Baby From Frost by Ashe Moon
3
Delos
I stoppedfor a break at the mountain lodge that served as a rest point for dragons making the flight from Old Shore Port inland. Looking out from the landing platform, a whole new landscape lay open before me. The mountain’s rocky face dropped to meadows painted with mirror sheen lakes, rolling hills, and pastures roaming with flocks of white sheep. I was still too far to see Stonvale, but the ice dragon who ran the lodge pointed towards a distant crescent-shaped lake and told me that the city would be visible once I reached its north shore.
After lunch and an hour of rest, I was ready to finish the journey. Clutching my luggage in my claws, I took back to the sky. The surface of the lakes passing below reflected flashes of sunlight up at me, and a cloud of frightened ducks burst upwards as my shadow crossed through them. A farmer turned his head to look, shielding his eyes with his hand as his dog barked warnings for me not to come any closer. I was past them in seconds, going up and up until I caught a gust I could glide on. The world below me was a patchwork of green and cerulean. I’d never seen such incredible scenery before.
The path I was flying was well used by dragons. Couriers with bundles of mail strapped to their bellies, haulers flying lumber and raw stone, and even transport drakes carrying passengers on their backs in wooden carriages. The closer I got to the city, the more of these dragons I encountered, and it felt like a great departure from the atmosphere I’d gotten used to at home. In Old Shore Port, our community was small and somewhat underground. People who didn’t use their dragon forms to make a living typically didn’t shift. But as I passed the lake, I was greeted with a web of busy roads spreading out below me, and the sky became more crowded than anything I’d ever experienced before.
Then, I could see it. The clusters of villages and farmland, the roads, the traffic, all of it drew to a point dead ahead of me—gray granite ramparts just barely hiding tile rooftops the color of clay soil, punctuated by tall lookout towers on each corner. Suddenly, I remembered pieces of an excited rant that Rainor had gone on about Stonvale, one I’d mostly ignored. The fortress walls had been built during the years of conflict between dragons and humans hundreds of years ago to keep anything with wings out. Now, instead of archers manning the towers, there were immigration officers directing sky traffic into the city.
And the traffic was insane. Several lanes were going to the walls, all in different directions on different levels. Dragons passed me, and everyone seemed to know exactly where they were going. I had no idea what to do.
“Don’t stop in the middle of the fucking sky!” someone shouted, and they wheeled around me. I muttered an apology and dropped altitude, nearly smashing into a dragon hauling two gigantic sacks of potatoes in their claws.
Forget this, I thought and zipped down to the line of people marching in slow procession through the ground-level gate. I landed next to a horse-drawn cart, agitating two steeds that whinnied and snorted. Suddenly it was like every single eye had turned on me, and I realized I was surrounded by humans, save for the few dragons who were pulling human-driven carts, and they were all looking at me like I’d just insulted their mothers. A whistle shrieked and a man in a purple uniform jogged over, waving a striped flag.
“Where’s your porter pass, dragon?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “I just want to get into the city.”
“No pass? Then you better fly your scaly ass back up there.” He pointed into the air. “Only dragons coming through this entrance are those transporting human passengers. Go on.”
He shooed me with his hand, and I fought the urge to flick him away with my toe claw. I took back to the sky, and after getting kicked out of three more lines, I was just about on the verge of charging the gate when an elderly dragoness flew over and took me by the arm.
“You must be new to Stonvale.”
“I’m lost,” I said.
“I can see that. It can be an ordeal getting into the city for a newcomer. So many rules.” She pulled me along, guiding me through the cross-weave of traffic until we reached a line that seemed no different from any of the other ones.
“I don’t see why we can’t all just use the main ground gate,” I muttered.
“Where do you come from?”
“Old Shore Port,” I replied.
“Well, the way things are mixed up here might come as a surprise to someone from a small town like Old Shore Port. Once you get in the city, everyone is swirled together like milk and sugar in tea. But the humans still make the rules, and those rules hardly ever make sense.”
Finally, I was at the sky gate. A man in uniform was seated between two armored dragons on a floating platform that didn’t seem to be powered by anything except a hoop-shaped piece of metal that gave off a low buzzing sound. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I tilted my head to inspect it. It was some kind of receptacle for thunder dragon energy, much like my fire and ice orbs.
“Purpose of visit?” the man asked me. “Work, study, or pleasure?”
“Work and study,” I said.
“If you’re here working, you’ll need form 38A through R filled out and stamped. Study requires dragon form—”
“Kidding,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s pleasure. I’m here for pleasure.” Whatever was the quickest way inside.
The man blinked, stamped a piece of paper, and waved me past.
I stared at the never-ending city in front of me. I’d never seen anything like it. The streets bustled with people and dragons, and so did the sky. Huge stone buildings lined up like books on a shelf, none smaller than the tallest of Old Shore Port. The smell of grilled food mingled with wafts of horse manure and foreign spices. In a square below, dragon entertainers breathed fire into spectacular shapes for a crowd of children. And further off on a wide main road, there seemed to be some kind of parade where people in flower crowns sounded golden horns, while dragons draped in long robes held their wings high like sails and stomped their feet in a slow rhythm. I was overwhelmed. Completely and utterly. My nice, cold, dark room sounded really good right at that moment.
“Do you know where you’re going?” It was the old dragoness again.
“I… Well…” For a second, I forgot what I was doing here to begin with. “A librarium,” I blurted, finally finding my brain. “I’m looking for a librarium, a big one.”
“Is that where you’re staying?”
“No,” I said. “I…didn’t really think about where I was going to stay.”
She laughed. “You’re quite out of your depth, aren’t you, young drake? There’s a great number of libraries in the city, but if you have to choose one, then I’d choose the Grand Librarium. That’s probably what you’re looking for, and there are a few inns nearby, too. You were planning on staying somewhere, right? Or were you going to sleep on the street?”
“I’m unprepared, but not that unprepared,” I said, feeling somewhat dumb.
“Then I’ll make you a map to where you need to go. Here…”
We floated down to the ground and shifted to human form, and a few minutes later I was on my way with a hand-drawn map on the back of a napkin and fresh gratitude for the kindness of strangers. I looked back over my shoulder at the kind old woman and waved, feeling just a little more positive about my situation. Maybe it was a good thing I was the one who had to come here. I spent so much of my time at home in the station, only ever going out on patrols and taking care of incidents. I did my best to avoid meeting anyone outside of the flight if I could help it, and I’d only gotten more reclusive over the years.
I fished my black sun hat from my bag and tugged its brim as far down as I could, and kept to the street level where I walked under the shade of the awnings strung over merchant stalls selling produce, meats, spices, and knick-knacks. There seemed to be something going on in every direction I looked. I thought coming from the southern continent to Old Shore Port was a step into a big, busy world, but compared to this place, Old Shore Port was a ghost town.
My flush of positivity didn’t last very long. I tried to be discreet about following the map, but every time I had to stop to figure out where I was, it seemed like everyone noticed. I stuck out like a broken horn. Strapping my pack closer, I hurried onward and kept the map tucked in my palm for quick glances. I pushed into a crowd, a sea of people flowing in every direction, and I was swept along. The crash of a gong, laughter, the chatter of fireworks. A flare of heat on my cheek as to my right, a dragon torched huge rotating skewers of meat while two men cut pieces and served them to waiting customers.
“That’s a fire hazard,” I muttered before the crowd pushed me onto a street busy with pack carts and dragons hauling cargo like workhorses. I checked the map again, looked around for landmarks, but everything looked the same—massive, busy, stifling. Then a passing body smacked into the back of my hand and the map was gone, fluttering away into the trample of traffic never to be seen again. I was forced forward, my pulse racing, the noise around me rising to oppressive levels. I had to get out of here. I looked up—no room to shift, not even room to get into the sky. Had to keep going. Then, finally, an opening to the side. I threw myself out of the crowd and stumbled into a side alley.
I slumped against the wall, breathing hard. The movement on the main street continued like the endless rush of a river. There was no way I was getting back in there. The alley became a flight of narrow stairs lined with cramped entranceways and locked doors, moving far upward to the city’s outer walls. So, I climbed, hoping that I would somehow reach a cross street or something that would bring me to where I needed to go. I was going in the right direction, probably. I hoped.
The buildings on either side shaded the sun, only leaving a strip of blue sky. Laundry lines crossed like spiderwebs above me. A man with a pipe stuck his head out of a small window and lit the end of it with a glowing fingertip. The sound of the main street faded behind me, and things became surprisingly quiet. A cat darted out from somewhere and scampered up the stairs ahead of me, pausing every so often to look at me. Eventually, it lost interest and slipped into a narrow gap between buildings. Seeing the cat made me wonder if Soot was okay. Hopefully, someone had remembered to keep him out of my room.
I kept walking up the stairs, passing a terrace with an orange tree that seemed to sprout right out of the old stonework. It draped across the path, in danger of smashing through the opposing window if it grew any faster. Finally, I stepped out of the alleyway onto a large street. On the other side, the alley stairway continued. I was done with climbing. I went left and followed the street in the same direction I would’ve gone were I still down in the crowd. There was a tavern, and past that, a temple with high, twisted steeples. I kept going, trying to remember the directions from the map. I might’ve overestimated my capabilities to navigate through this place. I knew the city was big, but…this was beyond my experience.
Going with my gut was a bad idea, too. I made a few turns, thinking I knew where they would take me, but I ended up coming to a dead end and needing to retrace my steps each time. I was getting tired and grumpy. The day was zipping by, I hadn’t eaten anything, and my shoulders hurt from flying. I probably should’ve just stopped for directions, knocked on a door or something, but stubbornness got the best of me. So, I kept walking.
“Are you lost?”
Surprised at the little voice that came out of nowhere, I whirled around and found myself alone.
“Hi. I’m up here.”
I looked up and saw a little boy sitting on the edge of a high wall. He waved at me.
“Nope. I’m fine,” I said.
The boy jumped in the air, and to my surprise, shifted into a partial dragon form—wings and scales—and glided down. He popped back into human form just a few feet above the ground and dropped into step next to me. “I think you’re lost.”
“And why is that?”
“I saw you run into a wall back there,” he said. “And I can just tell.”
“Okay. I am a little lost.”
“Where are you going? I’ll help you.”
“Won’t your parents worry about you? Walking off with some stranger?”
He shrugged. “You seem nice.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, I can tell,” he said with a grin. “You’re nice.”
“What’s a kid your age doing alone, sitting on random walls?” I asked, looking around. “You weren’t up on those rooftops, were you?”
“So what if I was? My dad said I could go around when I finished class.” He put his hands on his hips. “You need help or not?”
I laughed. “Fine, fine. I’m looking for the Grand Librarium. I was told there are places to stay around it?”
His face lit up. “That’s where I live! It’s really close.”
Without another word, the little boy took off running, and I sprinted after him. I was reminded of Dalia and how she loved for all of us to chase her around the station, her little legs barely carrying her. This kid was older than Dalia and sure-footed; he turned down a narrow corridor between buildings, hardly big enough to be called an alleyway, and easily hurdled up onto a wooden crate and clambered to a terrace planter. I grunted my way up, scraping my knee in the process, and followed him through a private courtyard where someone was sunbathing. They looked up in surprise when we ran past, and I waved apologetically.
“Slow down,” I said. “I can’t keep up with you.”
“Come on!” he answered, bounding effortlessly over a short wall.
He slipped into another tight passage, his tiny shoulders narrow enough that he could run without touching the walls. I had to take off my pack and shimmy sideways, and the space got more and more narrow until I was just about stuck.
“Hey!” I called after him. He turned around, laughed, and ran back to me. He grabbed my hand and pulled with all his weight, but my chest was wedged in tight. “Hold on,” I said and concentrated my cold energy to my upper body to turn the wall’s surface to ice. Finally, I slid forward, and my new friend pulled harder, dragging me through the crevice. When I popped out the other side, I realized my shirt had frozen and ripped open in the front and back, and I stood there with the tattered shreds hanging off my shoulders. I felt like Rainor when he once had burst open his shirt flexing his muscles in a sad attempt to get Thomas’s attention.
The kid fell to the ground, holding his stomach and laughing. I tried to pull the remains of my poor shirt closed, but they fell off of me in ribbons.
“Okay, it’s not that funny,” I said.
“It’s so funny,” he shrieked. “The funniest thing I’ve seen in my life!” He hiccupped out a few more giggles and got to his feet. “Are you an ice dragon?”
“No, I just get very cold sometimes,” I said, pulling a shirt from my bag.
He grinned at me. “You’re funny. Come on, it’s just this way. I’m an ice dragon too.”
“Really?”
“Dad says there aren’t too many of us here. I’ve only ever met fire dragons. Can you fly?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I can’t,” he replied, sounding a little sad.
“Why not? I saw your wings earlier. You must be past the age of your first flight.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. I can kind of do it. I don’t know how to use my full dragon form.”
“Your parents never taught you?”
He shook his head and didn’t say anything more, so I changed the subject. “You live at the Librarium?”
“Uh-huh. Just me and my dad. Well, there’s a bunch of others, too. Kids my age, I mean.”
I vaguely recalled something that Rainor had told me about the people who ran these archives and libraries, that they provided a place to live in exchange for work. Old Shore Port’s small library might’ve been part of the system; I wasn’t sure.
“It’s gotta be fun to live in a library,” I said. “Lots of books.”
“Blech.” He stuck out his tongue. “Nuh-uh. I have to study all day, and it’s so boring. But Dad says I need to become an Archivist when I grow up. He thinks it’s bad for me to go out around town.”
“There’s a lot you can get from studying,” I said.
“A headache.”
I laughed. “No. You can learn how to do all sorts of interesting things. Have you ever studied alchemy?”
“No. What’s that?”
“It’s like magic. Here, watch this.” I paused to shuffle around in my bag and pulled out a marble-sized orb. I rolled it between my thumb and forefinger, showing it to him, and then threw it into the empty street. It shattered, and a line of flame rolled across the ground and licked up into the air like a small geyser. His eyes were wide. “With alchemy, the elemental powers of dragons can be harnessed by anyone.”
“Whoa. Can I have one of those?”
“Maybe when you’re older,” I said, chuckling.
After a few more minutes of walking, we stopped in front of an imposing stone building with a set of stairs leading up to a pair of massive wooden doors framed by ornate engravings. It was closely neighbored by a tavern on one side, and a row of featureless buildings on the other, with a narrow alleyway that climbed up to the city wall far behind it.
“Here we are!” he said, throwing up his hands. “And there’s an inn. There, and there, too.” He pointed around.
“You’ve been a great guide. Thank you. What’s your name?”
“I’m Oli,” he said, smiling brightly. “What’s your name?”
“Delos,” I replied, and I held out my hand.
Oli shook it, smiled wider, and then jogged up the steps towards the doors. “Whatcha waiting for?” he asked.
“It’s been a long trip. I’m going to go find a place to stay first. Maybe I’ll see you again later.”
“If you find me, I’ll show you around the Librarium. I know every single spot.”
Then he waved, opened up a normal-sized door inset into one of the big doors, and disappeared inside.
I found a room at the tavern next door, which had lodging in its upper floors. After unpacking my things and arranging a limited setup of alchemy gear on the cramped desk, I immediately wrote a letter to the flight telling them I’d arrived, some details about the journey, and where I was staying, and gave it to the landlady to dispatch. I used the shared bath on the second floor and rubbed a special ice salve onto my sore muscles. I wasn’t used to flying such long distances and my body was feeling it now, all tight along my shoulders and spine. I moved my arms in slow circles, trying to stretch myself out. Ow. Cramping. It really hurt.
I dressed, went outside, and walked back to the library. I craned my neck to look at the building and a flock of birds fluttered out from the top, just a peppering of dark specks against the sky. The inside was cavernous. High windows shone sunlight on rows and rows of high bookshelves and cabinets stuffed to bursting with an infinite collection of material. Long desks took up the center of the main room, lots of people hard at work. Stairways curled up to the upper floors, where old paintings of dragons and humans hung all along the walls. I had to pick my jaw up from the floor. I wanted to find their alchemy books and dig deep into everything they had, but I had a job to do—the sooner I could get what I came for and go home, the better. I wandered around for a while, clueless about where to look. Every floor and every room seemed to have more shelves, more books, and I had no idea how any of it was arranged.
I was on the third floor when a familiar voice called out, “You’re back!”
Oli was sitting on the atrium railing, his little legs swinging back and forth. My heart immediately jumped into my throat—one wrong move and he could slip and fall backward.
“I don’t think you should be up there,” I said. “It’s not safe.”
“I sit up here all the time,” he said.
“Well, I’d feel a lot better if you came down. You don’t know how to use your wings.”
“You’re not my dad.”
“No, but I don’t want to see a kid splat today. That would really ruin my day.”
He started laughing, but he froze in fear when his eyes caught something behind me.
“OLI!” a voice boomed out. “What did I tell you about sitting up there? Get down!”
Without protest, he dropped down to the ground, looking sheepish. “Sorry, Dad.”
I turned around. My heart, still in my throat, was in danger of exploding out of my mouth. Everything went into a spin. My eyes had to be lying to me, right? It couldn't be him.
“Delos?” he whispered, his face pale.
By the Gods, it was him.
