May 10, 2016

PodCastle 415: Responsibility Descending

* Author : G. Scott Huggins

* Narrator : Wilson Fowlie

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PodCastle 415: Responsibility Descending is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

Responsibility Descending

by G. Scott Huggins

The Century Ship burned.

From her mainmast cell, Responsibility heard the screams, and the roar of the flames. Flames engulfing square miles of sailcloth and rope. She scrabbled at the trapdoor, but it was bolted shut.

Outside, her mother burned the ship, searching for her.

Responsibility peered out the tiny windows, but smoke filled her eyes. She tried to cry out, to shout to the dragon that she was here, was burning. But what good would it do to shout that name? Her mother knew it not. Her mother had called her…

Responsibility hid under her wings from the flames, vainly trying to remember the name that would save her.

She woke, gulping down great draughts of clear night air.

Azriyqam. She clung to the name more fiercely than she had clung to any boat, out in the Great Ocean. My name is Azriyqam.

Sleep forgotten, breath slowing, she rolled out of bed and strode to her balcony.

Her cell was gone, but her new rooms also overlooked the sea from a great height, a comforting and frightening resemblance. From this ledge, the walled face of the mountainside dropped five hundred feet to the Spinward Court of the Kreyntorm. Beyond its curtain walls, ten thousand lamps shone like orange stars on the descending terraces of Stormbirth, thronecity of Halskette. Below that lay the darkness of the sea.

Azriyqam thought about visiting her brother’s rooms, but Asnai would be asleep. She could go down and wake Zhad, the other refugee from Ekkaia. But no. She did not want to wallow in memories. She wanted to escape them. She stepped up on the low ledge of the railing and spread her arms. Her wings. They went out a long way.

On Ekkaia, where she had been a lone freak, she would never have dared this, to stand in plain sight, eight-foot wing-arms catching the wind. It brought on a moment of nausea and fear. But here, this night, she was a halfdragon of the royal blood. She leapt.

She knifed through the air like a diving bird, tasting freedom, and the pain shooting along her flight muscles was sweet agony. Pulling up, she swept low over the outer wall. The guards nodded, but did not challenge her. She was free as any other halfdragon in the kingdom.

Except that she was not. She beat at the air with her wings for height—and managed only to slow her descent. Other halfdragons could truly fly. She had seen them, but all she could manage was a controlled glide, lower and lower, unless she found a rising thermal.

The square beyond the Spinward Gate rushed up at her and she braked. The humans in the square paused, watching her alight on the flat stones. There was a knot of merchants from the Far Isles wrapped in bright, winding garments. Several couples clasping hands, dressed sparsely but well for the warm evening, a bespectacled old woman in a cloak, and two children gaping in frank envy. But no one curled a lip at her, or asked what she was doing out of her cage, much less threatened to beat her. It was glorious.

She ran into the maze of wonders that was Stormbirth. No fear of being lost; the Kreyntorm could be seen for a hundred miles out to sea; behind it the immovable moonspike in the lightward sky was a spear of silver, casting black shadows broken by lamplit doorways.

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