Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

A darkness was filling the sky as deep clouds sailed in from the south. The night grew colder and the albino shivered, fearing further for Nauha’s safety.

“Nobody here will harm her,” said the Phoorn. “But now I must venture into—take more substance—from—the—netherworld…” A noise like a whirlpool, running fast in high seas.

He had difficulty seeing her now. His mind was less clear than before. The table seemed to have disappeared. The house was a black shadow, unlit.

The sounds of the night had faded when her voice came again. He turned, peering into a void. Above him were two green-gold staring stars: passionless, cold. Her voice was still recognisable, yet hissed like waves on shingle:

“Are you ready to go with me, Elric?”

“You have my word.”

Something fell at his feet then. He knew what it was and bent to pick it up. He buckled on his breastplate and greaves, settled his helmet on his head, attached the scabbard to his belt. When he straightened, scaled flesh, long and sinuous, stretched down out of the sky and he looked deeper into those green-gold eyes, knowing them for what and whose they were. At the base of her long, reptilian neck was a natural indentation in which a man might sit. It had not been long since, in the great Dragon Caves of his people, he had taken a carved Vilmirian saddle and placed it in just such an indentation. The Lady Fernrath, a shape-changer of a very specific kind, touched him affectionately with her long claw. While Elric had experienced her strange powers before, reliving the first coming together of their related races, he had never seen her change so rapidly. Nor, in all his adventures and his dreams, had he seen movement so rapid in any shape-changer from mammal to reptile, though the Phoorn were not true reptiles, any more than Melnibonéans were true humans. Both had come into being in other worlds under different gods and philosophies. Both had learned the virtues of the other. And then, at last, they had mated, though still in many ways alien one to the other. And these were the folk whom the Dragon Kings of Melniboné claimed as their ancestors. This was not the first time he had seen why in his world dragons were called “brother” or “sister” and treated with such complete respect, each conversing with the other, when they lived on altered time, so that it seemed to Melnibonéans that their dragons slept for years or decades.

There were no further traces of the human about the Lady Fernrath. She was completely Phoorn, speaking in the ancient language used between Phoorn and Melnibonéan. Completely Phoorn as she bent that beautiful serrated neck to let him mount, turning her head so that residues of fiery venom from her mouth-sacs fell bursting upon the tiled terrace and did not harm him.

As if suspicious of pursuit, the lady firedrake peered this way and that into the night, her great claws clattering on the terra cotta, her wings stretching, wide, wide as she prepared to lift into the darkness of the night, giving voice with wild, beautiful music to the Phoorn’s ancient Song of Flight. Springing off the terrace, she began to gallop across the lawn, her sharp senses noting the obstacles as she approached that obsidian sea.

And then she was aloft.

And Elric, seated astride her gigantic, exquisite body, found himself flinging back his head, letting the cool air stream through his long white hair as he lifted his own voice to join in harmony with that complex melody, as natural to him and his kind as when the Phoorn and his own people first came to this sweet, glorious world and determined to take stewardship of it in the name of their ideals.

What had gone wrong between the time when he had enjoyed a long idyll with her and fallen in love in a new way? Then their faith in the Great Balance translated into so many practical notions of order and justice. Now? Now he had become used to lies, secrecies, political and other bargains. The whole world was a darker, more threatening place. If he had known how the changes in the World Below were mirrored in the World Above, he would not have had his friends come with him.

But all such thoughts were dissipating, for he rode a dragon again, bonding, as his genes remembered, with that monstrous, thumping heart, the deep, slow pulse, the beating of vast wings and the sweeping from side to side of that long, muscular tail. He relished the comfort of his heavy black armour but missed his great dragon spear, through which his thoughts were transmitted back and forth.

Now all he could tell was that he was heading west and inland. As dawn sunlight streaked the blue-black horizon, they flew over a forest, spired by great pines, towards a turreted fortress of gold-veined white marble, woven in a way to show both artistic elegance and sturdy practicality—and also, somehow, a faint sense of menace.