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Wings of Fire: A Feast for Change
A commission for 
Venter
It was hope-crushing, that volcanic island her NightWing clan called home. It heralded only ash-smitten skies, charred lands, scarce game and sooty waters. So one night, Hopebearer spread her starry black wings then sailed into the charcoal clouds, deserting her fellow black dragons.
After some time, she reached the mainland of Pyrrhia, where she winged across the Sky Kingdom. But she could not shake her love of the sea, of being surrounded by water, even though she refused to return to the volcanic island. So when she saw the sea east of the mainland, she kept flying, and journeyed over the ocean expanse until she chanced upon an outskirting isle of the Kingdom of the Sea. It was small enough to wing across in a few minutes, and it featured steep cliffs and jungle verdure and a grotto. There she met an outcast of the SeaWings. He was a handsome dragon named Salmon, with aquamarine scales, and fins and markings white like the sea-mists; as handsome as she was beautiful, with her scales of shadow, and wings of colour the same, speckled with constellations. On a seacliff, amid crashing waves, under a full moon, they mated one night; and, with romantic ideas about the futures of their respective tribes, named their eventual offspring Changeseizer.
Perhaps a dragon named Changeseizer would hold true to his namesake—would end starvation and war, and champion the end of corruption and propaganda. Perhaps the evils of the world, like energy itself, would exist eternally and simply assume new shapes. But they shunned that idea as soon as Salmon entertained it. They had to believe in brighter tomorrows.
Well, it seemed Fate responded to their choice for their son’s name, and made him an animus: a dragon of a rare magical talent. He could enchant objects to do whatever he wished, save resurrect someone and perhaps other unfound exceptions. Their son’s … gift both worried and heartened his parents.
The full moon had meanwhile made him a mind-reader; and now and then, he would glimpse either an IceWing or a NightWing animus flash through the minds of his parents. From their thoughts, he learned that animus magic could corrupt someone who overused it. He saw them thinking about a black dragon of legend, an animus whose powers had made him mad and his moves machiavellian. These unsettling images, along with the counsel of his parents, kept him from attempting his magic after the SeaWing coconut test that confirmed him to be an animus.
Looking out to sea on a shore beside his mother, listening to her head, Changeseizer (he was still young then) said, “I’m always gonna be me. I won’t ever go insane like that, mom. I promise I won’t ever use magic if it’ll turn me into a monster.”
Hopebearer chuffed reflexively. Although she disapproved of her son reading her mind, she was used to it. “You are Changeseizer.” She nuzzled along his neck. “It’s not becoming someone different you should fear, nor is it magic: It’s the currents that sweep you away eastward when you should be going west. Or vice versa. It’s thinking you know where you’re going when you’ve lost all sense of direction … Of course I worry about how you use the magic, darling, but the fact that you have it gives me a small spark of something … I and your father … Listen: You have plenty of time to age, to wisen, to learn how to navigate the tides with the same careful precision as a cartographer. What you don’t know yet … you’ll figure out in time.”
“I’ve already figured it out, mom. I’d be a good leader for the NightWings and find them a new home. And the SeaWings, I would teach them things Coral would never teach them, so they could be less biased. I know all what to do—I just don’t know how to do it.”
There was a proud glimmer in her eye, but she replied as though there were nothing to it. “The NightWings and the SeaWings, you’ve never met them. How then would you lead them—navigate for them? Do you really know the destinations they seek? You think you know, but you’re young, yet. You only know what you think’s best for them. It takes time for a caring and an understanding of others to develop. Good change is … good for everyone, in the eyes of everyone. Am I speaking sense to you?”
“Sort of?”
“You must understand them, just as they must understand you.”
“That’s great and all, but how can I understand them if you keep me on this nameless island, never letting me meet anyone?”
“Your father’s an outcast of the SeaWing kingdom. You and I look like NightWings, so going there for us is out of the question. But when you’re older and wiser, maybe I’ll take you to the island of the NightWings. Maybe then you’ll be ready to be a leader.”
Maybe? Changeseizer scrutinized his mother’s thoughts. As young as he was, he understood her reasoning to be somewhat circular. How could he wisen to others without others around? If he could not be around others until he wisened, whenever would he be around others? She wants to protect me and prepare me, I know. But she wants both, and it’s not possible … I don’t think she completely understood the others, either. I mean, if she truly knew why they stayed on that ashen rock even though they suffered for it, well she would have stayed too. So … so sometimes people have got to want more than other people to bring change that the other people say they prefer once they’ve got it. And right now … I want more than my parents; I have to do what won’t get me any support now, but they’ll praise me and thank me later.
“Sorry, mom. Sorry, dad. You’ll be glad I did this.”
So he spoke that night, unrolling a piece of blank parchment over a mossy beach rock.
“Enchant this piece of paper to draw a compass which always points me toward the place where the most NightWings are.”
On the parchment there appeared an arrow of black ink that a four-pointed circle circumscribed. The points either had an “S,” an “N,” a “W” or an “E.” The arrow spun like a tornado, trembled to a stop and pointed behind him. Apparently that was south and slightly west.
The NightWing-SeaWing hybrid took a deep breath of the ocean air, then dived into the sky, deserting waves which softly crashed along the shore for the greater tides of the aquamarine ocean. What his mother started, he would finish.
On the black membranes of his beating widespread wings, starry skies glittered like seaspray beneath the shine of the sun. Feeling the cool marine breeze of fish and kelp beat his face, seeing two V-shaped flocks of seagulls converge around him, he grinned. His seagreen eyes gleamed with new ambition. He nosedived, streamlining his wings, then broke up from a fissure of waves made by his wake with a burst of speed toward the Pyrrhian mainland some thousands of wingbeats away.
Suns and moons brought overhead blankets of blue and black, again and again. At length, after he had crossed archipelagos and lands of muck and mountain, Change glided through the Rainforest Kingdom. It was a wonderland of vibrant colours he had had no idea could be produced. Beneath the hot sun thrived tree-climbing geckos, koalas, sloths, papayas and coconuts. Hammocks could be seen tied between the trees, and huts of bamboo below. And there were NightWings—dozens of them. Their thoughts ambushed his mind with rushes of relaxation and the satisfaction of industry. He had been expecting grief and sorrow. The contrast disoriented him like the bangs of close-exploding fireworks.
Where was the suffering? Where the oppression? Where the smoggy volcanic island?
One of the NightWings, he heard thinking, Glad that everyone’s back to normal. Queen Glory, a little less creepy and manipulative than Darkstalker. The Rainforest may be harsh with its heat, and way more noisy than the NightWing graveyard, but the RainWings are nice enough.
RainWings? Changeseizer thought, realizing he had seen one of those dragons neither in father’s mind nor his mother’s. Nice enough? So they’re not all that satisfied—just complacent. But who are the Rain—
Something pointy needled into his belly, then another in his wing, and another and another. A sudden malaise domineered his will to continue flying. Shivers of cold and hot pulled him into a deep sleep. He plunged from the sky.
Brought with the sounds of finicky squawks and shouts, a trampoline motioned over the ground, catching him in the nick of time. The trampoline staggered from side to side, and four RainWings were lugging it. Their vibrant scales changed colour manically, bouncing between an acid green and a banana yellow.
“A NightWing I’ve never seen before—COWABUNGA!” shouted one of the RainWings named Kinkajou. “Wait till Glory hears that dragons are literally cannonballing out of the sky. That’ll liven her right up. She’s been so tense since that fiasco with Darkstalker.”
Another of the four, named Mangrove, hmphed. “Flying dragons that you shoot with sleeping darts have a tendency to cannonball out of the sky. And yeah, something tells me nothing will relax Queen Glory more than finding out about a nameless NightWing with strange markings all over his body. Nope.”
With unshaken perkiness, Kinkajou yelled, “HEY! No need to be nippy. And don’t think I don’t know that was sarcasm.”
The four of them carried the dragon-carrying trampoline to the throne room of Queen Glory, dropped it on floor of tree bark then left. Later, informed by the four RainWings about the NightWing, Queen Glory paced into the room around the time that the drowsing drugs were supposed to wear off on him. Her scales were turning brown with splotches of dark green pulsating over them. She nudged his shoulder with one of her outermost wing fingers, heard a groggy groan, then strode to face the NightWing as he awoke.
“Not going to judge you,” she said with wary guardedness. “Not yet. But we just dealt with one gargantuan NightWing threat, so please please PLEAAAAAASE cut us some slack and say that you’re not here to brainwash or kill us.”
Changeseizer got up. He puffed out his chest, his feet shuffling a bit restlessly, while his scaly eyebrows caved over his eyes. He was listening to her thoughts: Looking at me like he already hates me. Oh, yay. Did you come off too harsh and potentially make another murderous enemy, Glory? Cross your talons not.
The NightWing blinked, then spoke:
“I’m not your enemy, but correct me if I’m wrong. You don’t normally shoot a dragon with darts, not unless they’re your enemy. Not that I’ve met a lot of dragons.”
“Did you just—” He didn’t just read my mind, did he?
“Yep, I’m a mind-reader.”
Suddenly, the mind of the queen spun into a whirl more of colours and feelings than of fully-articulated thoughts. She reflexively stepped away from him, feeling the muscles in her claws tighten like knots. Changeseizer clenched his jaws with annoyance.
“Are you obscuring what you’re thinking?”
“Seven kingdoms!”
“There’s only six? … Ahh. The lost kingdom of the NightWings. Well, that’s news to me.”
“I’D RATHER YOU NOT READ MY MIND. OR AT LEAST PRETEND THAT YOU CAN’T READ IT, PLEASE AND THANK YOU.” Queen Glory paced about the room briskly in circles, her scales turning the colour of shaded alligators—and even the colour of limes in some patches. She ruffled her wings a couple times then rounded on him. “Where’d you say you came from?”
“The Kingdom of the Sea? A small island. Not worth the mapmaker’s time.”
“And you are—”
“An animus?”
She blinked with quizzical amusement, then leaned back with an inkling of relief. Lemon shades started pooling over her. “You don’t slack around to soak up the sun, do you?”
“What?”
“ You cut to the chase. I like that.”
“Well, we need to understand each other so that we strive for the same change. I’m Changeseizer, by the way.”
“Changeseizer,” she said. She said it with curiosity—with a seedling of hope; and then she was considering the form of the smaller dragon for the first time truly: studying the seagreen markings which ran as bow shapes under his eyes and along his snout; which emblazoned the side of each moon-silver plate that ran the length of his underside from neck to tail; which coursed along the fronts of his shadowy arms and legs and the arms of his wings. They gave him an eccentric look to which Queen Glory related, and which she surreptitiously admired.
As though cautious to falling under some spell, she shook her head. Then setting her eyes again on the puzzling dragon, she again slackened. “Tell me, O animus.” She smiled leerily. “What change is it you intend to seize?”
A dragon like the legendary NightWing from my mother’s mind, she’s seen him. She worries, he realized. She doesn’t think I’m like him. Does she think I could be? She hasn’t ruled it out.
But her memories, the one in those memories, he’s nothing like me … This Darkstalker never cared about understanding individuals. He was … manipulative … But his charming tactics for everyone were made with his own static idea of others’ desires in mind. And whoever he didn’t fool, he just magicked into liking him. Changeseizer hated it—the dissociation of Darkstalker’s wants from others’ wants; the bankruptcy of his empathy; the laziness of his character.
“I want a world where everyone is understood,” he said finally. “A world where everyone gets each other without having to be brainwashed by magic or fascist leaders. A world where everyone fights for a cause, instead of sitting around on stranded islands, hoping …” He thought some more. “A world where dragons like NightWings are satisfied with their lives, and dragons like SeaWings aren’t constantly fed propaganda from a Queen who mandates that they all read her books, and only her books.”
As she listened, Glory nodded her head with a spreading gape of stupefaction and consolation. The shape of her eyes seemed to blink into another entirely, near the end of his reply, as though she looked at him in a frank new light. When he finished, a laugh burst from her chest; and she looked as light as a child. The sound confused him. It seemed completely inappropriate to the serious thing he’d just said.
“That’s all you want? Well, that’s a relief.”
Out of nowhere, a NightWing appeared by her side.
“Shall I spare him from my unparalleled assassination skills, your highness?”
He winked, and with a soft return of his smug dimple-quirk, Glory leaned into his cheek with hers.
“I almost feel safer around him than you,” she murmured.
Changeseizer shook his head, overwhelmed, deciding how to focus the conversation after it was so pointlessly derailed.
“What do you mean, ‘That’s all?’ Queen Whatever-Your-Name-Is, don’t you care about the welfare of the NightWings, the SeaWings and the other dragons?”
“Glory.” She clapped a paw on his shoulder, said with a soft smile, “Trust me—I’ve stressed myself out over zillions of things—you’re seeing problems where there are none. The NightWings are happy, Changeseizer. And the SeaWings—well, Queen Coral isn’t nearly as protective as she used to be. She’s more open to the influence of other tribes now. We’ve shipped the SeaWings hundreds of copy scrolls from the Jade Mountain, so it’s just not her publications that they’re reading.”
“Jade Mountain?” Of that place, Changeseizer had never heard. He wasn’t entirely convinced. “On my way here, I heard a NightWing think, ‘The RainWings are nice enough.’ ”
Glory slid her paw away, stepped back, and she and Deathbringer gave each other a look.
“What? I’m missing something,” she said.
“It means that things could be nicer, but he settled for less. And Queen Coral … hah.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re so nonchalant about her when she’s made the SeaWings a bunch of servants and information banks. The same propaganda my father spoke out against, which got him exiled from the tribe …”
Oh, Glory thought with a look of sympathy. Next to her, Deathbringer scratched the edge of his jaw with the hooked frontal claw of one of his wings. One side of his jaws was exposed and clenched grimly. Glory thought, I don’t know his story. What I do know is that I need to calm him down. Who knows what kind of animus fit he might—
She looked up straight at Changeseizer, and her mind turned into a whirlpool of colourful static.
“I get it,” he said. “You’d rather there not be any problems. You’d rather look the other way.”
“Change, that is NOT what I said. Not that I said anything at all.”
“You’re like my parents in a way.” Changeseizer suppressed a laugh of pity, turning it to a snort. “The NightWings, the RainWings, from what few glimpses I’ve had of their minds—wow …” He chuckled indignantly. “Everyone is asleep. Stagnant. And you’re their leader.”
“Keep insulting the queen,” said Deathbringer scathingly. “I have several throwing weapons that could slit your throat. Not that I’d use them, your highness.”
“Death, Change, come on,” said Glory with exasperation. “We were getting along so handsomely just a second ago. Let’s take just a second to breathe. Deep breaths.”
“You still haven’t addressed what I said about my dad,” said Changeseizer with venomous smoothness. “Maybe you’ve forgotten about it already? Nice. Meanwhile, your servant over here is threatening to kill me for expressing myself. Suppression of free speech via death. Awesome.”
Glory tried politely not to scoff, but failed. “You’re joking.”
“You think I’m overreacting. I’m just making parallels, Glory.”
“And I just want you to calm down so that I have a minute to think: to address all that you’ve said and keep saying. PREFERABLY without you peeking into my head.”
“Alright”—I don’t see why, but—“sorry.”
The fact that the RainWing leader didn’t see any problems where Changeseizer saw many: That disturbed him. In some ways, the NightWing-RainWing domain and cohabitation resembled his mother’s visions of a comfortable, peaceful paradise. In some ways. They stopped believing, and so they stopped imagining better, echoed his mother’s words. Change thought, I know that there’s both good and bad here. Just which is which is hard to digest … And the fact that they already had Glory as their leader was equally hard to swallow.
But he was an animus. He could make it easier—the digesting and the swallowing—couldn’t he? Perhaps not by brainwashing. No, the mere thought was unpalatable to him. But perhaps he could magick up some object or phenomena that would help him and Glory understand each other better … that would join their minds and bodily sensations, even.
Digesting … swallowing … joining.
“Wait—Glory, I just thought of something!”
At the prideful sound, Glory lifted her head. Her scales burned shades of magma. “I assumed you said sorry because you kept talking. Then you keep on talking. Are you indecisive, irreparably unhinged, or did I misunderstand you altogether?”
“I may make use of you yet,” Deathbringer told a shuriken attached to his wrist.
Change said, “I just thought of something that could benefit the dragons of every tribe forever.”
“Great,” Glory exclaimed, “and I have a magical papaya that ends world hunger!”
She’s thinks … she doubts the possibility already. “My idea involves me eating you so that we can fuse together and share each other’s thoughts and senses. Then, we un-fuse, and we come apart knowing each other’s minds and physical feelings with no misunderstanding.”
Glory thought about that. “I hate to break it to you, but Qibli’s already thought of a much less roundabout way of cultivating empathy with animus magic, and it’s been proven to work. Your magic, on the other paw—we’ve never even seen you use it.”
“Who? Glory, you haven’t even given me a chance. You give up too easily. Lazy RainWing …”
“I’m not giving up. I’m RATIONALIZING. Deathbringer, say something to this blasted soliloquizer.”
“How am I a—”
“I say why not?” Deathbringer said. “If he’s tricking you, I give him a bloody coup de grace, and if not, we all live happily ever after and celebrate with pineapples and sun-time. Come to think (he’s an animus, after all) … why don’t we just make him enchant something to kill himself if he’s lying about what he wants to do?”
Glory looked up. “Change? Will you do that for us?”
“Go kill myself? Gee, thought you were starting to like me.”
Glory began to laugh wryly, but Change had anticipated her not entertaining his humor, and interrupted.
“KIDDING. Okay, hand me something. Yeah, the banana, sure fine. Okay, enchant this banana to fly at me like a boomerang of death if I’m lying about why I want to eat Glory or am trying to manipulate her in any way.”
“And me,” Deathbringer suggested.
“And Glory’s murderous servant.”
“Mate,” Glory emphasized.
“Deathbringer,” her mate chimed.
Change made the correction.
To everyone except Deathbringer’s joy, the banana failed to attack Change like a boomerang of death. And so ends the story of how the strange NightWing who cannonballed out of the sky managed to convince Queen Glory of the RainWings to let him swallow her whole just minutes after meeting him. So begins the story of Change swallowing Glory whole, which sounds like an inappropriate story, but it’s pretty tame.
“Enchant my digestive system to be able to swallow dragons, no matter how big they are.”
Glory suddenly looked susceptible. She was having second thoughts. “This isn’t going to hurt, is it?”
“Also enchant it to harmlessly digest dragons. And to absorb digested dragons into my body, so that they fuse with me and we understand each other’s thoughts and combine each other’s senses.”
As soon as Change finished speaking, an unquenchable force threw Glory and Deathbringer onto their sides. Changeseizer’s belly had just … rumbled. The rumble had been powerful enough to quake the whole room, to knock over tables and potted plants and the throne itself.
“Hoah. I’m really, REALLY hungry all of a sudden.”
A thick, sloppy, slimy sound resounded as his tongue lashed across his drooling lips. A gravelly exhale rolled from him. It sounded so hungry and self-gratifying, especially paired with the grin that stretched back his now-slathering jowls.
Change could not help but look at his gurgling, lithe gut. It was fluctuating fervidly and begging for food, like a fishing net full of starved sea lions.
“I feel like I could eat a whole dolphin sandwich. But then again, my enchantment only applies to dragons, so maybe not. But I could for sure eat a whole dragon, or two or three.”
The same way Change couldn’t quit commending his own hunger, Glory couldn’t stop wincing at the sheer might of the guttural tremors his starving gut kept sending across the floor. They kept her and Deathbringer in perpetual totters and states of seasickness.
Then Change pounced on her. And Deathbringer—seeing another male pin Glory to the floor so suddenly and incite such a shaken look on her face—had to fight back the protective urge to spring at him like a tardy shadow. The urge intensified as the smaller dragon yawned his jaws and cast a hot rain of spittle over her snout. She measured about a third taller and longer than the freshly-magicked cannibal.
Glory gulped, feeling his hungry shadow hanging over her. “I’m putting TREMENDOUS trust in you. Don’t get all suicidal on me.”
“Suicidal?” Change grinned. “I’m finally living. We’re finally making progress.”
He lashed his neck forward, clamping his jaws down on her snout. He began to suckle its spiked end toward the back of his gullet, sampling the tropical flavor of her chin with slick, sticky glides of his thick tongue. She tasted like guava. Guava and passionfruit. Not that he had tasted either before, but he delighted in the sugary, tart, sour flavor. No coconut, anchovy or crab he had ever eaten could compare. Nor could they stuff his jaws so satiably, or force him to breathe shallowly out of his nostrils.
He gulped hard. His salivary glands gushed and lubricated his magicked esophagus, which used its lathered muscles to clench on her horned head and tug it farther down the meander of his cannibalistic tract. His silver-plated esophagus swelled larger to a steady string of craw squelches and wobbles. Within the clammy walls, Glory peeled her lips back and gave a groan of disgust.
“It smells like old seafood in here,” she complained, but Change couldn’t reply, not with his mouth full of her.
The fleshy chute enveloped her nostrils in the hot reek of acid and decay that awaited farther below. All the while, it slicked her ears and her head fins to her skull and buffeted her eardrums with the crass, moist squelches of her body being muscled lower.
Change released her shoulders from the grip of his forepaws, then planted his feet alongside her sides so that he could more easily swallow her. While spreading his neck plates with each throat-expanding gulp, he started backward in a zigzagging amble, letting the grip of his jaws lift the RainWing off her backside and right her so that her reflexively-kicking, citrine-soled hind feet slumped right-side-up along the floor.
Until they didn’t. Until Change swallowed her barbed, super-long neck in its entirety, turning his own into a bloated, bumbling sausage of scales. Until he worked his jaws over her shoulders and reached out to grab the hook-shaped frontal claws of her wings to clamp the anterior of the bright tangerine membranes to her sides. At that point her lizard-lanky body was being lifted up and swung alongside his bulging craw and forechest. He reached and stuffed her forepaws into his greedy mouth.
“Can’t believe I agreed to this,” groaned Glory as contracting lips of flesh puckered around the tip of her snout and, with a vulgar SQUELCH, pushed her head into a stomach full of sleek, wriggling flesh walls and pungent acidic smog. The stomach was pooled with acids of the pale gold of a jaguar’s belly fur. The stench crinkled the edges of her eyes, and they almost rolled into the back of her head. “Blegh—I wasn’t even persuaded by magic to do this.”
Change comprehended the jist of her gurgle-obscured words, sniggering. He glimpsed at Deathbringer in his periphery and the NightWing’s mouth, which was a gape of shock and admonishment. The way Death’s eyes kept yo-yoing over Change’s dragon-encumbered stomach as it enlarged, made progress on its scaly sculpture of Glory and pressed to the floor: It would have gotten a proper laugh from Change, would that his mouth weren’t full. He nearly choked on the thick haunches of Glory as his attempted laughter made her thick, pinkish-now hindquarters buck and bounce between his tongue and palate. The goofy, muffled guffaw only made him laugh harder with his maw full; and the sporadic jerks of his gullet from that helped pump her rump deeper into his digestive tract. Before he knew it, her tail was shooting down his throat from a reflexive slurp of his lips, and the suddenness of it had him pedalling backward, until his belly swelled too big for him to do so and beached him, just in time for the curly end of her tail to shoot between his teeth wetly.
That had quite the kickback.
Once her tail shot down the predatory slide, Queen Glory was completely sacked inside of the tight paunch. All the space she took up quelled its mighty rumbles by leaving no space for his walls and acids to motion. The stomach enzymes sloshed over her body entire, submerging her face.
He belched a hulking, metallic belch. “Hey Glory, tell me how you feel. Anything hurt? Kick once for yes, twice for no … thrice for more options.”
Twice, she kicked.
“Did you see that?” Change asked Deathbringer, who had refused to let go of the shuriken on his wrist for a full minute.
Regrettingly, Death let go of it. “Glory, give two kicks again if you need me. Please?”
Glory wasn’t separate from Changeseizer long enough to do so. The NightWing felt a breathtaking contraction of his belly, which collapsed the bloated sac of scrunched-up wing and limb shapes into itself and sucked an eighth of the gravid middle’s girth away. Then, another eighth. Another, and another.
He groaned decadently. As his gut began metabolising, shrinking and diminishing its Glory shape, the tropical warmth of the rainforest around him became less harsh, and more pleasant and succulent. Sunshine became his companion, and poured through his body; and then all of her washed over his mind and his senses, all the senses and sweet thoughts and history that belonged to Glory.
You’re like me, he thought. You always felt like you were a leader. And you are one. And I see now, it’s not that you don’t try to fix things; it’s that you’re wary because fixing can sometimes really be breaking.
And … and you’re strong, she thought. I mean, mentally strong. Like you can’t be shaken. And you don’t stop fighting for what’s good, not even when everyone around you says everything is.
Heh, that’s me.
Change … our breaths, tongues, claws, ears and eyes—everything is coming more and more intense to them. I almost feel like I wouldn’t want this to be temporary, but permanent … And yet, so soon … I know you wouldn’t trick me, but shouldn’t I worry that I want it so soon?
Stop wanting! Stop wishing! Make it so! Make us one!
Change … I trust you!
Then why resist? Merge with me! We’ll be stronger on every front. Together, we’ll make the goodest change!
Alright—yes! We’ll both be good—strong—together!
It was for both of them a baptism of ecstasy. Their perfect union, their perfect drug, felt so good that neither wished to separate, not ever. But there can only be one captain of a vessel.
Because his influence was so strong, so inescapable, she let her consciousness slip into his joyously, willingly surrendered her claim to captainship and swore herself to his cause. Her consciousness receded into the background of his just as her skills, physical traits, size and power started pulsating through him.
With one last gurgle, his stomach erased the last traces of his prey. Glory became one with Change. Her essence coursed through his skull, and beneath his black ears, RainWing head membranes of sprouted: They were black instead of orange. A euphoric growl broke free from his jaws, both of which elongated to sounds of bones crunching and sinew hyperextending and proliferating. And a silver RainWing barb budded, spearing up from the tip of his snout.
His pleasure doubled in intensity. An aura flared across his scales, matching the colour of them. The scales had turned pink with patches of gold, representing his mood just like Glory’s had done. The hues of his body strobed to show the nuances of his joy as he absorbed her. He grew from her mass, until he became a whole half-a-height taller than Deathbringer, who had been about the same size as Glory, which was pretty tall, considering Glory had been a third taller than Change was originally.
The expansion of Change’s body startled Deathbringer, especially since during it, the animus melded the bodies of RainWing and NightWing. His transformation subtly extended his neck, and also molded the shape of it, along with the shapes of his head, wings, claws, tail and main body to make him more lean, lengthy and curvy.
Deathbringer’s wings were widespread, now. It seemed that he was ready to take off and plunge his fangs into Changeseizer any minute now, if only he could do so without harming his mate.
“Glory? Throw me a bone. I just want to hear your voice. A little assurance that you’re okay would be lovely.”
“Would you stop worrying about me?”
The voice came from Change. It was mostly Change’s voice, the one which tantalizes the ear with a pleasantly deep tone. But the voice carried something new: a slight feminine croon, a hint of Glory woven into its lush fabric. Deathbringer saw Change flutter his eyes at him, like Glory would, but it only appeased Death for a heartbeat. He recoiled with apprehension. It looked like he just had an extremely tart aftertaste of some foreign fruit.
“I don’t know whether I’m assured or creeped out. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll be at ease until the two of you unfuse. So, if you could hurry up and understand each other then be done with it, I’d greatly appreciate that.”
Changeseizer could read even Deathbringer’s subconscious thoughts now, because Glory had strengthened his mind-reading. When he did, he chuckled.
“Ohh. I see. If it were anyone but Glory, you’d be enthused by our merging, even if you found out I and someone else decided to be one permanently. But it’s Glory, and the idea of her being part of a male is unattractive to you. We get it. We love ya, but it’s our body, our choice. Gotta respect it, y’know?”
Deathbringer frowned. “Sometimes, you say ‘I’; other times, you say ‘we,’ so is she really equal with you? I’m not completely convinced you’re both Change and Glory at once: Nor am I convinced that she’d merge with some random guy she’s known for a half-hour. I should know—I’ve known her for years.”
“Death, people can go without being the best version of themselves for years. That doesn’t mean it won’t suddenly click someday. Today, it clicked for Glory and I. Look—I enchant my body to kill me and make Glory an individual dragon again if she’s unwilling to spend the rest of her days as part of me.”
Definitely suicidal, or extremely confident in himself, Death thought. “I’m sure you believe that,” he said. “But people are determined by their track records, not just by the choices they make on a whim. Maybe Glory made the choice all by herself, but the Glory of today’s just a little bit of Glory, and what really matters is all the years of Glory that have already been Gloried. You’re young still. You just don’t get the full importance of time yet.”
Change looked offended. “Time is super important to me, dude. Not a day goes by without me thinking about it. That being said, I want to learn why it’s so important to you—Glory and I. Just merge with us: Then, we’ll have all the strength, understanding and wisdom of three dragons! Cool beans, right?”
“You don’t sound like Glory. You sound like Change with Glory along for the ride.”
“And you sound like a complainer with no real solutions.” A sigh. “Deathbringer, we’re just gonna swallow you and absorb you, okay? Then you’ll realize you were being stubborn and be all like, ‘Dang, I feel really great now and feel like I’m part of something greater.’ ”
“Gotta catch me first, two-face.”
Deathbringer dashed out of the throne room. He stamped hurriedly down a beaten path, trying to figure out how he could undo Change’s magic. There were those earrings that made dragons immune to magic, but they only applied to Darkstalker’s magic. Argh—are there no other animuses?
No animuses magically appeared, but dragons did: Farther down the meander, Death bumped right into a MudWing who was accompanied by an IceWing. When he regained composure, he realized it was his friends Clay and Winter; both of them were scheduled for a meeting with the queen.
“Oh … Deathbringer, I’m sorry,” Clay apologized. “Is Glory here?”
Winter took a deep breath, said, “Glory is not gonna believe how intelligent scavengers are.”
Death opened his mouth, then an explosion of sound erupted: not from his mouth, but from the front of the throne room, which now sported a huge hole splintered around the edges. Seemingly nothing had created this hole. That was until Change materialized from thin air.
“That’s me, Glory. I can do camouflage now, see?” He disappeared and reappeared again and again, blinking across the incline with thundering giddy jumps.
Winter canted his chin up and stared intensely. “Deathbringer, what that NightWing-RainWing just said makes no sense and is SPLITTING my head. Ouch, brainfreeze—okay WHO IS THIS?”
Death answered, “Changeseizer, another animus. Yippee.”
“Woah.” Clay turned to Change. “If that’s really true, then how did you hide from Darkstalker? I thought he teleported all the animus dragons in Pyrrhia to himself, but no one mentioned another NightWing being there.”
“Guess I’m not Pyrrhian?” Change shrugged. “The mapmakers never bothered with the island on which I was born. I have several questions to ask you related to that subject alone, but getting the answers’ll be way more fun if we just absorb you—and you and you. Shall we begin?”
Clay looked innocently bewildered.
Winter blurted, “What?”
“Our bodies, our choices, remember?” Death mocked him. “You can’t absorb us if we don’t agree to it.”
“I bet you you are gonna agree to it. You don’t even know what you’re agreeing to yet. When you’re part of us, you can decide if you want it to be permanent.”
“You can’t eat us all with only one mouth,” Deathbringer challenged.
“Ohh? It’s a shame I only have one mouth, then. Why don’t I enchant another mouth to form from my … erm … tail?!”
Changeseizer clenched his teeth. He growled and concentrated, lashing his tail. Suddenly, a huge bulge of magic pulsed out of the base of his tail and shot to the tip, transforming the tip of the tail into a bulbous maw, which voraciously yawned scaly, zigzagging teeth over its chunky tongue.
The length of the tail in the wake of the bulge didn’t deflate to its former size, either: The whole thing stayed thick like it had been when the bulge shot through it. And the base of the tail thickened exceedingly to support it all. Then, the scales of the bulb of the maw started changing colours like a RainWing’s, while the rest of Change’s scales stayed black.
The tail—which (when he and Glory merged) had lengthened to be about twice as long as he was from the rear to the tip of the nose—snaked to his lips and nuzzled them. He purred and nosed them back.
“What do you say, Glory? You swallow your mate and the MudWing; I take Icicle-Head here?”
Deathbringer didn’t have time to react. The tail maw yawned a white-hot fog of tropical-smelling breath over his face. The maw showed him two halves of a puffy, ovular interior of thickly lubricated maw flesh. The oval-shape imploded, then the maw snarfed up both the head and neck of Deathbringer at once, emphasizing the shape of the NightWing’s skull and nape. Death struggled and murmured chaotically. The tail lurched upright, lifting its prey aloft with the dexterity of a snake, but the bulbous jawed head brought to mind a great carnivorous plant, for it was eyeless and its prey as trapped as a bug caught in a venus flytrap.
“Deathbringer!”
Clay sprung forward. He tried to pry the jowls of the tail back to free him. The tail crooned, for the MudWing only helped it spread its jaws over the forepaws and legs of its NightWing prey.
“Glory, if you’re truly there, please listen: You’re hurting Deathbringer!”
Change moaned, “M-mmh, that’s your opinion, even if we’re both enjoying this tremendously and so will Death once he’s assimilated, h-heh.”
He heard and felt a freezing huff—swiveled his neck forward to see a spear of frost breath hurtling from Winter’s jaws. But he had amazing reflexes from assimilating Glory. He belched firebreath, and doused the measly stream of frost with a flame-stream that was one-and-a-half times thicker. The dragonbreath powered toward Winter, forcing the IceWing to catch his breath and dodge the sweeping inferno.
“Heh, cute huff, Icicle-Head, but our breath’s stronger. Everything’s stronger when dragons come together! Burrrruhgh, burroooahp!” Change belched out another two great streams of inferno to punctuate his point.
Flames devoured vibrant grass and clung to the stalks of palm trees.
If Winter had fended for himself or fled, Change would have extinguished the fires with his animus magic, but Winter had no way of knowing that. The IceWing thought of all the innocent RainWings and NightWings who could perish, of all the rainforest that could be reduced to ash.
Change melted from his mind.
He burst aflight.
Then, frost breath was harpooning out of his mouth, sundering the flames before vaporizing them completely. The last fiery flicker smoked out when a crispy cold glazed the stalks of grass and palms. A look of relief set on his face. But then, Change bounded up and chomped down on the IceWing’s icicled tail-tip.
From Winter and Clay both, there came a different cry of pain: from Winter a YOWCH! because the bite of a dragon half a size bigger than him sent a buzz of stinging hurt up his tail bone; and from Clay a squeak of distress, because he was clinging to Deathbringer’s haunches, not wanting to let him go; but the tail maw was loudly snarfing them up, which meant Clay was next on his shaky, unwilling ascent into the air.
Changeseizer moaned with a mouthful of minty IceWing. Strafed with the zesty flavors of a triad of cuisines, he accidentally zipped down with weight on his left flank, and upset the coconuted tree tops with the wing-fingers on that side. The airbound stumble prompted him to better rein his wingbeats. He did, then rising higher, steered into the clearing so that nothing else could distract him from engorging both of his maws with the filling, satiating dragon meat.
His tail maw had almost completely swallowed his NightWing prey. The jaws of his Glory-controlled tail maw leisurely suckled down the base of Death’s tail. The NightWing bulge made thick wrinkles and folds over the bottom half of the tail. Although anchored down, the tail miraculously still muscled itself into a crook-shape, gulping with great shivers of strain and pleasure. Shifting the dysmorphic blankets of hyperextended, rose-glowing scales, shapes of forepaws and wing-fingers and jaws broke through and molded protrusions, eliciting loud squelches and slippery tugging noises from the tail’s internal walls. The strong fleshy muscles pumped Death’s head into the upper half of the tail’s gastrointestinal system, while the tail happily toiled its jowls with Clay’s burly neck, trafficking the MudWing right behind Death’s rump.
Both Change’s throat and tail swelled and quivered with ridiculously huge bulges. Combined, his prey weighed more than double he did, but that didn’t discourage him. It only goaded him to pull them deeper inside his bellies. One thought kept him gulping from both ends: Soon, he’d be evolving from three dragons at once! What sort of amazing, intelligent, unbeatable creature would the five of them make? He had to know.
The tail-bulge of Deathbringer buckled, then halted when it nestled below the constricting sheets of flesh in the upper half of Change’s tail. Clay’s obsession with food was giving the Glory tail maw a nice, filling second lunch. The scaly lips of the tail maw stretched more and more around his thickset shoulders. Clay’s earthy, meaty turmeric taste enthralled the maw’s taste buds. After swallowing the more chocolatey Death, Glory felt like Clay was a nutritious dinner that made up for an early dessert. The tail maw gulped and gulped, and its bulbous shape burgeoned with the beginnings of Clay’s forechest and wing limbs. It ate with efficiency, smoothed the MudWing’s wings into a “V”-shape then conjured the ghost of gluttony to wriggle its jaws over Clay’s rump within the same half of a minute.
On the upper end, Change had already swelled his silver-plated neck into a gravid, round mass he couldn’t hope to wrap his forepaws around. The esophageal IceWing sculpture tousled his craw with a stockpile of dragon traits. The moist squelches Winter made going down sounded like the breathy complaints of a morbidly obese seal.
The tail maw had way too much traction on Clay; the MudWing’s pesky tail-whipping did little to keep him from being completely eaten. With a slurp that had kickback, the tail sent Clay’s tail whizzing through its lips. The giant shape of the MudWing was bussed fully into the tail’s main length, backending its NightWing prey and forcing a loud BURGLE through the tail.
“BWOUUHWRRRRHHGH-K!”
The purge of air from her lips gave Glory extraordinary relief, and the sense of ease and accomplishment rubbed off on Changeseizer. Oddly enough, he felt stuffed in a distant sort of way: too full to eat a third dragon, but too starved not to eat one at the same time. The duality of satiation and hunger seemed right to him. He almost didn’t want to pass the squirmy IceWing through the peristaltic ring to his stomach. On the other paw, his throat was getting pretty sore, and so was his chin, which was being pushed up by the blimp of Winter bulge even more as the last of Winter’s wailing snout slipped behind his jowls. With labor, he clenched his jaws closed. He savored the savory burden of absolute fullness, took a snapshot of it in his mind then took one last gulp.
It was a worrisome gulp. His throat flexed with the full strength of two, but Winter’s bulge only slid down a little, then idled. Change started to gag, and that reflex was the catalyst; his sphincter thrust open with all the welcoming of a caffeinated neighbour, and then thousands of pounds just slumped into the pit of his paunch.
His belly not only barged through his paws and pushed them apart; it swooped below them. The sudden relocation of weight shoved him toward the earth; but Change would never let anything pull him where he wasn’t trying to go, even if it would reprieve his burden of flapping. He caught himself in his descent, and ascended again, pounding his wings with fatigue as his belly and bloated tail began thundering with calls of digestion. He consigned to gurgling all three of them away without ever touching the ground. He could do it!
Both he and his Glory tail maw groaned; the IceWing, the NightWing and the MudWing all softened and weakened to the great churns and sloshes of the stomachs’ metabolisms. The first of them to be gurgled away into mulch then transformed into part of Changeseizer was Deathbringer.
When the NightWing prey infused the animus, Change felt the mass that fled his tail-belly surge into his skull, right between his horns and ears. A pressure built up. It pushed his horns upward, making room for two similar ivory protrusions to push out: smaller horns. They grew in hammer pulses, and so did his original ones, until a quartet of curvy dragon horns crowned his head.
His talons, wings and tail elongated. The wings beat with such a span, they clipped the surrounding palms with their wing-tips before beating them back with gallivanting gusts. With their new size, they abundantly thieved the apparent hugeness of his main body, and they could enfold several dragons in their membranes. His tail, likewise, stretched and broadened to span thrice the length of his body from his derriere to the dip-of-his-nose.
All his NightWing features matured, toughened and bulked up. The RainWing-NightWing barbs of his nape and tail sharpened and grew, so that he seemed to age into an elder dragon before the very eyes of the up-looking RainWing and NightWing villagers. The growth of these specific features was accompanied by a swelling of his whole body. He expanded and became two-and-a-half times taller than he originally was.
An exultant roar burst free from his enlarged jaws. He still had so much growing and transforming to do!
He absorbed the sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing of Death to enhance his own. His senses achieved a dreamy lucidness. The lucidity and clarity of his feelings continued to mushroom in intensity, especially since the addition of Deathbringer to his body sped up the metabolic process of his belly and his tail-belly.
The evolving enzymes of the latter gurgled louder, reducing Clay’s body to a consistency that fit his namesake. The bulge of the lower tail faded while the lower tail shook in orgasmic fits. Its internal walls sponged up what remained of the fuel-converted MudWing to vampirically empower and morph the animus.
Winter winced, for he could hear Clay’s muffled cries being silenced by squelches and gurgles of rising loudness nextdoor. And when both the sounds of the dragon and the gut quietened, a quaver of Change’s insides followed them, as well as a crude buwaaarhp that made the belly walls clench tight on the IceWing, even though the belch came from the tail maw. Forced to curl up more, Winter frustratedly chuffed. The residual stench of the burp filled his own gurgly, acid-filled prison. Just in case that wasn’t taunting enough, the animus’ stomach walls were soon groaning around him in expansion. He could hear Change groaning, likewise.
The animus’ skeleton cracked and contorted like the shell of a nymph metamorphosing into a dragonfly. Clay was used just like the stuff of his namesake, a building material. His protein-rich body padded Change’s body with yet another layer of thick hide and musculature, beefing up every sturdy limb and appendage. Change moaned with a prehistorically deeper and grander voice, feeling his evolution come in euphoric throbs to reinforce his strength.
His tail and horns and paws and jaws grew unbridledly. His senses evolved again from Clay’s looted contribution, and they didn’t finish doing so before Changeseizer felt his stomach whomp his body with even more dragon genes to absorb. His stomach sucked in as his belly walls smushed the IceWing into a nutritious batter, melting Winter away like the coming of spring.
The digested MudWing and IceWing tag-teamed Change’s body, attacking him with a heavenly transformation.
He moaned with a voice as huge as he was.
“We’re g-gonna change so much—ngh!”
Greatly arousing aches preceded growls of astonishment. His snout enlarged and turned even more ferocious in shape. His RainWing-NightWing barbs of the nape and tail elongated devilishly, turning frosty before mutating into full-fledged icicles.
His next mutation affected his claws, making the dangerous daggers seem previously blunted and fragile; they sharpened and hardened and curled and gleamed, becoming dreadful sickles of ice.
Not even his tail maw was spared from a chilling change; a cold fog swept across his body and froze splintering ice-needles across the tail maw’s head and chin, pointing them toward the tail maw’s future next meal.
Three last thumps of growth surged through Changeseizer, and the animus grew to three times his original height. Now the monstrously huge dragon would loom several storeys over scavengers, and the heads of most dragons would only come to his belly.
Even though he finished transforming, inside of him, he was dealing with the consciousnesses of Death, Clay and Winter.
Deathbringer awoke, floating in a void.
GLORY!
He called her name again, his voice echoing into the infinite. Then claws touched his shoulder, and he had no need to look to his side to see whose they were. The touch was unmistakably hers, firm yet tender. Her presence was a warmth that no dragon nor rainforest could emulate.
I told you to stop being so high-strung.
She slurped his cheek. Her affection washed over him as a warm wave of assurance, but he couldn’t help but bristle once the wave receded with the tides. Me, high-strung? I’m supposed to be the one calming your nerves … Something’s different about you, Glory.
There’s nothing wrong with ‘different,’ is there? The look on his face said he reluctantly agreed. He’s not holding us against our will, Death … Any one of us could separate from him if we really wanted.
Then … you’ve considered it?
She just laughed. That was her way of dismissing the idea.
She held his paw in hers, lowered her nose a little. Her glimmering eyes looked into his with longing. Come with me, Deathbringer. Come be with us. The feeling of being one is incredible, and it’d mean the world to me to share it with you.
Glory …
Confounded, Deathbringer looked around the void. Across from him and Glory, Changeseizer stood as his small, untransformed self in front of Winter and Clay. The IceWing and the MudWing looked as flustered as Death had been.
But Changeseizer was smiling gently. Words were leaving his lips, incomprehensible. Somehow, Death knew the words to be consoling.
When he finished talking, Change held out a paw to them. It was shaky, but not at all because he was timid. He was just a dragon trying so very hard to humble his judgment. His eyes were ablaze, full of strength, aye, but letting patience trickle in.
Death wondered if he were imagining it; if something had changed about Changeseizer, or if he was simply seeing Change in a different light. He’s the opposite of Darkstalker … What he has—when we stop calling it manipulation and start calling it influence—that’s what he has. At what point can someone confidently ascribe either “manipulative” or “influential” to a dragon?
The point where intent is made clearest and is goodest, he decided.
He wasn’t sure, but he was resolute about the answer.
When he looked again, Clay had taken Death’s paw, and Winter the opposite one; and Change clenched their hands savoringly. His chest swelled, fluttered fast.
He reeled both dragons into his body—first Clay, then Winter: The mental avatar of Change absorbed their traits just as his flesh-and-blood body had absorbed them—but Glory’s and Death’s features were absent.
Mind and body had become almost fully synced. The pleasure that Changeseizer felt echoed through the void. It washed over Death and Glory, baptising them with that same pleasure.
Then, everyone was happy—even Death. Especially his mate.
With a giggle Glory ran to Change. She flicked one last glance at Death, as if to say Come on, then dove head-first into the animus’ belly. The merging of their mental avatars was instant. The power of Changeseizer’s presence mushroomed, and its energy blanketed Death deliciously. Without reservation, he felt his feet start to pound—to take him toward his lover, toward the great collective consciousness.
Then he dove into Change, and all of them were perfectly one.
“That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?”
Change was back in the physical world, speaking in the flesh-and-blood. Hints of Death, Glory, Clay and Winter coloured his voice. It was huge, grandly imposing.
“My friends … now that we are one, in tune with the best of each other, we can be the strongest, wisest dragon for ourselves and our tribes. Nothing will stop us from making the goodest difference in the world!”
Triumphantly, he started down the slope. He passed between a tropical thicket, then came to a clearing where RainWings and NightWings had gathered. They had seen him devour the other dragons and transform; and when he halted and stood before them, they looked child-like in size compared with him. His presence was powerful, his stature unlike anyone else’s. They awed, speechless, then one by one bowed their heads reverently.
Even with all those dragons around him, Changeseizer said one last monologue to himself—to Glory, Deathbringer, Clay and Winter—doing so with a smirk:
“And, perhaps, before we can make the goodest difference, we’ll need another great feast.”
VenterWings of Fire: A Feast for ChangeIt was hope-crushing, that volcanic island her NightWing clan called home. It heralded only ash-smitten skies, charred lands, scarce game and sooty waters. So one night, Hopebearer spread her starry black wings then sailed into the charcoal clouds, deserting her fellow black dragons.
After some time, she reached the mainland of Pyrrhia, where she winged across the Sky Kingdom. But she could not shake her love of the sea, of being surrounded by water, even though she refused to return to the volcanic island. So when she saw the sea east of the mainland, she kept flying, and journeyed over the ocean expanse until she chanced upon an outskirting isle of the Kingdom of the Sea. It was small enough to wing across in a few minutes, and it featured steep cliffs and jungle verdure and a grotto. There she met an outcast of the SeaWings. He was a handsome dragon named Salmon, with aquamarine scales, and fins and markings white like the sea-mists; as handsome as she was beautiful, with her scales of shadow, and wings of colour the same, speckled with constellations. On a seacliff, amid crashing waves, under a full moon, they mated one night; and, with romantic ideas about the futures of their respective tribes, named their eventual offspring Changeseizer.
Perhaps a dragon named Changeseizer would hold true to his namesake—would end starvation and war, and champion the end of corruption and propaganda. Perhaps the evils of the world, like energy itself, would exist eternally and simply assume new shapes. But they shunned that idea as soon as Salmon entertained it. They had to believe in brighter tomorrows.
Well, it seemed Fate responded to their choice for their son’s name, and made him an animus: a dragon of a rare magical talent. He could enchant objects to do whatever he wished, save resurrect someone and perhaps other unfound exceptions. Their son’s … gift both worried and heartened his parents.
The full moon had meanwhile made him a mind-reader; and now and then, he would glimpse either an IceWing or a NightWing animus flash through the minds of his parents. From their thoughts, he learned that animus magic could corrupt someone who overused it. He saw them thinking about a black dragon of legend, an animus whose powers had made him mad and his moves machiavellian. These unsettling images, along with the counsel of his parents, kept him from attempting his magic after the SeaWing coconut test that confirmed him to be an animus.
Looking out to sea on a shore beside his mother, listening to her head, Changeseizer (he was still young then) said, “I’m always gonna be me. I won’t ever go insane like that, mom. I promise I won’t ever use magic if it’ll turn me into a monster.”
Hopebearer chuffed reflexively. Although she disapproved of her son reading her mind, she was used to it. “You are Changeseizer.” She nuzzled along his neck. “It’s not becoming someone different you should fear, nor is it magic: It’s the currents that sweep you away eastward when you should be going west. Or vice versa. It’s thinking you know where you’re going when you’ve lost all sense of direction … Of course I worry about how you use the magic, darling, but the fact that you have it gives me a small spark of something … I and your father … Listen: You have plenty of time to age, to wisen, to learn how to navigate the tides with the same careful precision as a cartographer. What you don’t know yet … you’ll figure out in time.”
“I’ve already figured it out, mom. I’d be a good leader for the NightWings and find them a new home. And the SeaWings, I would teach them things Coral would never teach them, so they could be less biased. I know all what to do—I just don’t know how to do it.”
There was a proud glimmer in her eye, but she replied as though there were nothing to it. “The NightWings and the SeaWings, you’ve never met them. How then would you lead them—navigate for them? Do you really know the destinations they seek? You think you know, but you’re young, yet. You only know what you think’s best for them. It takes time for a caring and an understanding of others to develop. Good change is … good for everyone, in the eyes of everyone. Am I speaking sense to you?”
“Sort of?”
“You must understand them, just as they must understand you.”
“That’s great and all, but how can I understand them if you keep me on this nameless island, never letting me meet anyone?”
“Your father’s an outcast of the SeaWing kingdom. You and I look like NightWings, so going there for us is out of the question. But when you’re older and wiser, maybe I’ll take you to the island of the NightWings. Maybe then you’ll be ready to be a leader.”
Maybe? Changeseizer scrutinized his mother’s thoughts. As young as he was, he understood her reasoning to be somewhat circular. How could he wisen to others without others around? If he could not be around others until he wisened, whenever would he be around others? She wants to protect me and prepare me, I know. But she wants both, and it’s not possible … I don’t think she completely understood the others, either. I mean, if she truly knew why they stayed on that ashen rock even though they suffered for it, well she would have stayed too. So … so sometimes people have got to want more than other people to bring change that the other people say they prefer once they’ve got it. And right now … I want more than my parents; I have to do what won’t get me any support now, but they’ll praise me and thank me later.
“Sorry, mom. Sorry, dad. You’ll be glad I did this.”
So he spoke that night, unrolling a piece of blank parchment over a mossy beach rock.
“Enchant this piece of paper to draw a compass which always points me toward the place where the most NightWings are.”
On the parchment there appeared an arrow of black ink that a four-pointed circle circumscribed. The points either had an “S,” an “N,” a “W” or an “E.” The arrow spun like a tornado, trembled to a stop and pointed behind him. Apparently that was south and slightly west.
The NightWing-SeaWing hybrid took a deep breath of the ocean air, then dived into the sky, deserting waves which softly crashed along the shore for the greater tides of the aquamarine ocean. What his mother started, he would finish.
On the black membranes of his beating widespread wings, starry skies glittered like seaspray beneath the shine of the sun. Feeling the cool marine breeze of fish and kelp beat his face, seeing two V-shaped flocks of seagulls converge around him, he grinned. His seagreen eyes gleamed with new ambition. He nosedived, streamlining his wings, then broke up from a fissure of waves made by his wake with a burst of speed toward the Pyrrhian mainland some thousands of wingbeats away.
Suns and moons brought overhead blankets of blue and black, again and again. At length, after he had crossed archipelagos and lands of muck and mountain, Change glided through the Rainforest Kingdom. It was a wonderland of vibrant colours he had had no idea could be produced. Beneath the hot sun thrived tree-climbing geckos, koalas, sloths, papayas and coconuts. Hammocks could be seen tied between the trees, and huts of bamboo below. And there were NightWings—dozens of them. Their thoughts ambushed his mind with rushes of relaxation and the satisfaction of industry. He had been expecting grief and sorrow. The contrast disoriented him like the bangs of close-exploding fireworks.
Where was the suffering? Where the oppression? Where the smoggy volcanic island?
One of the NightWings, he heard thinking, Glad that everyone’s back to normal. Queen Glory, a little less creepy and manipulative than Darkstalker. The Rainforest may be harsh with its heat, and way more noisy than the NightWing graveyard, but the RainWings are nice enough.
RainWings? Changeseizer thought, realizing he had seen one of those dragons neither in father’s mind nor his mother’s. Nice enough? So they’re not all that satisfied—just complacent. But who are the Rain—
Something pointy needled into his belly, then another in his wing, and another and another. A sudden malaise domineered his will to continue flying. Shivers of cold and hot pulled him into a deep sleep. He plunged from the sky.
Brought with the sounds of finicky squawks and shouts, a trampoline motioned over the ground, catching him in the nick of time. The trampoline staggered from side to side, and four RainWings were lugging it. Their vibrant scales changed colour manically, bouncing between an acid green and a banana yellow.
“A NightWing I’ve never seen before—COWABUNGA!” shouted one of the RainWings named Kinkajou. “Wait till Glory hears that dragons are literally cannonballing out of the sky. That’ll liven her right up. She’s been so tense since that fiasco with Darkstalker.”
Another of the four, named Mangrove, hmphed. “Flying dragons that you shoot with sleeping darts have a tendency to cannonball out of the sky. And yeah, something tells me nothing will relax Queen Glory more than finding out about a nameless NightWing with strange markings all over his body. Nope.”
With unshaken perkiness, Kinkajou yelled, “HEY! No need to be nippy. And don’t think I don’t know that was sarcasm.”
The four of them carried the dragon-carrying trampoline to the throne room of Queen Glory, dropped it on floor of tree bark then left. Later, informed by the four RainWings about the NightWing, Queen Glory paced into the room around the time that the drowsing drugs were supposed to wear off on him. Her scales were turning brown with splotches of dark green pulsating over them. She nudged his shoulder with one of her outermost wing fingers, heard a groggy groan, then strode to face the NightWing as he awoke.
“Not going to judge you,” she said with wary guardedness. “Not yet. But we just dealt with one gargantuan NightWing threat, so please please PLEAAAAAASE cut us some slack and say that you’re not here to brainwash or kill us.”
Changeseizer got up. He puffed out his chest, his feet shuffling a bit restlessly, while his scaly eyebrows caved over his eyes. He was listening to her thoughts: Looking at me like he already hates me. Oh, yay. Did you come off too harsh and potentially make another murderous enemy, Glory? Cross your talons not.
The NightWing blinked, then spoke:
“I’m not your enemy, but correct me if I’m wrong. You don’t normally shoot a dragon with darts, not unless they’re your enemy. Not that I’ve met a lot of dragons.”
“Did you just—” He didn’t just read my mind, did he?
“Yep, I’m a mind-reader.”
Suddenly, the mind of the queen spun into a whirl more of colours and feelings than of fully-articulated thoughts. She reflexively stepped away from him, feeling the muscles in her claws tighten like knots. Changeseizer clenched his jaws with annoyance.
“Are you obscuring what you’re thinking?”
“Seven kingdoms!”
“There’s only six? … Ahh. The lost kingdom of the NightWings. Well, that’s news to me.”
“I’D RATHER YOU NOT READ MY MIND. OR AT LEAST PRETEND THAT YOU CAN’T READ IT, PLEASE AND THANK YOU.” Queen Glory paced about the room briskly in circles, her scales turning the colour of shaded alligators—and even the colour of limes in some patches. She ruffled her wings a couple times then rounded on him. “Where’d you say you came from?”
“The Kingdom of the Sea? A small island. Not worth the mapmaker’s time.”
“And you are—”
“An animus?”
She blinked with quizzical amusement, then leaned back with an inkling of relief. Lemon shades started pooling over her. “You don’t slack around to soak up the sun, do you?”
“What?”
“ You cut to the chase. I like that.”
“Well, we need to understand each other so that we strive for the same change. I’m Changeseizer, by the way.”
“Changeseizer,” she said. She said it with curiosity—with a seedling of hope; and then she was considering the form of the smaller dragon for the first time truly: studying the seagreen markings which ran as bow shapes under his eyes and along his snout; which emblazoned the side of each moon-silver plate that ran the length of his underside from neck to tail; which coursed along the fronts of his shadowy arms and legs and the arms of his wings. They gave him an eccentric look to which Queen Glory related, and which she surreptitiously admired.
As though cautious to falling under some spell, she shook her head. Then setting her eyes again on the puzzling dragon, she again slackened. “Tell me, O animus.” She smiled leerily. “What change is it you intend to seize?”
A dragon like the legendary NightWing from my mother’s mind, she’s seen him. She worries, he realized. She doesn’t think I’m like him. Does she think I could be? She hasn’t ruled it out.
But her memories, the one in those memories, he’s nothing like me … This Darkstalker never cared about understanding individuals. He was … manipulative … But his charming tactics for everyone were made with his own static idea of others’ desires in mind. And whoever he didn’t fool, he just magicked into liking him. Changeseizer hated it—the dissociation of Darkstalker’s wants from others’ wants; the bankruptcy of his empathy; the laziness of his character.
“I want a world where everyone is understood,” he said finally. “A world where everyone gets each other without having to be brainwashed by magic or fascist leaders. A world where everyone fights for a cause, instead of sitting around on stranded islands, hoping …” He thought some more. “A world where dragons like NightWings are satisfied with their lives, and dragons like SeaWings aren’t constantly fed propaganda from a Queen who mandates that they all read her books, and only her books.”
As she listened, Glory nodded her head with a spreading gape of stupefaction and consolation. The shape of her eyes seemed to blink into another entirely, near the end of his reply, as though she looked at him in a frank new light. When he finished, a laugh burst from her chest; and she looked as light as a child. The sound confused him. It seemed completely inappropriate to the serious thing he’d just said.
“That’s all you want? Well, that’s a relief.”
Out of nowhere, a NightWing appeared by her side.
“Shall I spare him from my unparalleled assassination skills, your highness?”
He winked, and with a soft return of his smug dimple-quirk, Glory leaned into his cheek with hers.
“I almost feel safer around him than you,” she murmured.
Changeseizer shook his head, overwhelmed, deciding how to focus the conversation after it was so pointlessly derailed.
“What do you mean, ‘That’s all?’ Queen Whatever-Your-Name-Is, don’t you care about the welfare of the NightWings, the SeaWings and the other dragons?”
“Glory.” She clapped a paw on his shoulder, said with a soft smile, “Trust me—I’ve stressed myself out over zillions of things—you’re seeing problems where there are none. The NightWings are happy, Changeseizer. And the SeaWings—well, Queen Coral isn’t nearly as protective as she used to be. She’s more open to the influence of other tribes now. We’ve shipped the SeaWings hundreds of copy scrolls from the Jade Mountain, so it’s just not her publications that they’re reading.”
“Jade Mountain?” Of that place, Changeseizer had never heard. He wasn’t entirely convinced. “On my way here, I heard a NightWing think, ‘The RainWings are nice enough.’ ”
Glory slid her paw away, stepped back, and she and Deathbringer gave each other a look.
“What? I’m missing something,” she said.
“It means that things could be nicer, but he settled for less. And Queen Coral … hah.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re so nonchalant about her when she’s made the SeaWings a bunch of servants and information banks. The same propaganda my father spoke out against, which got him exiled from the tribe …”
Oh, Glory thought with a look of sympathy. Next to her, Deathbringer scratched the edge of his jaw with the hooked frontal claw of one of his wings. One side of his jaws was exposed and clenched grimly. Glory thought, I don’t know his story. What I do know is that I need to calm him down. Who knows what kind of animus fit he might—
She looked up straight at Changeseizer, and her mind turned into a whirlpool of colourful static.
“I get it,” he said. “You’d rather there not be any problems. You’d rather look the other way.”
“Change, that is NOT what I said. Not that I said anything at all.”
“You’re like my parents in a way.” Changeseizer suppressed a laugh of pity, turning it to a snort. “The NightWings, the RainWings, from what few glimpses I’ve had of their minds—wow …” He chuckled indignantly. “Everyone is asleep. Stagnant. And you’re their leader.”
“Keep insulting the queen,” said Deathbringer scathingly. “I have several throwing weapons that could slit your throat. Not that I’d use them, your highness.”
“Death, Change, come on,” said Glory with exasperation. “We were getting along so handsomely just a second ago. Let’s take just a second to breathe. Deep breaths.”
“You still haven’t addressed what I said about my dad,” said Changeseizer with venomous smoothness. “Maybe you’ve forgotten about it already? Nice. Meanwhile, your servant over here is threatening to kill me for expressing myself. Suppression of free speech via death. Awesome.”
Glory tried politely not to scoff, but failed. “You’re joking.”
“You think I’m overreacting. I’m just making parallels, Glory.”
“And I just want you to calm down so that I have a minute to think: to address all that you’ve said and keep saying. PREFERABLY without you peeking into my head.”
“Alright”—I don’t see why, but—“sorry.”
The fact that the RainWing leader didn’t see any problems where Changeseizer saw many: That disturbed him. In some ways, the NightWing-RainWing domain and cohabitation resembled his mother’s visions of a comfortable, peaceful paradise. In some ways. They stopped believing, and so they stopped imagining better, echoed his mother’s words. Change thought, I know that there’s both good and bad here. Just which is which is hard to digest … And the fact that they already had Glory as their leader was equally hard to swallow.
But he was an animus. He could make it easier—the digesting and the swallowing—couldn’t he? Perhaps not by brainwashing. No, the mere thought was unpalatable to him. But perhaps he could magick up some object or phenomena that would help him and Glory understand each other better … that would join their minds and bodily sensations, even.
Digesting … swallowing … joining.
“Wait—Glory, I just thought of something!”
At the prideful sound, Glory lifted her head. Her scales burned shades of magma. “I assumed you said sorry because you kept talking. Then you keep on talking. Are you indecisive, irreparably unhinged, or did I misunderstand you altogether?”
“I may make use of you yet,” Deathbringer told a shuriken attached to his wrist.
Change said, “I just thought of something that could benefit the dragons of every tribe forever.”
“Great,” Glory exclaimed, “and I have a magical papaya that ends world hunger!”
She’s thinks … she doubts the possibility already. “My idea involves me eating you so that we can fuse together and share each other’s thoughts and senses. Then, we un-fuse, and we come apart knowing each other’s minds and physical feelings with no misunderstanding.”
Glory thought about that. “I hate to break it to you, but Qibli’s already thought of a much less roundabout way of cultivating empathy with animus magic, and it’s been proven to work. Your magic, on the other paw—we’ve never even seen you use it.”
“Who? Glory, you haven’t even given me a chance. You give up too easily. Lazy RainWing …”
“I’m not giving up. I’m RATIONALIZING. Deathbringer, say something to this blasted soliloquizer.”
“How am I a—”
“I say why not?” Deathbringer said. “If he’s tricking you, I give him a bloody coup de grace, and if not, we all live happily ever after and celebrate with pineapples and sun-time. Come to think (he’s an animus, after all) … why don’t we just make him enchant something to kill himself if he’s lying about what he wants to do?”
Glory looked up. “Change? Will you do that for us?”
“Go kill myself? Gee, thought you were starting to like me.”
Glory began to laugh wryly, but Change had anticipated her not entertaining his humor, and interrupted.
“KIDDING. Okay, hand me something. Yeah, the banana, sure fine. Okay, enchant this banana to fly at me like a boomerang of death if I’m lying about why I want to eat Glory or am trying to manipulate her in any way.”
“And me,” Deathbringer suggested.
“And Glory’s murderous servant.”
“Mate,” Glory emphasized.
“Deathbringer,” her mate chimed.
Change made the correction.
To everyone except Deathbringer’s joy, the banana failed to attack Change like a boomerang of death. And so ends the story of how the strange NightWing who cannonballed out of the sky managed to convince Queen Glory of the RainWings to let him swallow her whole just minutes after meeting him. So begins the story of Change swallowing Glory whole, which sounds like an inappropriate story, but it’s pretty tame.
“Enchant my digestive system to be able to swallow dragons, no matter how big they are.”
Glory suddenly looked susceptible. She was having second thoughts. “This isn’t going to hurt, is it?”
“Also enchant it to harmlessly digest dragons. And to absorb digested dragons into my body, so that they fuse with me and we understand each other’s thoughts and combine each other’s senses.”
As soon as Change finished speaking, an unquenchable force threw Glory and Deathbringer onto their sides. Changeseizer’s belly had just … rumbled. The rumble had been powerful enough to quake the whole room, to knock over tables and potted plants and the throne itself.
“Hoah. I’m really, REALLY hungry all of a sudden.”
A thick, sloppy, slimy sound resounded as his tongue lashed across his drooling lips. A gravelly exhale rolled from him. It sounded so hungry and self-gratifying, especially paired with the grin that stretched back his now-slathering jowls.
Change could not help but look at his gurgling, lithe gut. It was fluctuating fervidly and begging for food, like a fishing net full of starved sea lions.
“I feel like I could eat a whole dolphin sandwich. But then again, my enchantment only applies to dragons, so maybe not. But I could for sure eat a whole dragon, or two or three.”
The same way Change couldn’t quit commending his own hunger, Glory couldn’t stop wincing at the sheer might of the guttural tremors his starving gut kept sending across the floor. They kept her and Deathbringer in perpetual totters and states of seasickness.
Then Change pounced on her. And Deathbringer—seeing another male pin Glory to the floor so suddenly and incite such a shaken look on her face—had to fight back the protective urge to spring at him like a tardy shadow. The urge intensified as the smaller dragon yawned his jaws and cast a hot rain of spittle over her snout. She measured about a third taller and longer than the freshly-magicked cannibal.
Glory gulped, feeling his hungry shadow hanging over her. “I’m putting TREMENDOUS trust in you. Don’t get all suicidal on me.”
“Suicidal?” Change grinned. “I’m finally living. We’re finally making progress.”
He lashed his neck forward, clamping his jaws down on her snout. He began to suckle its spiked end toward the back of his gullet, sampling the tropical flavor of her chin with slick, sticky glides of his thick tongue. She tasted like guava. Guava and passionfruit. Not that he had tasted either before, but he delighted in the sugary, tart, sour flavor. No coconut, anchovy or crab he had ever eaten could compare. Nor could they stuff his jaws so satiably, or force him to breathe shallowly out of his nostrils.
He gulped hard. His salivary glands gushed and lubricated his magicked esophagus, which used its lathered muscles to clench on her horned head and tug it farther down the meander of his cannibalistic tract. His silver-plated esophagus swelled larger to a steady string of craw squelches and wobbles. Within the clammy walls, Glory peeled her lips back and gave a groan of disgust.
“It smells like old seafood in here,” she complained, but Change couldn’t reply, not with his mouth full of her.
The fleshy chute enveloped her nostrils in the hot reek of acid and decay that awaited farther below. All the while, it slicked her ears and her head fins to her skull and buffeted her eardrums with the crass, moist squelches of her body being muscled lower.
Change released her shoulders from the grip of his forepaws, then planted his feet alongside her sides so that he could more easily swallow her. While spreading his neck plates with each throat-expanding gulp, he started backward in a zigzagging amble, letting the grip of his jaws lift the RainWing off her backside and right her so that her reflexively-kicking, citrine-soled hind feet slumped right-side-up along the floor.
Until they didn’t. Until Change swallowed her barbed, super-long neck in its entirety, turning his own into a bloated, bumbling sausage of scales. Until he worked his jaws over her shoulders and reached out to grab the hook-shaped frontal claws of her wings to clamp the anterior of the bright tangerine membranes to her sides. At that point her lizard-lanky body was being lifted up and swung alongside his bulging craw and forechest. He reached and stuffed her forepaws into his greedy mouth.
“Can’t believe I agreed to this,” groaned Glory as contracting lips of flesh puckered around the tip of her snout and, with a vulgar SQUELCH, pushed her head into a stomach full of sleek, wriggling flesh walls and pungent acidic smog. The stomach was pooled with acids of the pale gold of a jaguar’s belly fur. The stench crinkled the edges of her eyes, and they almost rolled into the back of her head. “Blegh—I wasn’t even persuaded by magic to do this.”
Change comprehended the jist of her gurgle-obscured words, sniggering. He glimpsed at Deathbringer in his periphery and the NightWing’s mouth, which was a gape of shock and admonishment. The way Death’s eyes kept yo-yoing over Change’s dragon-encumbered stomach as it enlarged, made progress on its scaly sculpture of Glory and pressed to the floor: It would have gotten a proper laugh from Change, would that his mouth weren’t full. He nearly choked on the thick haunches of Glory as his attempted laughter made her thick, pinkish-now hindquarters buck and bounce between his tongue and palate. The goofy, muffled guffaw only made him laugh harder with his maw full; and the sporadic jerks of his gullet from that helped pump her rump deeper into his digestive tract. Before he knew it, her tail was shooting down his throat from a reflexive slurp of his lips, and the suddenness of it had him pedalling backward, until his belly swelled too big for him to do so and beached him, just in time for the curly end of her tail to shoot between his teeth wetly.
That had quite the kickback.
Once her tail shot down the predatory slide, Queen Glory was completely sacked inside of the tight paunch. All the space she took up quelled its mighty rumbles by leaving no space for his walls and acids to motion. The stomach enzymes sloshed over her body entire, submerging her face.
He belched a hulking, metallic belch. “Hey Glory, tell me how you feel. Anything hurt? Kick once for yes, twice for no … thrice for more options.”
Twice, she kicked.
“Did you see that?” Change asked Deathbringer, who had refused to let go of the shuriken on his wrist for a full minute.
Regrettingly, Death let go of it. “Glory, give two kicks again if you need me. Please?”
Glory wasn’t separate from Changeseizer long enough to do so. The NightWing felt a breathtaking contraction of his belly, which collapsed the bloated sac of scrunched-up wing and limb shapes into itself and sucked an eighth of the gravid middle’s girth away. Then, another eighth. Another, and another.
He groaned decadently. As his gut began metabolising, shrinking and diminishing its Glory shape, the tropical warmth of the rainforest around him became less harsh, and more pleasant and succulent. Sunshine became his companion, and poured through his body; and then all of her washed over his mind and his senses, all the senses and sweet thoughts and history that belonged to Glory.
You’re like me, he thought. You always felt like you were a leader. And you are one. And I see now, it’s not that you don’t try to fix things; it’s that you’re wary because fixing can sometimes really be breaking.
And … and you’re strong, she thought. I mean, mentally strong. Like you can’t be shaken. And you don’t stop fighting for what’s good, not even when everyone around you says everything is.
Heh, that’s me.
Change … our breaths, tongues, claws, ears and eyes—everything is coming more and more intense to them. I almost feel like I wouldn’t want this to be temporary, but permanent … And yet, so soon … I know you wouldn’t trick me, but shouldn’t I worry that I want it so soon?
Stop wanting! Stop wishing! Make it so! Make us one!
Change … I trust you!
Then why resist? Merge with me! We’ll be stronger on every front. Together, we’ll make the goodest change!
Alright—yes! We’ll both be good—strong—together!
It was for both of them a baptism of ecstasy. Their perfect union, their perfect drug, felt so good that neither wished to separate, not ever. But there can only be one captain of a vessel.
Because his influence was so strong, so inescapable, she let her consciousness slip into his joyously, willingly surrendered her claim to captainship and swore herself to his cause. Her consciousness receded into the background of his just as her skills, physical traits, size and power started pulsating through him.
With one last gurgle, his stomach erased the last traces of his prey. Glory became one with Change. Her essence coursed through his skull, and beneath his black ears, RainWing head membranes of sprouted: They were black instead of orange. A euphoric growl broke free from his jaws, both of which elongated to sounds of bones crunching and sinew hyperextending and proliferating. And a silver RainWing barb budded, spearing up from the tip of his snout.
His pleasure doubled in intensity. An aura flared across his scales, matching the colour of them. The scales had turned pink with patches of gold, representing his mood just like Glory’s had done. The hues of his body strobed to show the nuances of his joy as he absorbed her. He grew from her mass, until he became a whole half-a-height taller than Deathbringer, who had been about the same size as Glory, which was pretty tall, considering Glory had been a third taller than Change was originally.
The expansion of Change’s body startled Deathbringer, especially since during it, the animus melded the bodies of RainWing and NightWing. His transformation subtly extended his neck, and also molded the shape of it, along with the shapes of his head, wings, claws, tail and main body to make him more lean, lengthy and curvy.
Deathbringer’s wings were widespread, now. It seemed that he was ready to take off and plunge his fangs into Changeseizer any minute now, if only he could do so without harming his mate.
“Glory? Throw me a bone. I just want to hear your voice. A little assurance that you’re okay would be lovely.”
“Would you stop worrying about me?”
The voice came from Change. It was mostly Change’s voice, the one which tantalizes the ear with a pleasantly deep tone. But the voice carried something new: a slight feminine croon, a hint of Glory woven into its lush fabric. Deathbringer saw Change flutter his eyes at him, like Glory would, but it only appeased Death for a heartbeat. He recoiled with apprehension. It looked like he just had an extremely tart aftertaste of some foreign fruit.
“I don’t know whether I’m assured or creeped out. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll be at ease until the two of you unfuse. So, if you could hurry up and understand each other then be done with it, I’d greatly appreciate that.”
Changeseizer could read even Deathbringer’s subconscious thoughts now, because Glory had strengthened his mind-reading. When he did, he chuckled.
“Ohh. I see. If it were anyone but Glory, you’d be enthused by our merging, even if you found out I and someone else decided to be one permanently. But it’s Glory, and the idea of her being part of a male is unattractive to you. We get it. We love ya, but it’s our body, our choice. Gotta respect it, y’know?”
Deathbringer frowned. “Sometimes, you say ‘I’; other times, you say ‘we,’ so is she really equal with you? I’m not completely convinced you’re both Change and Glory at once: Nor am I convinced that she’d merge with some random guy she’s known for a half-hour. I should know—I’ve known her for years.”
“Death, people can go without being the best version of themselves for years. That doesn’t mean it won’t suddenly click someday. Today, it clicked for Glory and I. Look—I enchant my body to kill me and make Glory an individual dragon again if she’s unwilling to spend the rest of her days as part of me.”
Definitely suicidal, or extremely confident in himself, Death thought. “I’m sure you believe that,” he said. “But people are determined by their track records, not just by the choices they make on a whim. Maybe Glory made the choice all by herself, but the Glory of today’s just a little bit of Glory, and what really matters is all the years of Glory that have already been Gloried. You’re young still. You just don’t get the full importance of time yet.”
Change looked offended. “Time is super important to me, dude. Not a day goes by without me thinking about it. That being said, I want to learn why it’s so important to you—Glory and I. Just merge with us: Then, we’ll have all the strength, understanding and wisdom of three dragons! Cool beans, right?”
“You don’t sound like Glory. You sound like Change with Glory along for the ride.”
“And you sound like a complainer with no real solutions.” A sigh. “Deathbringer, we’re just gonna swallow you and absorb you, okay? Then you’ll realize you were being stubborn and be all like, ‘Dang, I feel really great now and feel like I’m part of something greater.’ ”
“Gotta catch me first, two-face.”
Deathbringer dashed out of the throne room. He stamped hurriedly down a beaten path, trying to figure out how he could undo Change’s magic. There were those earrings that made dragons immune to magic, but they only applied to Darkstalker’s magic. Argh—are there no other animuses?
No animuses magically appeared, but dragons did: Farther down the meander, Death bumped right into a MudWing who was accompanied by an IceWing. When he regained composure, he realized it was his friends Clay and Winter; both of them were scheduled for a meeting with the queen.
“Oh … Deathbringer, I’m sorry,” Clay apologized. “Is Glory here?”
Winter took a deep breath, said, “Glory is not gonna believe how intelligent scavengers are.”
Death opened his mouth, then an explosion of sound erupted: not from his mouth, but from the front of the throne room, which now sported a huge hole splintered around the edges. Seemingly nothing had created this hole. That was until Change materialized from thin air.
“That’s me, Glory. I can do camouflage now, see?” He disappeared and reappeared again and again, blinking across the incline with thundering giddy jumps.
Winter canted his chin up and stared intensely. “Deathbringer, what that NightWing-RainWing just said makes no sense and is SPLITTING my head. Ouch, brainfreeze—okay WHO IS THIS?”
Death answered, “Changeseizer, another animus. Yippee.”
“Woah.” Clay turned to Change. “If that’s really true, then how did you hide from Darkstalker? I thought he teleported all the animus dragons in Pyrrhia to himself, but no one mentioned another NightWing being there.”
“Guess I’m not Pyrrhian?” Change shrugged. “The mapmakers never bothered with the island on which I was born. I have several questions to ask you related to that subject alone, but getting the answers’ll be way more fun if we just absorb you—and you and you. Shall we begin?”
Clay looked innocently bewildered.
Winter blurted, “What?”
“Our bodies, our choices, remember?” Death mocked him. “You can’t absorb us if we don’t agree to it.”
“I bet you you are gonna agree to it. You don’t even know what you’re agreeing to yet. When you’re part of us, you can decide if you want it to be permanent.”
“You can’t eat us all with only one mouth,” Deathbringer challenged.
“Ohh? It’s a shame I only have one mouth, then. Why don’t I enchant another mouth to form from my … erm … tail?!”
Changeseizer clenched his teeth. He growled and concentrated, lashing his tail. Suddenly, a huge bulge of magic pulsed out of the base of his tail and shot to the tip, transforming the tip of the tail into a bulbous maw, which voraciously yawned scaly, zigzagging teeth over its chunky tongue.
The length of the tail in the wake of the bulge didn’t deflate to its former size, either: The whole thing stayed thick like it had been when the bulge shot through it. And the base of the tail thickened exceedingly to support it all. Then, the scales of the bulb of the maw started changing colours like a RainWing’s, while the rest of Change’s scales stayed black.
The tail—which (when he and Glory merged) had lengthened to be about twice as long as he was from the rear to the tip of the nose—snaked to his lips and nuzzled them. He purred and nosed them back.
“What do you say, Glory? You swallow your mate and the MudWing; I take Icicle-Head here?”
Deathbringer didn’t have time to react. The tail maw yawned a white-hot fog of tropical-smelling breath over his face. The maw showed him two halves of a puffy, ovular interior of thickly lubricated maw flesh. The oval-shape imploded, then the maw snarfed up both the head and neck of Deathbringer at once, emphasizing the shape of the NightWing’s skull and nape. Death struggled and murmured chaotically. The tail lurched upright, lifting its prey aloft with the dexterity of a snake, but the bulbous jawed head brought to mind a great carnivorous plant, for it was eyeless and its prey as trapped as a bug caught in a venus flytrap.
“Deathbringer!”
Clay sprung forward. He tried to pry the jowls of the tail back to free him. The tail crooned, for the MudWing only helped it spread its jaws over the forepaws and legs of its NightWing prey.
“Glory, if you’re truly there, please listen: You’re hurting Deathbringer!”
Change moaned, “M-mmh, that’s your opinion, even if we’re both enjoying this tremendously and so will Death once he’s assimilated, h-heh.”
He heard and felt a freezing huff—swiveled his neck forward to see a spear of frost breath hurtling from Winter’s jaws. But he had amazing reflexes from assimilating Glory. He belched firebreath, and doused the measly stream of frost with a flame-stream that was one-and-a-half times thicker. The dragonbreath powered toward Winter, forcing the IceWing to catch his breath and dodge the sweeping inferno.
“Heh, cute huff, Icicle-Head, but our breath’s stronger. Everything’s stronger when dragons come together! Burrrruhgh, burroooahp!” Change belched out another two great streams of inferno to punctuate his point.
Flames devoured vibrant grass and clung to the stalks of palm trees.
If Winter had fended for himself or fled, Change would have extinguished the fires with his animus magic, but Winter had no way of knowing that. The IceWing thought of all the innocent RainWings and NightWings who could perish, of all the rainforest that could be reduced to ash.
Change melted from his mind.
He burst aflight.
Then, frost breath was harpooning out of his mouth, sundering the flames before vaporizing them completely. The last fiery flicker smoked out when a crispy cold glazed the stalks of grass and palms. A look of relief set on his face. But then, Change bounded up and chomped down on the IceWing’s icicled tail-tip.
From Winter and Clay both, there came a different cry of pain: from Winter a YOWCH! because the bite of a dragon half a size bigger than him sent a buzz of stinging hurt up his tail bone; and from Clay a squeak of distress, because he was clinging to Deathbringer’s haunches, not wanting to let him go; but the tail maw was loudly snarfing them up, which meant Clay was next on his shaky, unwilling ascent into the air.
Changeseizer moaned with a mouthful of minty IceWing. Strafed with the zesty flavors of a triad of cuisines, he accidentally zipped down with weight on his left flank, and upset the coconuted tree tops with the wing-fingers on that side. The airbound stumble prompted him to better rein his wingbeats. He did, then rising higher, steered into the clearing so that nothing else could distract him from engorging both of his maws with the filling, satiating dragon meat.
His tail maw had almost completely swallowed his NightWing prey. The jaws of his Glory-controlled tail maw leisurely suckled down the base of Death’s tail. The NightWing bulge made thick wrinkles and folds over the bottom half of the tail. Although anchored down, the tail miraculously still muscled itself into a crook-shape, gulping with great shivers of strain and pleasure. Shifting the dysmorphic blankets of hyperextended, rose-glowing scales, shapes of forepaws and wing-fingers and jaws broke through and molded protrusions, eliciting loud squelches and slippery tugging noises from the tail’s internal walls. The strong fleshy muscles pumped Death’s head into the upper half of the tail’s gastrointestinal system, while the tail happily toiled its jowls with Clay’s burly neck, trafficking the MudWing right behind Death’s rump.
Both Change’s throat and tail swelled and quivered with ridiculously huge bulges. Combined, his prey weighed more than double he did, but that didn’t discourage him. It only goaded him to pull them deeper inside his bellies. One thought kept him gulping from both ends: Soon, he’d be evolving from three dragons at once! What sort of amazing, intelligent, unbeatable creature would the five of them make? He had to know.
The tail-bulge of Deathbringer buckled, then halted when it nestled below the constricting sheets of flesh in the upper half of Change’s tail. Clay’s obsession with food was giving the Glory tail maw a nice, filling second lunch. The scaly lips of the tail maw stretched more and more around his thickset shoulders. Clay’s earthy, meaty turmeric taste enthralled the maw’s taste buds. After swallowing the more chocolatey Death, Glory felt like Clay was a nutritious dinner that made up for an early dessert. The tail maw gulped and gulped, and its bulbous shape burgeoned with the beginnings of Clay’s forechest and wing limbs. It ate with efficiency, smoothed the MudWing’s wings into a “V”-shape then conjured the ghost of gluttony to wriggle its jaws over Clay’s rump within the same half of a minute.
On the upper end, Change had already swelled his silver-plated neck into a gravid, round mass he couldn’t hope to wrap his forepaws around. The esophageal IceWing sculpture tousled his craw with a stockpile of dragon traits. The moist squelches Winter made going down sounded like the breathy complaints of a morbidly obese seal.
The tail maw had way too much traction on Clay; the MudWing’s pesky tail-whipping did little to keep him from being completely eaten. With a slurp that had kickback, the tail sent Clay’s tail whizzing through its lips. The giant shape of the MudWing was bussed fully into the tail’s main length, backending its NightWing prey and forcing a loud BURGLE through the tail.
“BWOUUHWRRRRHHGH-K!”
The purge of air from her lips gave Glory extraordinary relief, and the sense of ease and accomplishment rubbed off on Changeseizer. Oddly enough, he felt stuffed in a distant sort of way: too full to eat a third dragon, but too starved not to eat one at the same time. The duality of satiation and hunger seemed right to him. He almost didn’t want to pass the squirmy IceWing through the peristaltic ring to his stomach. On the other paw, his throat was getting pretty sore, and so was his chin, which was being pushed up by the blimp of Winter bulge even more as the last of Winter’s wailing snout slipped behind his jowls. With labor, he clenched his jaws closed. He savored the savory burden of absolute fullness, took a snapshot of it in his mind then took one last gulp.
It was a worrisome gulp. His throat flexed with the full strength of two, but Winter’s bulge only slid down a little, then idled. Change started to gag, and that reflex was the catalyst; his sphincter thrust open with all the welcoming of a caffeinated neighbour, and then thousands of pounds just slumped into the pit of his paunch.
His belly not only barged through his paws and pushed them apart; it swooped below them. The sudden relocation of weight shoved him toward the earth; but Change would never let anything pull him where he wasn’t trying to go, even if it would reprieve his burden of flapping. He caught himself in his descent, and ascended again, pounding his wings with fatigue as his belly and bloated tail began thundering with calls of digestion. He consigned to gurgling all three of them away without ever touching the ground. He could do it!
Both he and his Glory tail maw groaned; the IceWing, the NightWing and the MudWing all softened and weakened to the great churns and sloshes of the stomachs’ metabolisms. The first of them to be gurgled away into mulch then transformed into part of Changeseizer was Deathbringer.
When the NightWing prey infused the animus, Change felt the mass that fled his tail-belly surge into his skull, right between his horns and ears. A pressure built up. It pushed his horns upward, making room for two similar ivory protrusions to push out: smaller horns. They grew in hammer pulses, and so did his original ones, until a quartet of curvy dragon horns crowned his head.
His talons, wings and tail elongated. The wings beat with such a span, they clipped the surrounding palms with their wing-tips before beating them back with gallivanting gusts. With their new size, they abundantly thieved the apparent hugeness of his main body, and they could enfold several dragons in their membranes. His tail, likewise, stretched and broadened to span thrice the length of his body from his derriere to the dip-of-his-nose.
All his NightWing features matured, toughened and bulked up. The RainWing-NightWing barbs of his nape and tail sharpened and grew, so that he seemed to age into an elder dragon before the very eyes of the up-looking RainWing and NightWing villagers. The growth of these specific features was accompanied by a swelling of his whole body. He expanded and became two-and-a-half times taller than he originally was.
An exultant roar burst free from his enlarged jaws. He still had so much growing and transforming to do!
He absorbed the sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing of Death to enhance his own. His senses achieved a dreamy lucidness. The lucidity and clarity of his feelings continued to mushroom in intensity, especially since the addition of Deathbringer to his body sped up the metabolic process of his belly and his tail-belly.
The evolving enzymes of the latter gurgled louder, reducing Clay’s body to a consistency that fit his namesake. The bulge of the lower tail faded while the lower tail shook in orgasmic fits. Its internal walls sponged up what remained of the fuel-converted MudWing to vampirically empower and morph the animus.
Winter winced, for he could hear Clay’s muffled cries being silenced by squelches and gurgles of rising loudness nextdoor. And when both the sounds of the dragon and the gut quietened, a quaver of Change’s insides followed them, as well as a crude buwaaarhp that made the belly walls clench tight on the IceWing, even though the belch came from the tail maw. Forced to curl up more, Winter frustratedly chuffed. The residual stench of the burp filled his own gurgly, acid-filled prison. Just in case that wasn’t taunting enough, the animus’ stomach walls were soon groaning around him in expansion. He could hear Change groaning, likewise.
The animus’ skeleton cracked and contorted like the shell of a nymph metamorphosing into a dragonfly. Clay was used just like the stuff of his namesake, a building material. His protein-rich body padded Change’s body with yet another layer of thick hide and musculature, beefing up every sturdy limb and appendage. Change moaned with a prehistorically deeper and grander voice, feeling his evolution come in euphoric throbs to reinforce his strength.
His tail and horns and paws and jaws grew unbridledly. His senses evolved again from Clay’s looted contribution, and they didn’t finish doing so before Changeseizer felt his stomach whomp his body with even more dragon genes to absorb. His stomach sucked in as his belly walls smushed the IceWing into a nutritious batter, melting Winter away like the coming of spring.
The digested MudWing and IceWing tag-teamed Change’s body, attacking him with a heavenly transformation.
He moaned with a voice as huge as he was.
“We’re g-gonna change so much—ngh!”
Greatly arousing aches preceded growls of astonishment. His snout enlarged and turned even more ferocious in shape. His RainWing-NightWing barbs of the nape and tail elongated devilishly, turning frosty before mutating into full-fledged icicles.
His next mutation affected his claws, making the dangerous daggers seem previously blunted and fragile; they sharpened and hardened and curled and gleamed, becoming dreadful sickles of ice.
Not even his tail maw was spared from a chilling change; a cold fog swept across his body and froze splintering ice-needles across the tail maw’s head and chin, pointing them toward the tail maw’s future next meal.
Three last thumps of growth surged through Changeseizer, and the animus grew to three times his original height. Now the monstrously huge dragon would loom several storeys over scavengers, and the heads of most dragons would only come to his belly.
Even though he finished transforming, inside of him, he was dealing with the consciousnesses of Death, Clay and Winter.
Deathbringer awoke, floating in a void.
GLORY!
He called her name again, his voice echoing into the infinite. Then claws touched his shoulder, and he had no need to look to his side to see whose they were. The touch was unmistakably hers, firm yet tender. Her presence was a warmth that no dragon nor rainforest could emulate.
I told you to stop being so high-strung.
She slurped his cheek. Her affection washed over him as a warm wave of assurance, but he couldn’t help but bristle once the wave receded with the tides. Me, high-strung? I’m supposed to be the one calming your nerves … Something’s different about you, Glory.
There’s nothing wrong with ‘different,’ is there? The look on his face said he reluctantly agreed. He’s not holding us against our will, Death … Any one of us could separate from him if we really wanted.
Then … you’ve considered it?
She just laughed. That was her way of dismissing the idea.
She held his paw in hers, lowered her nose a little. Her glimmering eyes looked into his with longing. Come with me, Deathbringer. Come be with us. The feeling of being one is incredible, and it’d mean the world to me to share it with you.
Glory …
Confounded, Deathbringer looked around the void. Across from him and Glory, Changeseizer stood as his small, untransformed self in front of Winter and Clay. The IceWing and the MudWing looked as flustered as Death had been.
But Changeseizer was smiling gently. Words were leaving his lips, incomprehensible. Somehow, Death knew the words to be consoling.
When he finished talking, Change held out a paw to them. It was shaky, but not at all because he was timid. He was just a dragon trying so very hard to humble his judgment. His eyes were ablaze, full of strength, aye, but letting patience trickle in.
Death wondered if he were imagining it; if something had changed about Changeseizer, or if he was simply seeing Change in a different light. He’s the opposite of Darkstalker … What he has—when we stop calling it manipulation and start calling it influence—that’s what he has. At what point can someone confidently ascribe either “manipulative” or “influential” to a dragon?
The point where intent is made clearest and is goodest, he decided.
He wasn’t sure, but he was resolute about the answer.
When he looked again, Clay had taken Death’s paw, and Winter the opposite one; and Change clenched their hands savoringly. His chest swelled, fluttered fast.
He reeled both dragons into his body—first Clay, then Winter: The mental avatar of Change absorbed their traits just as his flesh-and-blood body had absorbed them—but Glory’s and Death’s features were absent.
Mind and body had become almost fully synced. The pleasure that Changeseizer felt echoed through the void. It washed over Death and Glory, baptising them with that same pleasure.
Then, everyone was happy—even Death. Especially his mate.
With a giggle Glory ran to Change. She flicked one last glance at Death, as if to say Come on, then dove head-first into the animus’ belly. The merging of their mental avatars was instant. The power of Changeseizer’s presence mushroomed, and its energy blanketed Death deliciously. Without reservation, he felt his feet start to pound—to take him toward his lover, toward the great collective consciousness.
Then he dove into Change, and all of them were perfectly one.
*“That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?”
Change was back in the physical world, speaking in the flesh-and-blood. Hints of Death, Glory, Clay and Winter coloured his voice. It was huge, grandly imposing.
“My friends … now that we are one, in tune with the best of each other, we can be the strongest, wisest dragon for ourselves and our tribes. Nothing will stop us from making the goodest difference in the world!”
Triumphantly, he started down the slope. He passed between a tropical thicket, then came to a clearing where RainWings and NightWings had gathered. They had seen him devour the other dragons and transform; and when he halted and stood before them, they looked child-like in size compared with him. His presence was powerful, his stature unlike anyone else’s. They awed, speechless, then one by one bowed their heads reverently.
Even with all those dragons around him, Changeseizer said one last monologue to himself—to Glory, Deathbringer, Clay and Winter—doing so with a smirk:
“And, perhaps, before we can make the goodest difference, we’ll need another great feast.”
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Category Story / Vore
Species Western Dragon
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 318.9 kB
Listed in Folders
Yep! It's in the Wings of Fire graphic novel ...
https://www.amazon.com/Dragonet-Pro...../dp/B071G42RVT
I don't have the full picture on me right now, though, blegh
https://www.amazon.com/Dragonet-Pro...../dp/B071G42RVT
I don't have the full picture on me right now, though, blegh
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