. This one, on the other hand….
He couldn’t keep going anymore. He was halfway to the center of the gallery, with the hulking wurl at the other end. Between them, on the ground, the strange nexus of vines beckoned. It was the obvious place to put the Life Seed, but terror was getting the better of Elias, and after another hesitant half step he simply remained where he was. He couldn’t get any closer, not when he was sure the creature could trample him or slice him open with the edges of its wicked glass claws.
“H-here!” he shouted, holding out the Life Seed to the wurl. “Take it!”
The creature tilted its head to the side once more, as if analyzing a particularly interesting insect. Then it dipped its head down, ever so slightly.
“You want me to drop it?” Elias asked. “Okay—here!”
He dropped the Seed, and several things happened the second it touched the ground.
The vines around the chamber glowed with a brief, faint luminescence of subdued green.
Tristan shouted something.
The white wurl bared its fangs and attacked.
Elias was too surprised to even move out of the way. His bladder let go as the hulking behemoth struck forward in a blur of motion, its jaws snapping shut mere centimeters away from Elias’s face. An overpowering smell of smoldering vegetable matter enveloped him when the white wurl exhaled.
Still frozen in place by fear, unable to believe he was still alive, Elias stared as the white wurl lumbered forward, triggering tremors in the ground. It walked until its front feet rested on either side of the nexus of vines and then moved its slender neck toward the Seed, ripples of sunlight making its scales flicker from metal to glass to a shockingly beautiful iridescence.
With a last look at Elias, the creature touched the Life Seed with its snout.
The reaction was immediate. The entire Seed glowed as if white-hot, and the sharp sound of sizzling meat was soon trailed by the corresponding smell. The white wurl snatched its head away from the Seed, moaning, and Elias realized that the scales of its snout were burned, the edges reddened, hinting at charred flesh beneath. The wurl closed all three of its eyes and swung its head from side to side, moaning even more in evident pain.
“Now!” Tristan shouted over the din. He had suddenly appeared and grabbed Elias’s hand. “Go, go, go!”
Elias didn’t stop to think. He turned around and sprinted away beside Tristan, his terrified brain nevertheless registering the fact that Tristan’s grip on his hand was strong and warm. In its pain, the wurl thrashed its tail dangerously, but the entrance to the mountain tunnels was clear.
“The Seed!” Elias shouted.
“Forget it! We need to go!”
The ground under their feet rumbled. Another deafening screech forced Elias to let go of Tristan’s hand to cover his ears, but he didn’t stop running, somehow even getting ahead of Tristan in his wild race. They were almost there. Once they were in the tunnel, the creature wouldn’t be able to catch them. It was too big to fit. They would be safe. Just a little bit—
Whoosh.
Elias barely stopped in time. Tristan crashed against him and the two of them fell forward, sprawling on the vine-covered floor.
A mere hair’s breadth away from a glittering, iridescent spine.
Elias’s eyes were wide as saucers from absolute shock. A spine as thick and long as his leg had struck the ground right in front of them, splintering the rock underneath from the force with which it had been launched.
Elias exchanged a look with Tristan and saw his own emotions mirrored.
There’s no way out. No way out.
As if to confirm it, two more spines impacted the ground on either side of them, sending up sprays of stinging rock fragments and making the white wurl’s message clear. It could kill them anytime it wanted.
No escape at all.
Something strange happened to Elias. Now that he truly knew there was no way out, calm descended over him, blanketing the terror. He stood up and offered his hand to Tristan, who took it in a trembling grip. Elias didn’t let go as the two of them turned around to face their death.
“By the generation ship,” Tristan whispered, his voice terror mixed with awe.
It was as if the white wurl had transformed. From underneath its shimmering scales, spines had appeared, hundreds of them, each one ending in a wicked serrated tip that looked sharper than any knife. The spines were all facing forward, and the ones around the creature’s neck fanned out in a circle, almost like a mane of simmering threat and absolute power. It looked like a quilled monster come to life.
The wurl glared at them with its shining eyes even as it used its tail to coil around them, tightening, forcing the two young men to move forward until they were standing in front of the fallen Life Seed once more. Then it stopped. It lowered its head until it was level with Elias. It was so close that Elias could see clearly the awful damage that the Life Seed had inflicted on the creature’s snout. Several of its armor plates had fallen off where they had touched the Seed, and the charred flesh underneath was bleeding. Glittering red blood pooled on the creature’s snout, shocking against the iridescence of its healthy scales, and dripped to the ground in a faint but alarming rivulet.
The revelation hit Elias suddenly, piercing through his brittle veneer of calm.
“They can’t touch it,” he said quietly.
“What?” Tristan asked.
“The Life Seed,” Elias explained, pointing. In response, the white wurl lowered its head toward the Seed and then moved it in Elias’s direction. Its meaning was clear. “They can’t touch it. They need us to move it.”
“Maybe we can use that,” Tristan said quickly. “You grab the Seed, then we back away. This wurl has to let us go.”
Elias shook his head sadly. “Or it impales us with spines. No, Tristan. We’ve come this far. I have to set things right.”
“Elias, think of your home. Of Portree. What about the people there? How will you make things right? We need that Seed. Don’t do this.”
“We can’t sentence an entire world to die so we can live,” Elias replied, letting go of Tristan’s hand.
“Elias! Don’t do it!”
“Don’t try to stop me, Tristan. The white wurl won’t let you, and I don’t want to see you die.”
Tristan was about to say something else, but the wurl growled threateningly, almost as if it had understood their conversation. Elias picked up the Life Seed and held it out.
“I’m going to place it where it belongs, okay?” he told the savage creature in front of him.
There was no vocal reply, but the white wurl backed away a couple of steps in open invitation. It whisked its tail aside. Elias didn’t look back to see Tristan’s expression because he feared his own resolution would falter. Instead he simply walked forward, stepping gingerly over the vines, until he reached the very center of the mountain gallery. There was a shallow depression there, covered everywhere by vines. They formed a strangely beautiful geometric pattern, like a spiral made out of individual tendrils that coiled in on themselves until they reached a single point, where a withered-looking vine protruded up from the ground, as if questing to find the Seed that was no longer there.
Elias hopped into the depression and walked toward the center. Carefully, he knelt down and realized that the bottom of the Life Seed had a groove he hadn’t noticed before, a perfect opening for the questing vine tendril.
“Here. I return that which we stole.”
He placed the Life Seed where it belonged.
And his mind shattered into a thousand pieces.
Chapter 16—Sizzra
I AM….
I am Elias. I am a human being.
Or—am I?
I am….
I am an unhatched infant. I am ready, and I am strong. My shelter feels now like a prison, one I need to destroy if I am to escape. I want to live.
I do not have spines yet, but my feet have claws. It is hard to wriggle in the confines of the egg, but I bring one of the claws on my right front foot forward and I push. It is difficult. I can barely move, but all around me I can feel the warmth and the faint heartbeats of the others. They yearn to cross the threshold from dreams into reality, just as I do.
I will get there first.
I push harder and my claw pierces the shell. I know a brief moment of panic: What is out there? What if there is danger? What if a predator lies in wait, invisible, poised to strike?
I stifle a scared whine, clamping my jaws shut. The first sound I make in the world will not be one of fear. It will be one of strength.
Another push. My foot breaks through, and I feel sunlight. Wind. Eager now, all fear forgotten, I wriggle my body and use my other front foot to widen the gap in the eggshell. It breaks easily now, as if bending to my will. I will not be contained any longer. I will be…
Free!
I stumble forward, front feet slipping on smooth eggshells slick with the contents of my egg. The light is a blinding, painful shock, and I close both sets of eyelids on my eye cluster to block it out. My mind is racing, reeling in confusion, but above all there is a desire to stand tall, out in the world, and cry out my defiance. I push with all my strength, and my middle and back feet explode from the remnants of the eggshell to land on the uneven ground. My tail, so wonderfully long, flicks for the first time. I marvel at the sensation of air whistling over my scales.
I take a tentative, stumbling step. The second one is better. By the third I can open my eyes.
I see the world for the first time in a blast of sensory input. The sky overhead is shockingly blue, dizzying and vast, but it is to the ground that my gaze is drawn. It is… marvelous. Echoes of the ancient memories of my mother and her mothers surge to the fore of my thoughts, so I find concepts for every beautiful thing. I am on top of a mountain, looking down on lesser peaks capped by snow. It is noon, and the sun is high in the sky. I can see so much of the world. There are valleys, rivers, forests. There is a great crater, its rim glittering with gemstones. If I focus, I can even make out individual leaves in the trees on the mountain slopes, swaying gently in the wind. I can see small birds spiraling through the air as they hunt for insects. In the rivers, I see a fish with sparkling scales jump out in a spray of water droplets. This is a world of breathtaking beauty.
And it is mine. I am the queen of all I survey.
The time has come. I climb on an outcrop of rock overlooking a deadly drop into the abyss, clumsy no longer. I flick my tail three times, dig the claws on all six of my feet into the ground, and roar out my name.
Sizzra!
I am Sizzra, queen of this world. Instinct, memory, and my own unbreakable will guide my actions. I know what I should do next. I draw air into my lungs and sing the Song of Birth.
The echoes come back to me almost immediately, some of them mental echoes of my own voice, of the queens that came before me. And some of them from the nest.
I look to the left, and my ears single out the tentative scratching of the males, my brood-siblings all. Their eggs are much smaller than mine, black and metallic where mine was purest white. I lift my head approvingly at their efforts and roar the Song a second time. The notes in my voice thread themselves into an invisible pattern that projects my will.
Rise, brood-siblings. Live.
Faint keening is my answer, claws scratching at eggshells, and soon the first hints of black-scaled bodies break out of their own shelters. I memorize each and every one of them as they come out of their eggs, naming them in my heart even though they will never claim names of their own. I take special note of the males who hatched first. One among them might one day be my chosen mate—if he proves strong enough. For now, though, I merely welcome them all with my voice and my will and my presence. I know I am resplendent in the sunlight. I have scales like no other creature alive in the world, and they will see each and every one of them, or see them all as they shift and drink in the light to refract it in a million and one different ways. I stand firmly above the males and accept their unblinking gazes of hushed awe as my due.
I roar the Song for the third and final time. Some of the males answer with their own thoughtless voices, and again I memorize who sounds the fiercest. As the final echoes of my roar are lost in the distance, I drop back into the nest, crushing an unhatched egg under my claws. I feel the faint spark of life within it be extinguished, but I feel no remorse. He was too slow to hatch, and there will be no weakness in my brood.
I walk among the males, tiny creatures barely half my size, and they all part to make way for their queen. I bask in their unified attention, keenly aware of the echoes of my own image coming from their simple minds. I am strength incarnate. I am the light of the stars made grace. I am power and danger. I am unstoppable will.
I am Sizzra. And I am queen of all—
But it is then that I see the corpse, and the reality of the world comes crashing down onto my shoulders.
Slowly, moving with silken, calculated stealth, I approach the edge of the mountaintop nest. The wind howls around me, and some of the males whimper.
The sound triggers rage in me, and I whirl around, snapping at the air with my jaws. They all back away from me, terrified. That is good. I do not expect to hear them whimper again.
I turn my attention back to the gigantic corpse that lies sprawled out on the rocks of the treacherous mountain slope leading to our nest. My mother is beautiful even in death, a sculpture of ice now that her will has long ceased to animate her iridescent scales. I approach with more confidence than I feel, for the benefit of the males in my wake, until I reach her head.
Alaya. Her name comes to me like the echo of a ghost. I feel no sadness, no real sense of loss. Her memories are within me, as mine will be within my daughter one day. I do, however, feel anger. And the slightest hint of concern.
Alaya’s body towers above me, making me seem like an insignificant speck of life in the presence of a mountain, but even her size cannot hide the gruesome marks that teeth and savage claws have left on her flesh. Her right back and middle feet have been torn off completely, and a crimson pool of frozen blood coats the snow and the rocks nearby. Along her back there are three parallel slashes, wicked raking wounds that tore through her armored plating and sliced the bone and internal organs underneath. Her tail lies several body lengths away from where we stand. Most of the jagged spines on her back have been either fired or torn off. And her neck….
That is how she died, I am sure of it. There is a gruesome swath of frozen red flesh where her crown of spines should have been. The savagery of the mutilation leaves me breathless for a moment. To think of the strength required to bring down my mother in this way is to venture into the impossible, and yet here is the proof. She was not strong enough. And she was killed by one of the Two Others.
Of that there is no doubt in my mind. No one else holds such power in this world. Anger simmers in my chest as I walk around my mother’s body, my eyes briefly taking in the vista of the lower mountainside, littered as it is with the frozen remnants of dead males of my mother’s brood, and the brood of Another.
I already know which one it was simply by looking at the carcasses below, but I confirm it when I walk around to my mother’s front side and see two bloody wings still grasped firmly in her glass claws, torn off the queen they belonged to.
I bare my fangs at the sight. The scales on the wings are a deep violet hue, the color of an enemy. The wings are dim now, in death, but their size still takes my breath away. My mother must have fought fiercely indeed to have managed to tear both wings off the Flyer. For knowing that, my heart eases. My mother fought well. And her death was bought at a dear price.
