Beating wings, p.1
Beating Wings, page 1
part #6 of Lazy Scales Series
Cover Art by Lugh Delaney Boyle
© 2021 DM Gilmore
All rights reserved
More Books By DM Gilmore
The Lazy Scales Series
Lazy Scales
Idle Claws
Dull Teeth
Broken Horns
Kindled Flames
Beating Wings
The Centre of Magical Affairs Series
Drake
Trace
Poach
Prologue
Longsight shook his head, his fiery copper scales glistening in the light of whatever that was up above them. Lewis was fairly certain that it wasn’t the sun. The sun didn’t quite shine that way, nor did it ever seem so close. The other dragons were standing on an island that floated in a sea of darkness. The sky overhead was blue and cloudless, but as Lewis followed it to the horizon, it slowly faded into black. Past the edge of the island was nothing but an endless void.
“This bridge was for my son,” Longsight proclaimed, nodding at the cobblestone bridge that Lewis stood on, just off the edge of the island. “Your time will come, but it is not yet now. You have yet a duty to fulfill for our kind.”
“Duty?” Lewis asked, cocking his head. His own scales, a polished bronze color, seemed burnished in this strange place. He was standing before an army of dragons, many of them similar to him. Some had the same bulky shoulders. Others had the same strong snouts. None of them were as close in appearance to him as the three directly in front of him.
Longsight could have been his father; there were so many similarities between them. Their horns and claws were the same black color. Their tails were both tipped with the same blade-like spade. Even Lewis’s bronze scales seemed only like an off-shoot to the elder’s copper scales. The female dragon, currently cradling a red whelp no larger than Lewis himself, was covered in the same green scales that dappled Lewis’s bronze hide. That small red dragon himself, though, was perhaps the most similar.
If Lewis didn’t know the true history behind Lasthope, he could have sworn this peculiar dragon was his twin. Save for their colorations, they looked nearly identical. It was like staring into a mirror.
That thought alone sent shivers down Lewis’s spine.
“You have accomplished much in your short time as one of us,” Longsight continued, unaware of Lewis’s wandering eyes, “but your work is not yet finished. We bid you return to the mortal plane with our blessing and a bit of our wisdom.”
Suddenly, every dragon present turned their gazes upon Lewis. Those standing upon the strange island floating in a sea of darkness. Those flitting about the air above them. Thousands upon thousands of sharp dragon eyes locked onto him.
If there had been a chill down his spine before, Lewis felt ice rolling down his back now.
“Lazyscales of the Wyrm tribe,” their voices echoed, as though speaking as one. “You must guide our new hope into their bright future.”
“What!?” Lewis yelped in protest. “But how can I do that!? I’m barely a dragon at all!”
“You know our ways,” came a soft voice. Lewis blinked and saw the smaller Lasthope smiling up at him. “You are the last living vestige of our culture. You have the library to guide you now, and in turn, you must guide and teach the others.”
“But I can’t read any of those books! How am I supposed to teach anyone, let alone lead them!?”
All at once, wisps of white flowed up from the assembled dragon tribes. Lewis’s eyes widened in terror as thousands of smokey ribbons slammed down upon him. He was terrified that perhaps the dragons had grown angry with him, and maybe they wanted to destroy him for his insolence.
Mother. Father. Child. Friend. Family. Tribe.
Words suddenly exploded in Lewis’s mind as understanding bowled into him with such force as to knock him down. He clutched his head, crying out in pain.
Language. The dragons had just gifted him with the knowledge of their language. As the words assaulted him, he instinctively knew that this was Old Draconic, the language necessary to read the bulwark of the tomes in the library.
It was a moment later that the tide of knowledge ended. Lewis shook his head, dizzy but otherwise okay.
“Go forth,” Longsight ordered, his face alight with pride, “and lead our kind into their future, Lazyscales of the Wyrm tribe!” It took Lewis a moment to realize that Longsight hadn’t spoken English and another moment to realize that he’d understood it! The series of hisses and growls had been a language, and his brain had handled the rest.
“GO FORTH!” Echoed the assembled dragons, turning their gaze skyward, towards the light overhead.
It took Lewis a moment to recover as the words continued to swirl and churn in his thoughts and mind. For a second, he shook his head in confusion as he started thinking in the ancient dragon language rather than his own native tongue. English felt so distant, so alien to him. How could he speak it when the language of dragons was right there, begging him to use it?
“Go forth. Return home, and be the leader the others need in the coming years.”
It felt so weird hearing Lasthope speak in such a soft tone, to use a voice more akin to a child than the fussy elder dragon that Lewis had come to know and respect. As he gazed down at him — a reversal of their usual situation — Lewis met the small ruby dragon’s gaze. Smiles often looked bizarre and alien on Lasthope’s face, but it seemed a perfectly logical thing on this whelp's snout. This wasn’t Lasthope: this was the child he was supposed to be before losing his mother and father. This was a child full of hope.
If the Lasthope that Lewis knew and respected was still in there, he owed it to him to give the dragons the justice they craved.
Go forth.
“I-I will,” Lewis stammered as he once again found his words. He shakily rose back to his feet and shook off the daze, turning his eyes skyward towards the light beyond the circling dragons. “I just have to go up, right?”
“Correct,” Longsight confirmed again
Lewis grinned and waved goodbye to the tiny Lasthope one last time. He spread his wings, gave them a few practice flaps, and marveled at how light he felt. It felt like it would take barely any effort at all, and he would be in the air. He suspected that this was because he had no physical body in this place.
He flapped once, twice, and braced his legs for take off.
Then, the bridge suddenly fell out beneath him.
Lewis was falling, with loose stones tumbling around him. He beat his wings as hard as he could, momentarily maintaining his altitude. For a second, he thought he was ascending.
Then his body flickered.
His form, in this strange place, was not immutable. In the place he’d come to think of as the real world, Lewis was a dragon. He’d been a dragon for nearly two months. He was used to the way his dragon body moved and behaved. He’d even grown acceptant of the fact that he might not ever be human again.
In this place, though? He didn’t quite know what he was. Was he a dragon? Was he a human? The only answer he could reasonably come to was that he was, unfortunately, both.
And even more unfortunately, his form decided to shift at the most inopportune time.
“NO!” Lewis cried, staring at his hands — his pale, claw-less, scale-bare, human hands — as color once again faded from his fingertips. Above him, the dragon-covered island started to shrink away in the distance.
“Lewis!” Lasthope’s tiny voice cried out as the whelpling leaped off the island to chase after him as he plummeted into the darkness. In an instant, Longsight was there, grabbing Lasthope before he could descend too far.
Lewis begged his body to obey. He couldn’t afford to be a human! “NOT NOW!” He screamed, shaking his hands and silently begging them to turn into the clumsy talons of a young dragon. “I HAVE TO BE A DRAGON! I HAVE TO…”
The sudden pain was unbearable. It was as though every fiber of his being was being torn at the seams. Lewis screamed in agony as he was split in two. He felt like a piece of paper, torn into two parts and thrown in separate directions.
“BE A DRAGON!”
The voice was his own, but it didn’t come from him. Lewis felt as though he was torn in half, with one part falling, while the other rose into the air and flapped madly towards the sky.
The dragon did not look back as it flew toward the light. As it ascended over the island, the assembled dragons cheered for it, blissfully unaware of the soul sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness.
“What about me!?” Lewis cried as the island — and the light itself — faded further into the distance. “Don’t forget about me!”
Lewis knew his voice would never reach their ears. As the darkness swallowed him, he knew that there was no way they would come and save him. Lasthope had tried, only to be stopped by Longsight.
They probably assumed he was fine. They saw a dragon that looked like him flying up. Surely they believed that was him, right?
“But that wasn’t me, was it?” Lewis whispered to the dark. “I’m still me, aren’t I?”
Lewis tried to remember, but the last two months of his life felt hollow and distant. On some level, he knew he’d been a dragon, but he couldn’t remember what it had been like. All he had were vague scraps of human life as seen through the lens of a boy forcibly changed into a dragon. As he fell through the darkness, Lewis was left with nothing to do but relive his life.
It was a painfully short existence. Every day he woke up at 7, and his mom would call for him to get ready for school. Every day, Lewis would make a game of seeing how long he could stay in bed before she came to get him. It was never very long.
School was boringly tedious. Lewis never bothered to pay more than the barest hint of attention. Idly he wondered why his mother had never bothered to seek help for him. They knew he had ADHD. Thinking back now, though, she’d always known about their family’s magical ancestry. Maybe she’d just assumed his latent power would manifest if they tried to have him tested? Probably. His mom would have done anything to protect him.
He missed her. He missed his dad.
He missed his friends.
He called out their names, but he knew it was a fruitless effort. They weren’t in this place, and even if they were, there was no way they’d be in the darkness to catch him as he fell.
Lewis let his memories hold him like a blanket. He swaddled himself in their warmth. The loving embrace of his mother. His best friends. His home.
Would he ever see them again? Was he doomed to drift through the darkness for eternity?
Lewis couldn’t help himself. He let out a sob.
“Hello?” He croaked, calling out into the darkness. “Please, is anyone there?”
The darkness didn’t answer.
“Please, I just want to go home! I’m lost!”
Lost?
Lewis abruptly froze. He didn’t know what it was, but he could feel a pair of eyes watching him from the darkness.
Lost, little soul?
Lewis looked around frantically, but all he could see or feel was the darkness. He turned around. He was pretty sure he faced the direction he was falling and felt an eerie chill roll down his spine.
Are you lost, little soul?
“H-hello? Wh-who’s there?” Lewis called.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been falling. It felt like it might have been years, but it could have just as easily been a few minutes. Time didn’t seem real in this strange place.
Are you lost, little soul?
It wasn’t so much a voice speaking to him. Lewis could hear nothing, and yet still, he could feel those eyes on him, and he could feel their intention.
“I’m lost,” Lewis croaked again, hugging himself in the darkness. “I keep falling, and I don’t know where I am.”
He tried to look up, but he wasn’t sure where up was. Was it behind him? Was it in front of him? He wasn’t even sure which direction he was falling in anymore. At first, it had been so easy. He’d been falling down. In his desperation to find the eyes, though, he’d gotten himself turned around. Any direction could be up.
What is your sin?
“What?”
What is your sin? Why were you cast out of your nether?
“I fell!” Lewis squeaked to the darkness. “The dragons gave me a duty, but I haven’t fulfilled it yet!”
There was no sensation at all from the darkness. Lewis got the impression that whatever it was had to give his words some thought.
Failure, the darkness judged him. Doubt. Mistrust. Murder…? Guilt? Cannibalism? Destruction.
Sin. Punishment.
Lewis hugged himself tighter. “What are you?” He whispered to the darkness.
Abruptly, Lewis felt his feet touch down on solid ground. He blinked and tested his footing. For the first time in God knows how long, he could feel something but the empty darkness. He took a tentative step forward and then another. The ground felt stable enough, but he didn’t know how far it reached and whether or not he could follow it in any given direction.
I am punishment.
Lewis felt those eyes draw near and looked up. In the darkness, he could make out the vague impression of a skeletal face. No, not skeletal, a skull so large it filled Lewis’s entire field of view. Writhing shapes formed of raw darkness filled the space where its eyes should be.
The ground Lewis was standing on abruptly shifted as long shapes began to close in overhead. It took him mere seconds to recognize that he wasn’t standing on any solid ground.
He was standing on a hand.
For the first time since falling into the darkness, since leaving the island of dragons behind, Lewis didn’t feel alone.
But he desperately wished he did.
I am Tartarus.
Chapter 1
Lazyscales was hiding in the library again. These days, it felt like he was spending more and more time hiding out among the books in his collection than he was among the other dragons. He wasn’t even reading them, though. The massive tomes, constructed for dragon use, lay nestled in their shelves, unopened and gathering dust. It wasn’t that they weren’t interesting. If he really wanted to, he could find numerous books on whatever topic he wanted, and he could settle in for a quiet afternoon of reading and contemplation. Then again, would it have killed the ancient authors of the tomes to add some kind of narrative to their works? He was sick of reading treatises on the history of dragons, or biology of dragons, whatever sciences related to his kind that the Ancestors had come up with.
No, the bronze dragon had no interest in reading at that moment, not that he had the strength to muster for it. He had more important things to worry about than the contents of some book! He should have been focusing on governing the other dragons or training the newcomers who had joined them within the last week.
Instead of doing any of that, he was more concerned about nursing the massive headache tearing his skull apart. It was like thousands of tiny humans with giant hammers were sitting inside his head and pounding away on his brain! It was like every voice that ever existed was screaming in his ears. It was so bad that his stomach churned with nausea, and his vision blurred when exposed to even a fraction of light. It didn’t matter that he covered his eyes with his flying eyelids. They still watered if he so much as lit a sconce.
He sat beneath the Orrery in the middle of the library. The enormous golden sphere radiated magic and power. For a while, it had been enough to keep the headaches at bay. The thing was so heavily enchanted that simply being in its proximity had alleviated the pain and made him feel temporarily like himself again.
When the headaches had started nearly two months prior, he’d thought very little of them. They’d simply been a minor nuisance brought on whenever he’d tried to remember something from his past. All he’d had to do at the time was try very hard not to remember what his life had been like before his near-death experience, and he could exist as though nothing was wrong. Beyond that, staying sufficiently distracted was paramount. There was never a shortage of things to do on the Barrington Dragon Reserve, so Lazyscales had kept busy.
That had worked for a few weeks, at first. Still, Lazyscales’s memories never returned, and the headaches only grew in intensity.
They were coming with increased frequency now, and Lazyscales’s trips to the library to sit beneath the Orrery had grown so frequent that he didn’t dare stray too far from the mountain top. Unbeknownst to his friends and fellow dragons, he’d moved his personal belongings into the hidden cave that led to the library in a desire to be closer to the magical golden sphere. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually slept in his old cave, let alone in proximity to the other dragons.
One of the five arms that swung out from the Orrery base lazily bounced against his head, and Lazyscales moaned in agony. His temples throbbed in pain, and he steadily lowered himself to let the arm pass. Even after two months of being near the magical mechanism, he knew very little about how it worked, other than the fact that the sphere itself could be used to transport the entire library anywhere in the world.
“Ancestors, what have I done to deserve this agony?” Lazyscales mumbled, massaging his forehead in a vain attempt to banish the aching pain.
Naturally, it was no help at all.
There was a sound of claws scraping against stone, the only warning that another dragon had slipped into the cave. Two months ago, Lazyscales would have immediately been on high alert. He went out of his way to keep the location of the library secret from the other dragons. Only a small handful of them knew of its location.
A flash of white scales was all Lazyscales needed to see to know who it was.
“There you are,” came a familiar, feminine voice.
A warm body pressed up against Lazyscales’s side, and he quickly scrambled to take its talons in his own. He’d never admitted it to her, but Aurora’s presence was one of the few things that could reliably banish the pain in his head.
