Michelle M. Sagara - Birthright

VIP免费
2024-11-24
0
0
27.62KB
13 页
5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Copyright © 1992 by Michelle M. Sagara. All rights reservedcopynotes. First appeared in
xxx. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.
BIRTHNIGHT
Michelle M. Sagara
On the open road, surrounded by gentle hills and grass strong enough to withstand
the predation of sheep, the black dragon cast a shadow long and wide. His scales,
glittering in sun-light, reflected the passage of clouds above; his wings, spread to
full, were a delicate stretch of leathered hide, impervious to mere mortal weapon. His
jaws opened; he roared and a flare of red fire tickled his throat and lips.
Below, watching sheep graze and keeping an eye on the nearby river, where one of
his charges had managed to bramble itself and drown just three days past, the
shepherd looked up. He felt the passing gust of wind warm the air; saw the shadow
splayed out in all its splendour against the hillocks, and covered his eyes, to squint
skyward.
"Clouds," he muttered, as he shook his head. For a moment, he thought he had seen
... children's dreams. He smiled, remembering the stories his grandmother had often
told to him, and went back to his keeping. The sheep were skittish today; perhaps
that made him nervous enough to remember a child's fancy.
The great black dragon circled the shepherd three times; on each passage, he let
loose the fiery death of his voice — but the shepherd had ceased even to look, and
in time, the dragon flew on.
#
He found them at last, although until he spotted them from his windward perch, he
had not known he was searching. They walked the road like any pilgrims, and only
his eyes knew them for what they were: Immortal, unchanging, the creatures of
magic's first birth. There, with white silk mane and horn more precious to man than
gold, pranced the unicorn. Fools talked of horses with horns, and still others, deer
or goats — goats! — but they were pathetic in their lack of vision. This creature was
too graceful to be compared to any mortal thing; too graceful and too dangerously
beautiful.
Ahead of the peerless one, cloaked and robed in a darkness that covered her head,
the dragon thought he recognized the statue-maker from her gait. Over her, he did
not linger.
But there also was basilisk, stone-maker, a wingless serpent less mighty than a
dragon, and at his side, never quite meeting his eyes, were a small ring of the Sylvan
folk, dancing and singing as they walked. They did not fear the basilisk's gaze; it was
clear from the way they had wreathed his mighty neck in forest flowers that seemed,
to the sharp eyes of the dragon, to be blooming even as he watched.
And there were others — many others — each and every one of them the first born,
the endless.
"Your fires are lazy, brother," a voice said from above, and the dragon looked up,
almost startled, so intent had he been upon his inspection. "And I so hate a lazy
fire."
No other creature would dare so impertinent an address; the dragon roared his
annoyance, but felt no need to press his point. It had been a long time since he had
seen this fiery creature. "I was present for your last birth," he said, "and you were
insolent even then — but I was more willing to forgive you; you were young."
"Oh indeed, more insolent," the phoenix replied, furling wings of fire and heat and
beauty as he dived beneath the dragon, buoying him up, "and young. My brother, I
fear you speak truer than you know. You attended my last birth — there will be no
others."
The dragon gave a lazy, playful breath — one that would have scorched a small
village or blinded a small army — and the phoenix preened in the flames. But though
they played, as old friends might, there was a worry in the games — a desperation
they could not speak of. For were they not immortal and endless?
#
"They do not see me," the unicorn said quietly, when at last the dragon had chosen
to land. The phoenix alas, was still playing his loving games — this time with the
harpies, who tended to think rather more ill of it than the dragon had. They
screeched and swore and threatened to tear out the swan-like fire-bird's neck; from
thousands of feet below, the dragon could hear the phoenix trumpet.
"Do not see you? But sister, you hide."
"I once did." She shook her splendid mane, and turned to face him, her dark eyes
wide and round. "But now — I walk as you fly, and they do not see me. I even
touched one old woman, to heal her of her aches — and she did not feel my
presence at all."
Dragons are proud creatures, but for her sake, he was willing to take risk weakness.
"I, too, am worried. I flew, I cast my shadows wide, I breathed the fiery death." He
snorted; smoke cindered a tree-branch. Satisfied, he continued. "But they did not
even look up."
"And," one of the Sylvan folk broke in, "my people cannot call them further to our
声明:本站为文档C2C交易模式,即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载,本站只是中间服务平台,本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间,仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理,对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私,请立即通知玖贝云文库,我们立即给予删除!
相关推荐
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 6
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 11
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 7
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 9
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 10
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 15
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 18
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 20
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 15
-
VIP免费2024-12-08 22
分类:外语学习
价格:5.9玖币
属性:13 页
大小:27.62KB
格式:PDF
时间:2024-11-24
作者详情
-
IMU2CLIP MULTIMODAL CONTRASTIVE LEARNING FOR IMU MOTION SENSORS FROM EGOCENTRIC VIDEOS AND TEXT NARRATIONS Seungwhan Moon Andrea Madotto Zhaojiang Lin Alireza Dirafzoon Aparajita Saraf5.9 玖币0人下载
-
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective Zijian Zhang1 Chang Shu23 Ya Xiao1 Yuan Shen1 Di Zhu1 Jing Xiao25.9 玖币0人下载
相关内容
-
2015年6月英语四级真题答案及解析(卷二)
分类:外语学习
时间:2025-05-02
标签:无
格式:PDF
价格:5.8 玖币
-
2015年6月英语四级真题答案及解析(卷三)
分类:外语学习
时间:2025-05-02
标签:无
格式:PDF
价格:5.8 玖币
-
2016年12月六级(第二套)真题
分类:外语学习
时间:2025-05-02
标签:无
格式:PDF
价格:5.8 玖币
-
2016年12月六级(第三套)真题
分类:外语学习
时间:2025-05-02
标签:无
格式:PDF
价格:5.8 玖币
-
2016年12月六级(第一套)真题
分类:外语学习
时间:2025-05-02
标签:无
格式:PDF
价格:5.8 玖币