Free Dragonlove by Marc Secchia

loose.
    Lia kicked out. Begone, spirit!
    The mist-creature’s thundering shook her, but Hualiama kept a white-knuckled grip on the scroll racks. She lashed out with her legs, but the cold seemed as blades sliding through her flesh. Summoning the magic, she tried to warm herself. Blades in her back! Hualiama screamed as pain flared along her old scar-wound, the one Ra’aba had dealt her. Groaning, she dangled above the vast volcanic pipe. The creature coiled and swayed nearby, seeking another, more crippling attack.
    ‘You always take blows right on that definite little chin of yours, zephyr,’ she remembered Master Khoyal, her Nuyallith teacher, admonishing her. ‘Sometimes the path of valour is retreat. Or simply, to flee. The dead do not fight half as well as the living.’ The pain gave her Khoyal’s kind of courage. Abandoning her stand, Lia fell to monkey-climbing the wall as though her life depended on it. As she angled for the exit, her route took her out over the chasm, a pipe thousands of feet deep and all of it, lined with the expansive lore of the Dragonkind. There were many platforms down there. Should she fall from this height, visiting one of those platforms would be the last thing she remembered.
    DIE, INTRUDER! Cold thundered over her, as though she had dived beneath an icy waterfall. Lia found herself screaming back almost as loudly. Oh, for a Dragon’s wings! Aye, she was naturally agile, but this was a series of frantic grabs and thrusts, almost missing a grip as she transitioned over a section of bookshelves, launching herself at last into the jagged-mouthed little tunnel from which she had emerged, dragging her feet up behind her …
    Lia shouted furiously as talons of ice gripped her ankles. A monstrous force began to haul her backward. Though her fingers clawed at the stone and her muscles bunched, the Guardian Spirit suddenly seemed to possess the tonnage of an adult male Dragon.
    No! She would not yield!
    Amaryllion, I need your fire now! Her shriek echoed through the tunnels of Ha’athior Island.
    Her bones felt deep-frozen. Her legs and hips dangled in the air. Lia clutched an outcropping with both hands, but her fingers began to slip, a quarter inch, now two inches, as the creature exerted its strength.
    Then, her cry returned as fire. Beautiful, clean, crystalline fire shot toward her in a form that suggested a dragonet’s wings, as if she had somehow evoked the power of Ha’athior’s magical crystals which had sustained Amaryllion’s life for so many centuries.
    Flames blossomed around Lia, unfolding in vast yet transient petals of colour, blue and white and gold. The pressure vanished. With a terrible cry, the Guardian Spirit released her legs.
    Heaving herself into the tunnel with a dancer’s upper body strength, Lia surged to her feet, and fled as though she had indeed grown wings.

Chapter 5: Remembrance
     
    E mERGING from the hidden stairwell behind the prekki-fruit tree just after dawn the morning following Amaryllion’s passing on, Hualiama ran headlong into the bare, muscular chest of Rallon, who cried, “It’s her!”
    “Detain the miscreant. Master Ja’al will see her at once,” ordered Hallon, his twin brother. The bearded monks seized her, one to either arm.
    Great Islands, did these monks never wear more than a loincloth? With her newfound clarity of recollection, Lia remembered how she had first met the twins. She could not ignore the opportunity to foment mischief. She drawled, “Well, boys, and what of your vows?”
    “Our vows?” rumbled Rallon, staring down at her from his gigantic six feet and seven inches stature. “What do you mean, scrap?”
    “Firstly, you lay hands on the royal ward, part-time Princess of the realm. Secondly, I’m a female. You are monks, sworn to chastity, fidelity, and service to the Great Dragon. Thirdly–”
    “What of it?” growled Hallon, his Dragon’s-paw grip on her upper arm swinging her off the ground in concert with