Draigkhiun: Chapter One, Section I

PART I 

Anam Draig

Foy do me, anam Draig, k’ann lashay loystchi cray khiun. Avrim shay, crutanna sol, agas dovrim shay ayeh levrith. Ethrim loy me, ar shkeithni Draig, k’ann anami tcha mann fullann. Faikhrim sheo dowhan Draig agas dovrim tu loy boarr.

The Dragon’s Soul

Find, for me, the Dragon’s soul, where it lies quiet within the earth. Sing to it, of the trials of life, and awaken it to rebirth. Fly with me, on the Dragon’s wings, where our spirits wish to soar. Look upon this Dragon’s world and awaken with its roar. -Shondrean prayer of rebirth

Chapter One:

Find, for Me, the Dragon’s Soul

I

The seasons were changing.

    There was the cool, crisp feeling to the late-morning air that intimated life in our little part of the world was entering its unavoidable long slumber. The autumnal undercurrents pumped my blood every time I saw the Andowhan maples exploding in iridescent reds, oranges and purples that were interspersed with the dried-out yellows of the Dairai-oak leaves. The colors of the patchwork woodlots bordering my family’s fields cast pastel reflections upon the pale tiles of my parents’ kitchen. Even after watching this transformation through twenty-three autumns—eighteen standard years of Human Chronological Time—it still managed to take my breath away.

     I took it all in through the open kitchen window and began to feel that itch, somewhere deep in my soul, that anticipated the upcoming hunting season. It seemed the one wholesome bit of excitement I currently had in my life.

     My breath steamed in the cold air as I cradled my hands around that first, late-morning, hot, healing cup of good coffee that started a much-needed day off. With half-lidded eyes I continued to take in the view of my family’s property while letting the coffee’s aroma waft away over two weeks of grueling extra hours and numbing renovation of the recycling plant. It was also a welcome reprieve from the troubled dreams of the night before.

I knew Ma was working and the twins would still be at school for several hours and I couldn’t think much beyond the peaceful quiet of the house, the view and the warm sunshine mixing with the cool breeze trickling through the open kitchen window. I could only force myself to get up and make additional cups of coffee.

     Four cups of coffee later and my state of mind and body was much the same. I just could not pry myself away from that happy, lazy state. I could barely keep my eyes open as I rested my chin on my sore hands. I didn’t care if I stayed that way for the rest of the day or, at the least, until my twin nieces came home and unleashed all unholy, teenage hell.

     Thunk! I had forgotten that the patriarch would be around.

The sound of Pap’s palm slapping the oak table brought me wide awake. The caffeine from four cups of strong coffee decided it was time to stimulate me and my heart raced as my breath momentarily froze.

     “So, Caleb, do you plan to waste the rest of your day as much as you’re wasting our heat?” Pap growled at me from where he stood across the table. He looked over his shoulder at the open window.

     “Yes.” I was awake now. I smiled at him. “At least most of it. I never heard the thermostats click or I would’ve closed the window, Pap.” I took a long swallow from my mug. This was an old argument between us that concerned my late-morning lethargy as much as leaving a window open on a cold morning. This happened much more frequently since I had finished college and he had retired.

     “Okh!” he snorted. “You never heard them click because I still have them turned off. I try to do our part for Cohnuai and not draw too much energy and you go and blow it out the window—literally!” Pap swept his hands across the table towards the offending window and made a sound that was either another snort or an attempt to mimic the wind.

“Okh, iguntas djia, Ahir!” I replied, banging my empty mug on the table. “It’s no colder in here, now, than you leaving the pantry door to the root cellar open this morning.” In my morning stupor I had almost fallen down the cellar stairs while trying to retrieve a fresh jar of coffee beans from the pantry.

“Besides,” I continued, leaning back in my chair, “maybe it’s just a case of those old, aching bones you always complain to me about, making it seem too cold. I certainly don’t feel it.” I let my chair slip back to level.

As soon as I said it I knew I had gone too far. Pap’s eyes narrowed and his scowl was quite visible through his grizzled, bushy beard. He drew himself up straight. Fergus Lonnergan was an imposing, broad-shouldered man at an even 200 centimeters tall. I took a deep breath anticipating his anger. Instead, his face quickly relaxed.

“Since you seem to need to prove how rugged you are, how about helping me turn the garden over?” he asked.

I instinctively rolled my eyes before I could even think about his request: yard work, however important, was the last thing my own aching hands and back wanted on my first day off in over twenty days.

“I thought as much,” he replied to my reaction.

“Pap, I’m sorry. I—” I stammered.

“Don’t worry about it,” he cut me off. “I guess you’ve earned a little lazy time.” Pap gave me a small, sad smile. “But, since you are being so productive, how about taking care of all of this.”

He slid the maple box I used for my correspondence across the table at me. “It’s been piling up for the better part of a month. There are probably things that had best be dealt with soon, Caleb.”

“Okay.” I looked from the box towards my father but he had already turned and was out the back door. Through the open window I heard him rummaging through his tools in the barn.

“Tcha broan orum, Daid.” I muttered the apology only to myself as I got up and closed the window. I looked out and watched Pap walk the tiller into the family’s main field, where it began just beyond the driveway. He was limping a little so the cold was bothering him. There would also be rain soon. I was trying to energize myself to go help him when I saw my uncle Collin strolling over from his corner of the property. He had a shovel and two rakes slung across his shoulder and I realized Pap had not been counting on me for help today. I gave a bittersweet sigh of relief and turned away.

Against my better judgment I poured myself another cup from the pot, added honey and cream, and turned my attention back to the box on the table. I had planned to take care of my correspondence, just not quite then. I sat down and decided to just get the chore over with.

The colored data disks reminded me of just how negligent I had been in dealing with my correspondence. After ten days all unchecked correspondence and transactions were purged and sent to the individual on disk so as not to backlog the server. I would, of course, be charged for this service. It was a fee I was all too familiar with.

There were three disks addressed to me: the red disk contained all statements and transactions from my creditors; the brown, with its icon of nine gold coins, held my bank records; and the plume icon, on a pale blue disk was my mail and messages that I had neglected for too long.

Luckily, the red disk held only one icon on its holographic label—an open book overlapping three triangular links, intertwined on a common point. My only outstanding debt was for my student loan from when I attended Guildhall University. I knew what was in the brown disk fairly well as I had barely had time or energy to spend my credits.

I dismissed checking the contents of the blue disk after noticing the envelope on the bottom under several hardcopies Ma and Pap had printed from the family accounts for me. My heart leapt a little at the sight of it. I couldn’t help but feel a little anxiety as I reached for it.

I was hoping it was from Genevieve Desmarais. She was one of the few people I knew who enjoyed the personality displayed in writing a message out by hand in a world of near-instantaneous, direct-link cognitive messaging. My heart ached while thinking of her, and I was desperately hoping that she had finally found the time in her busy schedule to write.

We had maintained a close relationship through college that always managed to stumble over some obstacle or another while teetering on that line between friendship and love. I had always been too irresolute, too afraid to try and initiate that jump across without receiving a clear feeling of deeper interest from her. This was too typical for me: I almost always fought with a cowardly hesitation or uncertainty in the validity of my motives or decisions.

I had never dared to push my luck and I was left mostly empty-handed and dreamy as she took a choice job with the Projects, terraforming Sylphalia on the other side of the Confederation. My poor grades and I were left still living with my parents, working as a sewage recycling technician and waiting on a beautiful woman’s promises to give me a recommendation to Sylphalia’s Civilian Corps.

Although my heartache for Genevieve was strong enough to be nauseating it paled against the cascade of feelings that struck me when I finally read the envelope that carried the embossed seal for the Terran Reclamation Project. I didn’t need to see my family’s sigil of a bear under a solitary star to know who it was from. This letter was almost a year and several terse Cog-Net communications in coming. I had all but given up on it; more so than my hopes for securing a position on Sylphalia.

It was from my uncle, Malakai, the family’s great wanderer and Chief Bioethicist for the TRP.

My hand was shaking as I finished pulling the envelope from the box. I wasn’t sure that I truly wanted to know what it contained. I held it for several seconds and absorbed the lines of the Project seal. Looking at the Lonnergan sigil in the upper left corner brought my thoughts back to the night in which everything contained in that antiquarian envelope started:

I was in my final semester at Guildhall. I had come home late from Beordarakh’s Pub and was trying to navigate the twisting and rocking stairs that led from our back door, by the kitchen, to my room without disturbing the rest of the family. A deep and unexpected voice bellowed from the darkened foot of the stairs and I would have jumped out of my shoes if I had not already taken them off.

“Out a little late for a school night, aren’t you, Caleb?”

“Okh, Jehosephus, tcha djiaval agat!” Cursing, I gripped at the railing and leaned back against the wall to steady myself and let my heart rate slow down.

“I don’t have any important classes tomorrow,” I replied. I had already planned to skip them before deciding to go out drinking with friends.

Through my alcoholic stupor, I tried to place a name and face to that voice in the dark. It was not my father’s or Uncle Collin’s. My heart was not slowing down. It sped up as my foggy mind began to anticipate trouble. Who was in my house unexpectedly?

“Well, come on down. Let me take a look at you, Nia. It seems like the last time I’d seen you, you were just a tacrann and always banging that old coffee pot on your gramma’s good oak table.”

In a mildly accented Shondrean, he had called me Nephew. I had only one other uncle.

“Malakai?” I asked, my senses clearing a little. I hadn’t been a baby the last time I’d seen him but it had still been more than a decade. I started to make my way back down the stairs. I was shaking a little from the adrenaline rush of his surprise.

“So you do remember your long-lost uncle, eh?” He wrapped his big arms around me in a bear-like hug as I came towards the landing.

“Of course; when did you get here?” I had heard nothing of his planning to visit. I didn’t think my parents had either.

“Right at dinnertime,” he released his hug. I had to stand a step up to look him in the eye. “You should’ve seen the looks on your parents’ faces when I walked in and sat myself down—unannounced.” He laughed.

“They had no idea you were coming?” We stepped through the left door and down into the dimly lit kitchen.

“Not a clue.” He laughed again. “I owed them one after they surprised me at the blessing of Astoria; with them eloping there to be married and all!”

“Oh?”

“Oh, you ask? Oh, is right. They never told you kids about their wedding?” He looked at me in the low light and I shook my head. “Well. That’s a story for another time. Ha!”

I started to sit down. It was more like falling into the chair. I was still desperately trying to recover my senses. I was also perturbed that he hadn’t continued with the story of my parents. I liked knowing stories from their past.

“You look like you could use a little refreshment, young sir. What’s your preference?” Malakai asked from where he stood by the stove.

“Actually,” I began, forgetting my momentary irritation. Actually, I had had enough refreshment and didn’t immediately answer him. I debated on just pouring myself a glass of water to try and stave off the hangover I knew would make me miserable the next morning. But, I began to drunkenly reason with myself, I had not seen Malakai in too many years and he had given me quite a fright. But, I began to think again that I was really quite drunk already.

“Actually,” I began again, “I believe we have quite a bit of Pap’s porter in the pantry that needs to be drunk before it ages too much.”

“You mean you actually like that dark antallop piss?”

“Yeah,” I slurred, cocking my chin towards the sink. “Looks like I’m not the only one.” I had noticed the litter of empty bottles on the counter by the sink as we walked in from the stairs.

“Good. I see you’ve grown to be a man after my own heart. Sha’, Fergus and Mareia did all right. That, they did.” Malakai strode across the kitchen and disappeared down the dark hall to the pantry. I heard bottles clinking.

“Don’t you go rummaging like some clumsy bear and wake Pap,” I called into the darkness. I didn’t have to worry about waking Ma because she was on her rotation of night shifts.

“You wouldn’t know a real bear if it bit you in the ass,” Malakai growled as he stepped back into the kitchen. “I grew up here, too. I know my way around.” He set four bottles on the table and popped the tops off two of them.

“As for your father,” he grinned and cocked his chin towards the counter and its empty bottles, “I don’t think we’ll have to worry about him for the rest of the evening. Coll’s out on retreat or he’d still be keeping us company.”

“Oh.” I didn’t think I’d seen Pap drink in quite a while, especially after Luke and Elise had been killed on Astoria. I replaced those thoughts with the image of the squint-eyed look that my father always got during the few times I could recall he was drunk. I chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Just thinking of Pap drunk.” I looked at Malakai. As my father’s twin, the only discernable difference was the short hair and more closely trimmed beard. He kept both trimmed to military specs.

“Little shisa never could hold his alcohol.” Malakai laughed too.

“Nope.” I laughed some more. “Kinyantai n’Sruh, it’s sure good to see you, Uncail.”

“It’s sure good to come home once in a while, Caleb.” He slowly glanced around the kitchen. “It’s been too long?”

I wasn’t sure if he was asking me or making a statement.

“I guess. Last time any of us saw you was for Gramma’s funeral.” I bit at my tongue knowing I had said the wrong thing.

“Great reunion that was. Helluva way to make amends.” His face darkened. “Mom never could stomach that I had gone away so far. I should’ve been the good widower and come home to be with the family. But, no, I had to go running off to Terra after that damned war and after Leanne.”

I wished I had actually bit my tongue and done it sooner. I hadn’t been visiting with my uncle for more than ten minutes and, stupid drunk that I was, had already managed to spoil the mood. While Malakai was stationed on Astoria, Leanne, his first wife, was on the team sent to investigate a possible Colonial reclamation of Terra. She was killed during the first contact with the Histaklii, an alien race that had taken up a limited residence on old Earth during humanity’s absence. Malakai had become a member of the TRP soon after the Cromwell Accord ended a brutal war between the species and established a tenuous cohabitation of human Colonists and Histaklii.

He had been there ever since, much to the dissatisfaction of many relatives who held firmly to the Shondrean belief that family should stay close. The greater good of the extended family was the core of our people. The high percentage of Andowhanese among the casualty lists of the war with the Histaklii had only strengthened and reaffirmed these beliefs.

Malakai and Pap had been the first Lonnergans to leave Andowhan Orga since its colonization.

An already strained relationship between Malakai and the family broke wide open after he failed to attend his father’s funeral. According to Ma and Pap, he had had good reason: Terra was the deep frontier of Confederation territory and communications and travel were extremely limited. From what I understood, Gramps had been gone almost two years before Malakai had even known.

Those were the early years of the TRP; much was rapidly changing since.

Malakai looked off to the ceiling and was morose and quiet. I planned to keep my mouth shut until he decided to share his thoughts.

“Hmpf,” he snorted, drumming his fingers on the table. He returned his gaze back to me and gave a sad, forced smile. “Well, tcha shay kaltche fan n’Sruh.” Many years on Terra had definitely accented his Shondrean.

“It’s all lost in the river,” I reiterated.

“Damn right it is!” He drummed his fingers more frenetically and fixed me with a hard stare. “And don’t you ever forget that, Nia! If you spend your days that are left wasting away over old hurts and regrets, all you’ll accomplish is wasting away. And, then, what’s left?” He slapped his hand on the table and I jumped.

“N—nothing,” I stuttered in reply.

“Right! Caleb, every time I came home on leave, from one Project or another, your grandmother would remind me of her disapproval at how far away I was: ‘Mal,’ she’d say, ‘if you don’t have family then you have nothing’. Thirty years of Confederation service has taught me the truths of that.” He crossed his arms on the table and continued to drum the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop. His eyes drifted absently towards the ceiling and nothing.

“Does this mean you’re returning to Andowhan, then?”

“Kinyantai n’Sruh, no!” He came back to our reality and fixed me with an intent stare. “The truth is that being away from family is a heavy price to pay. But you can’t let that get in the way of following your soul. What did I say wasting away gets you?”

“Nothing.”

“Absolutely right!” He Paused. “Caleb, families—especially Shondrean families—have got to understand that some damned chicks have got to fly from the nest. Pining away for them or preventing them from doing so won’t solve one damned thing.” He crossed his arms on his chest and sat back with great self-satisfaction.

I wondered, to myself, if there wasn’t a bit of hypocrisy to his statements, with the way that he seemed to worship the ghost of Leanne in his devotion to the TRP.

“Caleb, it’s hard—really hard—being so far from the family: siblings are growing old and their children growing up in eye blinks.” He shook his head and leaned forward towards me, holding my gaze. “Eye blinks! You can’t even begin to imagine it.” He leaned back and his eyes went towards the ceiling again.

Actually I could, though I chose not to mention it. My oldest brother, who had only been interested in pursuing his artwork and raising his family, had followed his wife, a Colonial Marine, to Astoria before he and Elise were even expecting the twins. I had hugged them goodbye, watched them depart and lost them to the Fhovoyan raid three years later. And my other brother, Ezekiel, was now somewhere among the stars piloting a Suhlaric-class corvette for the Colonial Armed Forces along the supply route to Terra. It was no wonder that my parents tolerated my listlessness: I was staying close and safe. I was possibly becoming the de facto heir apparent of the household.

I suddenly felt somewhat sobered.

“Have you fallen asleep with your eyes open?” Malakai was returning to the table with several more bottles clutched in the crooks of his fingers.

“Huh?  No.” I tried to return from my daze. I didn’t remember him getting up. I didn’t remember emptying the bottles we had started with. “I was just thinking, Uncail.”

“’Bout what?”

He popped the lids off two more bottles and sat down, passing one to me. I took a long swallow from it and tried to get Luke back out of my mind.

“Eye blinks,” I quickly replied.

“Yeah?” Malakai looked a little more relaxed, to me. He smiled a little easier this time. He cleared his throat.

“Caleb, there is absolutely no way I could come back to Andowhan.” He paused and took a long swallow from his porter. “Terra, I’d have to say, is the most incredible planet I have set foot on.” His smile broadened. His eyes shone with a mischievous sparkle. “The wild beauty of it: we get to see much of the place as it was before our ancestors left their caves. It’s had more than two Terran millennia without any significant human activity!”

“It must be incredible.” I had eagerly watched every holo regarding Terra I could get my hands on.

“Beyond any imagining you can do sitting, back here, in the heart of the Colonies.”

“No, I guess not,” I mumbled. Staring down at the table, I sipped at my porter and retreated more within my own thoughts. His statement touched home: I had had a sheltered, limited view of our universe.

I’d spent so much of my childhood terrified of the monsters that might have lurked behind every bush or in the shadows. Certainly, some of the fauna that was native to Andowhan Orga—our “Golden Earth”—deserved a strong foundation for that fear. And, for so long it seemed, I’d had trouble just getting my little feet to leave our immediate backyard.

But the tenets of the Tuahan Solas Shondra—the People of the Ancient Light—prohibited the eradication of any species, no matter how dangerous or loathsome. In return these same tenets reaffirmed our place in the predator-prey balances of any ecosystem and this helped calm my fears of the natural world. I was as much dinner as any antallop.

But it did little for the rest of my life, as my unresolved affections for Genevieve continually reaffirmed.

In retrospect, I also had to wonder if my parents’ exposure to the deprivations of war and piracy in the Confederation’s outlying territories had left them with an unhealthy tolerance of my timid approach towards life: I was home; I was safe. With them, in easy reach, I was the swaddled baby of the family.

Maybe I was worth it to them because, as a third child, I was an unplanned tax burden. With them in easy reach I felt shiftless, bored and lackadaisical. I was frustrated and restless and—

“Are you sure you’re not falling asleep, Caleb?” Malakai asked, staring at me with noticeable concern on his face. “Maybe you should head to bed.”

I came out of my thoughts and into my body with my head resting on one hand. My forgotten bottle remained held precipitously in the other.

“No.” I shook my head for emphasis, steadying my neglected bottle on the table. “I was lost in my thoughts, again, that’s all.” I was starting to seriously feel the lateness of the hour but was determined not to show it.

“I hear you do a lot of that.” He continued to stare at me. “Just stare off.”

“Do you, now?” I held his gaze for a moment and then let my eyes drift over his shoulder towards the sink and its empty bottles. I quickly counted them and just as quickly forgot the number. I could almost feel an elder’s lecture coming on.

“Who from?” I asked. I knew the answer just the same.

“Oh, I hear things from all over. Words whisper to me on the wind.” He said it in a breathy voice. He arched his eyebrows and exhaled through pursed lips to make a sound like a sighing breeze.

“Sure you do,” I replied. The comical expression left his face but he continued to stare at me.

“So, Nia, can I ask you a question?  And answer me honestly if you answer me at all.” He sat cockeyed in the chair, still staring at me, with an elbow resting on the chair back.

“Go ahead.” I was dreading what would come next but, like my inebriated fatigue, I was going to expend all effort not to show it.

“What are you doing here?”

“Drinking with you!”

“Don’t be the amadan you act like. Now, I asked you a serious question, dammit!”

Here it comes, I thought. I leaned back in my chair and stared up at the ceiling to collect myself, my head lolling like a rag doll’s. I let my head roll forward and looked Malakai in the eye.

“Why aren’t you going to the Projects?” He continued to stare at me, unmoving.

“I guess I’m content here,” I lied. As my cumulative grade point average could attest to, I had wanderlust. I found my attentions were constantly straying to the countryside. I was happiest getting soaked and slimy in swamps, hiking the woodlands or hunting antallop on the grasslands that covered most of Andowhan. A degree in Planetary Ecology had been a good choice for me but my desire to be in the field more than the classroom had resulted in two poor grades for every one good.

“I asked you to be honest with me, Nia.”

“What?  Did you come all this way just so you could harass me about my life?” I was tired, coming down from a drunk and defensively irritable. “What’s the matter, Ma and Pap put you up to this because they haven’t had the heart to do it themselves for too long?”

“Maybe I have come all this way just to kick you in the ass! But your parents weren’t behind it.” He still hadn’t moved but his expression was much sterner. “Now, why aren’t you going to the Projects?”

“I’ve tried for Sylphalia. They won’t take me.”

“Okh, forget that showboat. Have you tried the General Projects?”

“No. I just figured I wasn’t the go-getter that they’d want. I don’t exactly have what it takes on paper. They might take me as a miner on Archeron.” I shrugged my shoulders and let my eyes drift back towards the sink. Through the window over the sink I could see the first red streaks of dawn.

“Quit being such a fool! I hear good things about you.”

“What?  You know, you shouldn’t listen to what Ma and Pap say.”

Malakai leaned forward and placed his palms flat to the table. His eyes were only centimeters from mine. I locked my eyes on his.

“Listen, Caleb, I went through school with two professors—Peabody and Johansen— whom you’ve done some pretty impressive fieldwork for. You are a staff sergeant in the Andowhan Garda Plannad. You are a Ranger, rated for Vigilant-class battle armor. Don’t be too quick to put your skills down. You’re not some hapless foot soldier, barely competent to act as Garda Shoheen on a street corner!”

“I’m not.” I broke eye contact for a moment. “I’m only being realistic.”

“If that attitude reflects you all the time then, of course, the Projects won’t want you.” Malakai folded his hands together on the table. “How much of this is really you and how much is because you’re unhappy being stuck around the homestead, keeping your folks happy but feeling there’s no choice?”

“I’m not unhappy.”

“Bocakh!” He slammed a palm on the table right in front of me. He was so fast I barely caught the motion. “That is one thing your parents have told me: piss-poor grades, skipping classes. Kinyant n’sruh! From what I’m hearing you spend most of your free time and credits drinking.”

Malakai took another swallow from his bottle. I knew I couldn’t handle any more or I would definitely be sick.

“Have you thought of enlisting in the CAF?”

“Time or two. Ma and Pap keep convincing me to wait, though.”

“Dammit! Jehosephus, tcha djiaval agat,” he cursed. “They’ll keep you safe until you die of it!”

“Think about it, Uncail, one of my brothers is already in the CAF. The other is dead.”

“Did staying out of the service save Luke’s life?” Malakai cut me off with the question. “Astoria was an established, self-governing planet. It was, in the Shondrean sense, ‘Home’ for several million people. That sure as hell didn’t save most of them.”

“The Fhovoy have never touched Andowhan,” I responded. I finally wondered if he was only in one of his legendary, drunken and argumentative moods. It was rumored that he loved a fight for the pure sake of a fight.

“But the Unitarians have!”

“What does this have to do with why I’m not enlisted in the Projects or the CAF, Malakai?” I was tired. I noticed that much more light was coming through the windows.

“Because I know you’re unhappy. Your parents do too if they won’t admit to why.” He picked up his bottle of porter and drained it. He grimaced at the bitterness in the dregs before continuing with his lecture. “What I’m saying; what I’ve been trying to say all night is that family is precious but it is not the ultimate everything. It should be there to welcome you home and to support you but not imprison you. Life’s too dear and unpredictable, Nia, to waste in the false protection of the family fold.”

“Malakai,” I interjected, laughing, “are you trying to recruit me for the TRP?” I was mostly joking.

“Yes,” he replied.

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