Almare - The White Mirror

For several terrifying seconds, Virginia wasn’t sure if she was alive or dead. All she could see was blackness, and all there was to be heard was the distant rumblings of thunder. She soon realized, though, that everything was dark because her eyes were squeezed shut, and once they were open she relaxed quite a bit. Still, it was dark, but above could be seen stars and a half-full moon.

She was still safe inside the clear dome, and Patrick was curled up in her arms, whimpering. As Virginia hugged him tightly, she saw that Wolf and Tony’s faces were pale with wide eyes and Tony was taking deep breaths. She supposed that she looked much the same.

“I guess it’s over,” Wolf said. His voice sounded strange as he broke the silence that always prevails after a storm.

Apparently, it was over, but the results of what the people in Welkin had done were everywhere. First of all, when Virginia dared to glance down, she could see that they were certainly not in the same place as they had been when the storm started. All Virginia could see below was blackness, specked here and there by white, but not the white of fires or lamps; white like the crests of waves. They had been blown all the way to the ocean by the tremendous winds from the storm. But was it the Great Northern Sea, or the Great Southern one, or another body of water altogether? Far away to one side a strip of land could be seen reflecting the moonlight, but it was much too dark and too distant to determine what Kingdom it was.

And the straight, orderly rows of people that had been near Virginia before the storm started were no more. Now they were scattered all over the sky, each person standing on his or her own cloud. If it was daytime, they could have been seen far away in the distance, many of them clustered near the land, and beyond where the eye could reach some of them were still working. It would be a while before each and every person was back in Welkin safe and sound. In fact, where was Welkin? Did it even exist anymore, or had it been torn to pieces by the wind like every other cloud in the sky?

Virginia, Wolf, Tony, and Patrick themselves were sitting in their dome on a cloud barely big enough for them. Where the rest of the huge cloud they had been on before had gone, no one could tell. None of them had been overly aware of their surroundings during the storm. They had all tried to block out the deafening thunder and the lightning that struck their own small dome more than once. They had all wished to be safe back in Welkin at the time, but now that Welkin’s fate was unsure, they were glad that they had decided against staying in the city. And Virginia, for one, was glad that no matter what happened, they were together. After so much time spent away from Patrick, she still didn’t feel afraid of much now that they were all together again.

And yet... the dark, churning waves so far below didn’t do much as far as lifting their spirits. In fact, it was downright scary.

“So,” Tony piped up nervously, “How are we planning on getting back to... anywhere?”

“Good question,” Wolf said miserably, peering out over the side of the cloud. “I wish I knew the answer.” He kicked the side of the dome in exasperation, but it didn’t yield to his angry foot.

“There’s nothing to do but wait until Lorelei comes back for us,” Virginia said. “We can’t get out of this dome thing, and even if we could, where would we go?” Nowhere, of course, but the thought weighed heavily on all their minds: What if Lorelei didn’t come back?

“I’m hungry,” Wolf mumbled, but resigned himself to staring out the watery surface of the dome. Tony rubbed his eyes, stretched out his legs, leaned back against the side of the bubble and crossed his arms across his chest. Virginia, after watching them both for a couple seconds and sighing, situated Patrick in her lap and started rocking him gently to sleep. He had stopped whimpering and was now yawning. It was difficult to tell what time of night it was, but in any case they were all tired. Patrick’s yawning became contagious and in a short time Virginia was fast asleep.

When she woke much later it was light again, and the sun was beginning to climb to the top of the sky. She had fallen over onto Wolf’s shoulder during the night, and Tony was spread out on the floor. The morning sun was starting to beat down on their backs and heat them up very quickly. It was a relief from the cool night air but Virginia was afraid that they would bake in the direct sun later in the day. The dome offered little or no protection. She decided to worry about it later, though. Patrick and Tony were still sleeping, but Wolf was awake, staring out over the ocean. When he noticed Virginia looking at him, he smiled.

“Look,” he whispered, pointing to a spot on the ocean close but far below them. Virginia sat up and did as she was told. Jumping gracefully, with the bright sun shining off their backs, was a pod of dolphins. They were hard to see because they were so far away, but the sleek, beautiful bodies were unmistakable. Virginia grinned. There was something about dolphins that always made her happy.

“Keep watching,” Wolf ordered. She did, but all she could see were the leaping dolphins. A few seconds later, though, something else caught her eye. Near the edge of the group there was a creature other than a dolphin swimming along, and even from so far away she recognized a mermaid.

“Oh,” she breathed, watching the beautiful sight. The mermaid hung onto one of the dolphins’ backs and they swam together like one being. They continued to leap and jump with the sun shining around them until suddenly the whole group dived along with the mermaid and they were gone.

Virginia turned away with something like awe. “That was beautiful.”

“Yes,” Wolf agreed. “And it also means that we’re above the Northern Sea. That type of mermaid, the same kind that helped us, only live here in the North. I think that means we’re closer to Wendell, too.”

Virginia nodded. But that wouldn’t help them if they didn’t get out of their bubble in the sky first.

They sat in silence for a while. In a short time, Tony woke up. It seemed to take him several seconds to realize where he was, and when he did his face fell. Patrick woke also, and Wolf started to play with him to keep both of them occupied. Virginia stared at the land. It looked like it had gotten farther away during the night, and it probably had. She knew there was a light wind, as she could see it stirring the waves so far below. It was moving them away, too.

It seemed like hours they sat there, with the sun beating down on them. Virginia, for one, was getting thirsty, watching the water of the ocean and having nothing to drink herself. She felt like she was stranded in a desert, instead of stranded over an ocean. She was beginning to wonder vaguely at how the two were so different and yet alike, and thinking that if something didn’t happen soon they were all going to die of boredom if not thirst, when she noticed two somethings at once.

One was Lorelei, speeding toward their cloud at a breakneck pace, and trailing behind her the Guardian. And the other was... Dragons!

They were flying to them from the increasingly distant land, and they were a sight to behold. Four gigantic dragons, beating their scaly wings against the air in defiance, as if they refused to believe that creatures as big as they didn’t normally take flight. The armored plates on their tails and bodies shimmered in the sunlight, shimmered gold. Their teeth and claws were clean, sharp, and larger than life. But even more amazing and frightening than all this were their eyes, deep and intelligent, eyes that if you stared into them too long you could get lost forever. Virginia watched them come closer with not so much fear as a profound respect.

The gold dragons, Lorelei, and the Guardian all reached their dome at about the same time. The entire bubble that Virginia, Wolf, Tony, and Patrick were in was the size of one dragon’s clawed hand. The dragon that was apparently in charge hovered closest to the dome and in front of the others. Lorelei and the Guardian hovered on the other side.

Lorelei was very white and she trembled as she lifted a hand and spoke a few magic words to drop the dome of protection, and the four inside it gratefully stood up. She never took an eye off the dragons, though, and her other hand held the Guardian’s. After several silently tense seconds during which the dragons continued to beat their wings and let puffs of smoke escape from their nostrils and showed no signs of wishing to speak, if they even could, the Guardian addressed the head dragon in a small but steady voice.

“What do you mean by this, Tamun-Ra?”

Virginia started and looked at the Guardian incredulously. “You know him?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“Yes, Virginia,” the dragon called Tamun-Ra spoke. Now Virginia really started, not only because the dragon knew her name, but because his voice was so overpowering it made her stop and catch her breath.

“We know each other very well, and have for a long time,” Tamun-Ra told her, but looked at the Guardian, who looked straight back with blank eyes. “And what I mean by this, by coming here, Guardian, is to take these weary travelers home.”

“You cannot.” The Guardian did not hesitate, and his voice was unwavering. “They must not leave here.”

Tamun-Ra sighed, and the warm rushing air from his sigh almost blew the four on the cloud into the ocean hundreds of feet below. “Please, Guardian. We all appreciate what you have done for us and we are forever in you debt. But you must be reasonable. The king wants his friends home.”

“You think I fear the king?” the old man demanded. “I could kill him, and you, with a wave of my hand.”

“No one doubts that,” the dragon said with a low rumble in his throat. “But...“

“And you think I want your debt?” he went on. “There is nothing you can give me that I couldn’t get myself. But these people cannot leave here. They know too much. They would spew the secret of Welkin and the White Mirror all over the Kingdoms, and that is one thing I would not be able to prevent - all manner of creatures coming up here and asking for our powers when I don’t want to or couldn’t give them anything... they would ruin our peaceful life here.”

Again, Virginia blurted out, “But we wouldn’t! We would never let anyone know if you didn’t want us to tell!”

“How can I believe you?” the Guardian asked, fixing her with his stare.

There was a pause, and Tamun- Ra said, “Can’t you Hear it?”

The Guardian froze.

“Hear what?” Tony started to say, but Wolf elbowed him. Virginia was staring at the Guardian, and Patrick... Patrick was grinning.

All at once, Virginia knew what he was listening for. For something in the future, the not to distant future, that would tell him that if he let them go they wouldn’t ruin his people’s lives. He went into a trance, the same kind that Patrick had fallen into when he Saw for Virginia. But the Guardian came out of his stupor right away.

“Well?” the dragon asked as the old man blinked.

“My powers are leaving me, I’ve told you that already,” he said, but he looked at the ground while he said it.

“But...?” Wolf pursued him.

The Guardian narrowed his eyes and frowned. “All I heard was silence.” But then, as Virginia let her hopes drop, he looked up at her and confessed, “Your silence.”

Tamun-Ra smiled, showing all his ferocious teeth. “This means they can go free.”

“Not quite,” Lorelei spoke up for the first time. She was now trembling even more violently, but she didn’t back down as the dragons turned their eyes on her.

“We want you to tell us something,” Lorelei said to the dragons, without glancing at Virginia, who stood fuming at being held up any longer.

“We will try,” Tamun-Ra said.

It was the Guardian who spoke. “Where is my daughter?”

The dragon’s wings beat more slowly for a moment, and he dropped several feet. “She is dead. I’m sorry.”

The Guardian staggered, and Lorelei dropped to her knees on the cloud, but stared straight ahead at something only she could see. “How?”

“The red dragons. She was going to warn them of your attack, but they killed her instead. There was nothing we could do.”

A tear made its way slowly down Lorelei’s cheek. “Oh, Acrotis. I feel so terrible.”

Virginia blinked. Acrotis... the Guardian’s daughter? And something the girl had said a long time ago to Lorelei, when they had first come through the White Mirror, stood out in Virginia’s memory.

“This isn’t the warm welcome I expected... from my sister.”

Virginia’s head spun. Acrotis was dead, in any case. She didn’t know if that made her more relieved than sad, or the other way around. Maybe she never would know.

The Guardian and Lorelei still looked shocked, but the Guardian managed to wave an old, gnarled hand at them and said, “Go.”

Virginia looked at Wolf, who held Patrick, and at Tony, who didn’t seem to understand anything that was going on. Then she looked back at the Guardian and Lorelei. “May we tell King Wendell, at least, what you have done for him?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I’d like him to know.”

Wolf handed Patrick to Virginia, stepped toward him, and took his hand. “Thank you for saving the Nine Kingdoms.”

The old man sighed. “We do what we must.”

Wolf nodded and stepped back. Then he looked up at the dragons. “I guess we’ll be riding on you?” he asked with more than a hint of eagerness.

Tamun-Ra said they would, and positioned himself in such way so that Wolf could clamor up on his back. Tony climbed onto a second one without much hesitation, which was surprising after the scene he had made with the flying carpets. Virginia refused to let the fourth dragon take Patrick by himself, so they both rode together on the particularly big one. Of course, all of them could have fit onto one, but they were riding in style.

Virginia felt bad to leave Lorelei and the Guardian like they were, but not bad enough to postpone getting back to earth any longer. They would soon come to terms with it, she knew.

With a wave goodbye, the dragons and their riders launched themselves into the sky, and sped off down toward the ocean.