Dragonlove by Marc Secchia

–she had once told him it was her favourite passage–which ranged from dejected to frenetic, full of leaps and twirls reminiscent of the frolicking of flames. But what of the musicianship of an Ancient Dragon! Lia knew Dragons could produce at least three notes in harmony when they sang. Deep, sonorous notes issued from the lower larynx, right down in the chest, mid-tones from the middle throat, and piercingly sweet notes from a flap of skin in the roof of the mouth. Amaryllion’s song was a vast symphony of instruments, horns and bugles and drums mingled with softer flutelike tones and haunting strings.
    As she danced, he wove magic.
    Tendrils of fire began to flicker around Lia’s torso. The flames coalesced, gathering form and developing wings and a neck and muzzle, and a body as supple as molten lava. A fire-dragonet, she realised, spurring herself on to greater effort, to greater artistry. Her slippers spun across Amaryllion’s paw, barely touching his hide before she vaulted aloft again, soaring, stretching, burning with the passion of her inner infatuation with the flames, as graceful as the first gleam of a twin-suns dawn upon a pristine Islet. The dragonet danced with her, looping and spiralling about her spinning body, weaving his own melody.
    Flicker! Her heart squeezed in her chest. It’s you! Oh, my darling …
    Magic, as thick and buoyant as water, bore Hualiama along on its own wings as Amaryllion juddered into motion, slithering down the gully with a vast, metallic scraping across stone, creating a vibration which drilled into the mastoid bones of her inner ear, and caused the Island to quiver as though a Land Dragon gnawed at its roots.
    Faster and faster they descended, following an ancient watercourse. The tempo of Hualiama’s dance quickened as she chased the fire-dragonet, playing with him, laughing as he flitted about her face, as Flicker’s incorporeal tail stroked her shoulders with a touch of silken fire. Amaryllion bore her upon his paw through vast caves filled with eerie, phosphorescent light and dazzling spars of crystal which made the roots of Ha’athior Island gleam like chambers fit for a king descended from the stars. At length, a new light came to Hualiama’s awareness, which she realised was the radiance of the outside world.
    The fire-dragonet hovered before her face.
    Come, Flicker, she invited him. Be with me forever.
    The dragonet dived down her throat. Lia gasped, her lungs scorched by heat, a searing sensation that passed almost instantaneously up her spinal cord to detonate behind her eyes. All was flame. Roaring. Lambent. Burning, yet not consuming. An awareness of a mischievous presence darting and diving somehow within her resolved into a conviction that some part of Flicker, perhaps the dragonet’s fire-soul, had entered her being without fusing with her, as she had expected. His fire soaked into the most deep-rooted parts of her being, as if a hot volcanic rain fell upon parched ground.
    Hualiama soared into the finale of her dance, dimly realising that the Ancient Dragon had halted a few hundred feet before exiting Ha’athior Island, the wide ledge of his forepaw held just above his cavernous nostrils to allow him to regard her with both eyes. She sensed formidable fires mounting within her friend. As Lia stilled, holding the concluding dying-flame position, she read the coils and blossoms of fire stirring within his great orbs, and felt she might understand the mighty Dragon’s emotions.
    She said, Don’t be afraid, Amaryllion. The eternal fires are your birthright.
    Her thoughts whispered against his mind like a bird’s wings skirting the cliff-edge of an Island. Yet, the Ancient Dragon heard her, and chuckled, And I thought to comfort thee, little mouse!
    I’m also afraid, she admitted. I fear what your flame will do to me, mighty Dragon.
    Thy fate will rise not from what I do, but from who thou wert born to be. Hualiama bowed her head at his kind yet