heritage - one (part one)

Haraan knew he slept in Mam Ghieri's class at his own peril. Nothing about her trimmed blond hair or cheery summer blouses betrayed any hint of the ultimate doom for the miscreant unfortunate enough to misbehave in her class. The upperclassmen's favorite start-of-year activity was informing the first-tiers of her uncanny ability to reduce a student to tears inside of two weeks.

Athes Kamael did just that on the first day for forgetting to bring his textbook to class. He met justice at the hands of Mam Ghieri's stapler and the wall.

Haraan didn't want to be like poor Athes, who, even in the back row, found a way to move his desk another foot from the blackboard and the teacher in front of it. The desk hadn't been bolted down properly, but still...

The bad end of a pencil for poking someone in soft spots found its way just behind and below Haraan's ear. It was all he could do to not scream at the top of his lungs, but his head did fly off the crook of his elbow and turn, a little violently, at his assailant.

His brown eyes flashed a look that said, Jasti, when we get out of this class I will murder you.

His friend returned a smile that said, At least you're awake.

He knew it wouldn't last. He listened to the words coming out of Mam Ghieri's mouth and began writing in his notes again. From their frames above the blackboard, the portraits of every former president of Corth glared at him, as if daring him to drop his head again.

He scrutinized the projection screen and struggled to connect the ships and icebergs in the picture with the lecture.

"After Nordusk's expedition didn't go well, Gaff set out with a fleet of ten double-hulls in 736, but that wasn't enough to save his expedition, either," said the National History teacher, placing the next slide in the projector. This one featured a dreadnought cracked in half like a candy bar, with sailor filling spilling out of its guts. Instead of sinking in the middle, however, it sank at the ends, like something had come up from underneath.

Checking every word as he wrote it, Haraan put down "Gaff went gravy in 736." He read it after he finished it, decided he liked it, then read it again and got hung up on "gravy." Why did he put that there? He had meant "filling".

Oh, no. Lady, no.

The edges of his vision began to blur. All right, staying up until four the previous night working on that drawing for the Exhibition wasn't the brightest move, but he wanted to get it out of the way so he had more time for the final piece they wanted. He should have known better than thinking a ten-minute nap during lunch could carry him the rest of the day, but still!

He pulled on his hair, taking a few black strands between each finger, then went to pull it again, and stopped. Was there no way to wake himself up without getting pain involved? He could ask to go to the drop and splash his face there, but that required an effort to get out of his seat, first.

It was also unwise to request the hall pass while Mam Ghieri teached. She made you do squats if you ever got the nerve. Very slow squats, in front of the class. There were no prizes for guessing whose hall pass, a wooden block painted Altina Academy's eye-blinding orange and gold, looked the nicest sitting next to the blackboard for all to see.

Maybe he could put his head down while she wasn't looking. One second. Only one second. Before she turned away, though, he had to stay awake. He listened so hard he swore his ears reached out to give her a kiss.

Cats poured out of Jasti's desk. He didn't seem to mind.

Haraan heard words coming in his ear, and blocked them from going out the other one. "Brenner," he heard, putting the name in his notes, then finishing it with a squiggly line for whatever the rest of the sentence was. He'd know what it was when it came time to study for the Exam.

That was enough for today. Like a fatal meteor, Haraan's head plowed back into his sleeve.

First, there was darkness, and he was only a cloud of warmth mixed into the warm background. A small part of him remained connected to the classroom and told him something hard and cold, a binder ring, pressed against his ear, but he ignored it. He only wanted to drift. Then, he dissipated, and didn't want anything at all.

A mountain rose from the abyss, pierced his center point, and then Haraan fouund himself rudely thrown together again, fully aware, several hundred feet above its zenith. Except, looking down, the mountain lacked something important — a crater sprawled where the proud summit should have stood. Through the innards of the crater ran veins of shifting orange, and the comfortable, ubiquitous warmth became a directed blast from below.

_Not a mountain,_ Haraan concluded. _It's a volcano._

He liked to think he was a logical person. Dream logic told him it was okay to investigate the volcano instead of finding another place where he wouldn't boil alive. It also told him not to worry about the lack of solid surfaces beneath his feet. A school of fish with glowing yellow tips passed underneath, and if they could breathe here, why couldn't he?

He inhaled a lungful of water and enjoyed it.

The right side of his vision lurched. His temple demanded to be let through his skull.

Concavity.

Fierce heat smothered every inch of him, almost like being crushed and boiled alive at the same time. Jets of superheated water erupted from the bottom of the caldera, now just a few feet away. The sun could tattoo the Inner Cerusian Desert for a month and would come nowhere close to the temperature down here.

His skin, however, refused to peel, and only the fact of it all being a dream kept the pain to manageable levels. As far as he knew, dying of heatstroke in water didn't happen anywhere except in a kitchen, if you happened to be seafood.

A deep rumble went off a foot from his left ear.

Haraan acted like he hadn't been startled and did a poor job of it. This close, he could only make out a pair of huge, dark, and scaly nostrils.

They sniffed him. Loudly.

Haraan flung himself back, back, past the point where he could make out the entire head. Even without the horns growing from the back of its skull, its head was taller than he was. Granted, dignity didn't come easily to Haraan, being five-foot-three at fourteen years of age, but this dragon here was large enough to terrify him.

Its ear frills stood on end, alert. The gesture had a simple meaning, meaningful to anything which possessed a neuron cluster: _You do not belong here._

Haraan fought to keep his pulse under control. Dragons could smell fear — they enjoyed a whiff to go with breakfast, obviously.

Maybe three hundred years ago, this dragon was young enough to be caught near shore and put on the menu for the epicures and the rich. Now, he suspected it weighed as much as the specialized vessels that caught young dragons for the table. The rocky-looking spikes bristling from its neck down its back to its tail helped. Its tail fluke looked like it could start a storm surge with one pass; a swipe from one of its four flippers could punt a man into orbit.

He was pleased at coming up with that last bit, and hoped it wasn't true.

More gazes fell on him like layers of dust — imperceptible until they suddenly smothered him. Most of the newcomers were shaped like his discoverer; built hardy for the harsh conditions of the caldera, while others were more sinuous, flaunted more frills, colors, and patterns, and didn't look as comfortable in volcanic water. Comments began to float all around Haraan.

"Look at him. Really, look."

"Don't provoke him."

"He's not going to last very long."

The voices sounded familiar, not the least because they were in Corthan (and really, would he go through the trouble of translating his own dream?). He closed his eyes and tried to place them.

His classmates? He had discarded a hundred possibilities in seconds before reaching that one, and suddenly the voices began to click in — every other dragon except the first floated corresponding to the desk layout in Mam Ghieri's class — the dragons behind him were silent, as no one sat behind the last row.

"Mr. Siarke," said a voice behind the dragons. This set off an "oh shbyk" vibe so strong Haraan almost bolted upright from his desk. Instead, he remained there at the bottom of the caldera, while the other dragons began to look and shuffle among themselves, suddenly at a loss at what to do.

Except one. One Haraan hadn't noticed because it floated in front of him, but hadn't spoken. He noticed it because no other dragon had the same pattern: black on top and white below, and the two tones swirled around each other three times down the length of its body. It was also a small dragon, a whelp, practically, but the look it gave Haraan told him it knew what it was doing. Haraan recovered and started to follow it to a safer place when the voice struck again.

"Mr. Siarke!"

The world wrapped itself into an ice cream cone on a point millions of miles away, trapping him in a crush of dragonflesh for one unbearable, unavoidable instant. He caught one last glimpse of the whelp looking back at him, a sympathetic look on its face, before everything collapsed into darkness.

A fierce tingle shot through his lower arm. He lifted his head and the tingle became a blaze, but he stopped caring when he saw almost every pair of eyes in the class stare at him. Mam Ghieri's yardstick trained between his eyes from the front of the classroom.

"Did you just do what I think you did?"