3. Isabel and Her Pocket Draeken Visit the Boneyard #2
“Please, I need your help,” she gasps, the sound painful like she’s struggling for breath and face all twisted up. “It’s my husband. He’s ill.”
Isabel exits the busy shop and hurries after Bembe.
“Kaelen?” Isabel rubs a gentle finger over the small, furred body in her pocket, waking the grumpy takops.
Kaelen peeks an eye open and props his paws on the lip of the pocket.
“I need you to grow,” she whispers to him, her breath short as she hurries after the woman and struggles under the weight of her bags.
Kaelen peers out at the woman then back to Isabel.
He bobbles his head in a nod. She holds open the pocket as he flies out and far enough away to grow to the size of a horse.
Isabel only slows long enough for him to take the handles in his teeth and race after Bembe with the bags swinging.
They follow the woman to the small cottage she keeps in town.
Upon entering Bembe’s cozy home, Isabel sees Senor Abisai lying on pressed sheets, his face flushed and red. A cool towel lies across his forehead.
The home has a sickly sweet smell, like tym blossoms, and the fire is properly kept, as if Bembe is afraid to let it die out. There’s no odor of sick, or any mess lying around. Senor Abisai is well cared for.
“Nice to see you, Isabella,” Abisai croaks from his bed. The frail old man looks withered and pale, his brown skin leeched of color in an unsettling way. Isabel steps forward, calling her magic out. She places a hand on his clammy forehead, then flinches at the feel of wet, wrinkled skin.
“What is it?” Bembe asks urgently, coming up close behind her. “Can you help him?”
Isabel quickly checks the man’s vitals and scans his body for any illness. A faint blue glows from her hands, but she works to distract Bembe, hoping the woman won’t notice. She can see Abisai’s aura. It’s weak, and the energy around him feels weak, like his aura is wavering.
“Senor Abisai has S.E.D.—stellar energy deficiency. Does his family have a history of starflow impairment?”
Bembe nods gravely. “His mother.”
Isabel’s lips form a line. “I’ll need to gather some supplies. I don’t have everything I need to bring him back to health,” she says. “I’m freshly out of glowroot, and they’re hard to find. I’ll need to visit the boneyard if I hope to find some on such short notice.”
“W-what does that mean? Can you help him?” Bembe says, looking stricken, wringing her fingers until they turn white.
“I can help him, Senora Bembe. But it will take some time to gather the things I need. Keep your husband cool and give him this every third hour.” She pulls a vial full of shimmering silver liquid from her bag and presses it into the woman’s hands.
“If you do that, he should be all right until I return. It’s crushed stardust powder. ”
Isabel pushes at Kaelen’s head when it butts urgently up against her thigh, and she gives him a pointed look to behave. Bembe clutches the vial to her ample bosom. Her face shows relief, and Isabel feels pride for having put it there.
“Thank you so much, Isabel. I will do as you said. May the stars guide you on your journey. And hurry back soon.”
Isabel leaves swiftly. As soon as she’s on the path out of town, Kaelen gets in her way, trying to trip her up again.
“What are you doing?” Isabel says in a huff. “I have to get to Marrowmere before dark. So, if you can hurry and get big, you can fly me south.”
Kaelen snorts, turning his giant head away from Isabel in defiance.
She sighs, her shoulders slumping with the weight of Kaelen’s stubbornness. “I know I said I’d stop scavenging in the boneyard, and I mean it. But this is different. This is an emergency situation.”
The takops whines and shakes his head.
Should I open the bond? she wonders. Just open myself to his thoughts and get a peek inside his head, to see what stubbornness is rooted in there.
She shakes her head. No . They promised years ago that they wouldn’t read each other’s minds unless absolutely necessary. It can get… uncomfortable, sometimes.
“Come on. You know I won’t get there on time without you,” she says. “It’ll take three starturns on foot. I’ll do it if I have to, but I would rather not. Senor Abisai could be in critical condition by the time I return.”
Isabel gives Kaelen her sad eyes and notices the moment he begins wavering. He can’t resist the look. Hasn’t in fourteen years.
“I’ll also give you all of the guava Senora Alvita gave me,” she sings, tossing him one from the basket. He leaps up and snatches it in midair, then chomps on the fruit obnoxiously, juice and fruit flesh flying everywhere. “And I’ll make you all the guava cakes you want.”
Unable to hold out any longer, especially at the mention of unlimited guava, Kaelen grows in size until he’s towering over her.
“I knew that’d do it.”
His large red-and-ivory head falls as Kaelen drops forward into a stretch. Isabel grabs the golden harness, which shrinks and stretches with his growth. Climbing atop her friend’s shoulders, she settles into his soft fur.
In this form, the takops takes up the entire width of the path, butting up against the leaves of trees on either side of them. When the earth begins shaking and a trumpet whistles a tune, Isabel pats Kaelen’s back to get him into the air.
“The Mammuverde is waking,” Isabel says. Her eyes widen to the size of saucers as her legs clamp around the takops’s sides.
Kaelen springs into the air as the forest shudders. The trumpeting brRR brRR brRR , TOOO-TOO-TOOOOM scatters the birds, which take off into the sky as the forest mammoth wakes. As it stands and shakes, the foliage on its back departs from the ground, and small animals scurry to find cover.
Isabel looks down as the Mammuverde slowly ambles off. Then she lowers her chest to the takops’s back, hiding among the whipping fur. She’s been doing this since she was a kid, ever since Kaelen could first carry passengers and still only had a wing length of thirty-five starspans.
They head south over the Valley of Duskmirean.
The stars don’t touch the mountains of Astralorn and Solarion, where the twin deities of Cielo rise at dusk and dawn.
The wind whips her curls around her face, and by evening, as they ride into Marrowmere, the fading sun is warming her face, and Astralorn is rising to drop the stars.
Isabel urges Kaelen on quicker. If night falls and the star veil drops while she’s in Marrowmere, she will be swarmed by the Vacciom—night daemons who prowl in starless crevices of Cielo, searching for prey to drain of stellar energy.
They’re dark creatures with long bills and many rows of venomous teeth.
Their skin is thin and translucent. And they have spiny stalks, meant for collecting stellar energy, sticking out of the sides of their necks.
No one knows where they came from, but they’ve been gathering in number.
Marrowmere, also known as the boneyard, is untouched by the stars. It’s named so because of all the bodies that appear there. Some are victims of the Vacciom, dried husks left in the barren land. But others are a mystery Isabel has never figured out, battered and broken on the ground.
Kaelen slows, then dives downward toward the ground and lands between the sparse, naked trees that grow among a smattering of bodies and trash.
Isabel recoils at the sight. It’s hot enough here that the bodies dry up without leaving a rotting scent.
But the scavenger bird, the Falxis, often called the ‘messenger of death’, with a striped, fluffy tail and curved talons, still picks at them with its razor-like mouth.
The thing only stares at her, its tail thumping the ground as it watches to make sure she doesn’t get too close to its prize.
At half her size, she doesn’t want to agitate it, so she gives it a wide berth.
Kaelen refuses to move from his place at the valley’s edge while Isabel hobbles onward. Almost anything can be found along the cracked earth in this place and in the pockets of the dead. Some believe the valley is haunted. Others are drawn to the treasures found here despite the danger.
After one too many close calls with the Vacciom, and run-ins with bandits looking for easy loot, Isabel told Kaelen she would stop hunting here for ingredients for her elixirs. But Nsokena, where she normally forages for glowroot, is too far, and Senor Abisai won’t survive that long.
So, though her best friend doesn’t like it, Isabel steps farther into the valley as the darkness creeps closer. She has to risk it to save a life.