Requiem aeternam - 5 - Temeraire fan fiction

It had been two more months. Or so he thought. The world was no more.

Everything had fallen apart since she had come back with red eyes and dripping nostrils. She had burned random trees for a week. He had stared at a rock for a week.

He had tried flying again. His muscles were stiff and painful, and the flight ended before it had properly begun. Did it matter? The little appetite he had could be filled with what game he stumbled upon by foot. Which was not much.

The raids of the ferals did not stop. They simply stopped caring. Wounds were no longer scorched closed. Did it matter? Death by infection seemed a whole lot more pleasant than death from starvation. Not that it was easy for a dragon to kill himself. Dragons were creatures full of life and joy. He wasn’t. She wasn’t.

Aimlessly they travelled for weeks. From tree to tree, from river to river, along the coast, deep inland. Stopping in one place for a month, rushing to places they had yet to uncover. He flew again, now. She didn’t. She had strained a muscle in an awkward manoeuvre to dodge a tree. Did it matter? One month rest, said Dorset. Who was Dorset?

What was Rio? What was Pusantinsuyo? What was England? What was Laurence? What was Granby? Did any of them matter?

Every night they would entangle themselves with each other again. Nothing was as comforting as having another living being pressing on you, one who would not hurt you, or take away your sleep, or give you pain. Occasionally they even went a little further than that. Did it matter? Nothing had deeper meaning. The world was divided up into things that hurt you, and things that didn’t. The latter category had only one thing in it, for both of them.

Time lost meaning. She couldn’t describe if they had been somewhere for a week or for an hour. Neither could he. Did it matter?

A lingering shadow swept over parts of their lives, growing stronger every day. Every morning, they felt a little weaker. Soon death would embrace them, and the suffering would be over.

Soon.

Flying alone along the coast for no particular reason, he discovered a ship. A big one. British colours in the mast, HMS Fortunate on the stern.

Feeling up to some distraction, he unleashed the Divine Wind, at the water directly below him. Fish died and floated to the top. Nearby birds sprung up from their peaceful lives and chirped their complaints about being disrupted by the noise.

He flew forward while roaring, stopped, flew backwards a bit and started roaring again. Counting wingbeats, he held a steady rhythm of roaring and not roaring, and low, powerful waves sprung up from the sea.

The ship had noticed him. Two dragons appeared in the sky. A Regal Copper and a Longwing. How odd.

Roar, fall back. Roar, fall back. The slow, large waves got higher and higher. The ship was a mile away, but it already started rocking. Soon it would be time for the final wave. The Longwing would spit acid that would tear him apart, he was quite sure of that. The Regal Copper was twice, perhaps thrice his weight. But slow, he was sure the Regal Copper would not reach him before the time was right for the final wave. The last one he would ever make. Did it matter?

She would miss him. He would miss her too. But dying while bringing down the cause of their torment was a better day to die than slowly withering away in the jungle. The cause of their torment. Hm.

“What are you doing, Temeraire!?” he heard the Longwing yell with a mixture of emotions, from quite close range by now. Temeraire. He hadn’t heard that name in a while. Could his name be Temeraire? He did not know. He had not spoken a word in at a long time, all of his life for all he knew. Did it matter?

More screaming. A drop of burning acid on his hindquarters. Just some more suffering reporting for duty. Why not unleash all of the poison, he thought. It might even burn him away before he could finish his wave.

Arg, all this thinking made him forget his rhythm.  He missed a beat, and the waves started descending again. Now the Regal Copper would surely reach him, and perhaps push him out of the right place for the final roar. He added more power to his voice and the thundering sound travelled over and through the water.

He heard an interesting new sound, in a different language. Chinese poetry, it seemed. He understood what the words meant, but they had no meaning to him. Almost he gave up his roar to correct the voice in some of the pronunciations. Almost.

Voices were distracting. He focussed on counting wingbeats and roaring on time.

“Can I not push him away, into the ocean?” the Regal Copper said, barely audible from his concentration.

“He’s gone fully mad, he may direct the roar at you.  You should not take the chance. Lily, I am sure you are capable of stopping him with your acid.” a different voice said
.
“But he did not even twitch when I sprayed some on him!” was the Longwing’s answer.

“I am sure… You are fully capable... Of stopping him.” the human voice said again insistently, with long pauses at several places in the sentence.

But he stopped listening to the voices, it was now time for the final roar. Probably the last thing he would ever do. Did it matter? It most certainly did not!

He flung himself backward and upward, and set in a dive so he would glide over the waves, roaring at the sea, roaring at life, welcoming death.

“NOW LILY!”

He was not a Longwing, but he knew that this was a terrible shot. Most missed him, only a few tiny drops scattered over his body. A quick dive through the waves would wash them off instantly, but he had no time for that. His wings were punctured, but so they had lots of times by many different objects. The holes always healed and closed. What was slightly more worrying was the drop on his head. It started burning through his skull, and would reach his brain in perhaps half a minute. Still plenty of time to finish the wave.

He dove and glided, his massive fan-shaped wings outstretched to their full extent, wet from the water, acid and blood. He roared like he had never roared before, and never would again. This was his final moment. Bringing down this ship was a monument for all he could ever stand for. She would be so happy that he brought down their source of torment.

Source of torment. The drop of acid on his head was tormenting him now, but it could be removed. So could the monkeys, he and she had succeeded in eliminating them wherever they went. The raids of the ferals were omnipresent, there could be no doubt in that. But why would a ship injuring her, injuring Iskierka, still torment them when it must be hundreds of miles away by now?

A short feeling of pressure and a lot of tiny footsteps were recorded by his brain, which had a lot to do at the moment. The calming words spoken out of the general direction of the footsteps told him that someone had jumped on top of him in mid-air, and now ran towards his head without using a safety harness: even the last shred of it had long been lost and destroyed in the jungle.

The man touched and stroked the tendrils around his head. A pleasant sensation came from them, but Temeraire kept roaring. He would do it for Iskierka, since she was tormented by the memory of the ship, and he could destroy a ship, even if it was of a wholly different type and nationality. A green wall of water rose, obscuring the Fortunate from his view.

When no response came, the man crawled on top of his head. Somehow he kept balance, sat on Temeraire’s snout and looked him in the eye. Was he trying to obscure his view? He made no such attempts, he only showed his face. A face, looking as tormented as he was. More proof that there was nothing but suffering in the world. At least he could end part of it.

A tear dropped from the man’s eye. He turned his head, looked at the ship, barely visible, as a cloudy shape behind the green wall of water. Temeraire’s roar hesitated. The man had heard it, and he nodded.

Understanding did not come to Temeraire in a flash, as usually pictured in stories, but dripped in over the course of several seconds. Suffering was not all there was in the world. He could give this one person joy by not destroying the ship, and for some reason felt a strong urge to do so. As the implications of this new idea wandered his mind, the pitch of his roar rose. It was still thundering, but the tone changed frequency and a new, much broader spectrum of sounds was opened. Temeraire’s throat and spinal cords twisted, tightened and convulsed, along with one rather peculiar organ unknown to any dragon surgeon on the Western Hemisphere.

The roar turned into a shriek, the shriek into something akin to a whistle and then it left the range audible for humans entirely. Temeraire gave one last push with his powerful midriff, pushing the air from the deepest reaches of his lungs and shattering the tremendous wave into a big salt rain, mere seconds before it would impact on the ship. Water still collided heavily with the sails, snapping and entangling most of the rigging before landing on deck where it flushed several of the sailors into the ocean.

Temeraire had shaken off the cause of his change of mind and dropped him in the water, so he could gain more speed rushing for a dragon who had to know about the beauty of life.




“Lieutenant Whittaker, because I am having trouble properly phrasing how incredibly stupid, irresponsible and selfish your action was, you may consider this your demotion to midwingman.” said Captain Harcourt calmly. “Although I must say I am content with the result, the only proper course of action on top of a feral dragon about to destroy one of His Majesty’s ships would be to shoot it.”

“Captain, I understand and accept my demotion, but I wish to add that if my duty consists of shooting the only Celestial dragon the British Air Force has ever seen, much less employed, then my duty can go to hell.” said Whittaker, lifted from the water in Lily’s claws.

“I see that even mentioning Captain Laurence has a terrible influence on discipline in this corps. Now let’s go get that man back, if he is even still alive.”