BlackIce
(#73546300)
Level 15 Gaoler
Familiar
Glossy Duskrat
Click or tap to view this dragon in Predict Morphology.
Energy: 50/50
This dragon’s natural inborn element is Wind.
Male Gaoler
This dragon cannot breed until Apr 27, 2024 (2 days).
This dragon is an ancient breed.
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Personal Style
Ancient dragons cannot wear apparel.
Skin
Scene
Measurements
Length
12.53 m
Wingspan
7.41 m
Weight
7060.97 kg
Genetics
Eldritch
Tapir (Gaoler)
Tapir (Gaoler)
Flint
Stripes (Gaoler)
Stripes (Gaoler)
Ice
Gnarlhorns (Gaoler)
Gnarlhorns (Gaoler)
Hatchday
Breed
Eye Type
Level 15 Gaoler
EXP: 110 / 60881
STR
7
AGI
5
DEF
7
QCK
5
INT
5
VIT
9
MND
7
Lineage
Parents
Offspring
- Primus
- Secundus
- Tertius
- Quarta
- Quintus
- Sexta
- Septima
- Octavia
- Nonus
- Decima
- Undecima
- Duodecimus
- Tridecima
- Quaddecimus
- Quindecimus
- Hexdecima
- Septdecima
- Octdecima
- Nondecima
- Vicesima
- Unvicesima
- Duovicesima
- Trivicesimus
- Quavicesimus
- Quinvicesimus
- Hexvicesima
- Septvicesimus
- Octvicesimus
- Nonvicesima
- Tricensimus
- Untricensima
- Duotricensimus
- Tritricensimus
- Quatricensima
- Quintricensima
- Hextricensimus
- Septricensima
- Octricensimus
- Nontricensimus
- Unnamed
- Unnamed
- Unnamed
Biography
Warily, the massive dragons sized each other up. The small life of the wastelands froze in awe and trepidation. Lizards flattened themselves between the rocks and rabbits hardly dared to breathe. A long, low, warning growl rolled from the throat of the dark dragon, and a quail lost its nerve and exploded into the sky in a whir of wings. Neither of the deadly giants so much as twitched an ear. The pale one was a bit longer, and she was more muscled, but she could only bring that strength to bear at close quarters-- her claws and wing-claws had no reach. Not only was he was vastly better armed, with the rare slashing ridges at his jaws and joints and the huge curving horns that went with them, but his wings were elegantly long for their kind. He curled his lip and bared his fangs. Defiantly, she stared him down, and slurped up the tail of the mouse from where it had dangled between her teeth.
"I was going to eat that," he said, in the surprising soft voice of someone who never needs to speak twice.
She flopped on to her side and batted a fore-arm that could have a felled a tree across her forehead. "Oh! And are you going to make me pay?" she said cheekily.
Slowly, he arched his neck and lowered his head, pinning her with eyes that almost glowed in their intensity.
"Yes," he said.
- - -
"AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?" roared the innkeeper.
"I turned and walked away," the dark gaoler replied in his calm, whispery voice. He curled his hand-paw carefully around the cup and downed it. "It was obviously the worst thing I could do to her," he added casually.
The innkeeper gaped at him. "But what where you even doing there? Last time you came in to say goodbye. You had a clan all lined up ready to sponsor you to some god, the Exaltation was already scheduled, you said."
The dark gaoler looked at his old friend patiently. "I did, and it was, and like I told you, on my way to the ceremony I smelled a being whose scent had been deeply tainted by Shade."
"But it was just a MOUSE!" the innkeeper moaned.
The gaoler tilted his heavy head, and tapped the empty cup meaningfully against the long stone bar. "Your point?"
- - -
There was a burst of raucous laughter from behind them, where a pair of new arrivals were settling in to the nearest great table.
"You two," sighed the innkeeper. "One pitcher of blood beer, coming up-- and no trashing my place!" The obelisk shook his horned head fondly.
"Trashing? Quality assurance testing! You want all this nice stone to hold up, don't you?" The white gaoler smacked the slab of granite that formed the top of their table, and it boomed like a drum. Heads turned all over the common room at the sound, and a few of the regulars hunkered down lower into their seats.
"Bring your cup on over, BlackIce," the other white gaoler roared in a voice loud and gravelly as ice cracking. She was much stockier, and when the dark gaoler came close, she crashed her own great curving gnarlhorns sideways against his in a friendly bump that had the smaller dragons wincing. But all the little ones were safe, up in their carved niches all along the walls of the great cavern hung with tapestries and cloak hooks, or curled up on the heads or shoulders of their larger companions. All over the common room, dragons of all sizes touched the tips of their wings together, signalling the spirals who darted this way and that to put in their order for another round of blood beer, hard cider, squid-ink wine, or aphid-honey mead. The two white gaolers had taken the table closest to the door; anyone leaving would need to pass under their inspection and through their commentary. Consequently, everyone was settling in to another round. This was why the innkeeper had smiled.
- - -
BlackIce set his cup down on the table, and watched as the grrls snuggled close to each other to make room for him to curl his body around the other side.
Moonstriker was everything little hatching gaolers dreamed of growing up to be. Her eyes were cold as white stones with only a hint of blue. Chiseled heaps of muscle showed through her skin where the fur fell away, making her twice the mass of many gaolers, for all her lack of length. BlackIce had seen her use her helm of horns like a battering ram to bring stone walls down. Daybreaker, on the other hand, was built like a gazelle, slim, with an endless span of wings and legs. She had the waves of long, silky guard hairs that actually cooperated with braids, and to cap it off, she had sardonic eyes the color of woodland violets standing out sharply from the white fur of her face. Day was so pretty that someone had once referred to her as “a parody of a gaoler.” That had been in a different bar that wasn’t around anymore.
BlackIce himself had fur as dark as a hole in the ground. His horns and ridges and antlers almost shone in contrast, as pale blue-white as Moon’s eyes. He was rangy, even leaner than Day and on the long-limbed side himself, and he tended to say more with a stare or a snarl than his whispery voice. He was staring now, across the granite table.
Most beings gave BlackIce a wide berth, which was a mistake, unless they were looking for trouble, which was a worse mistake. He had few friends. Most of them were snappers and gaolers who spent much time on the roads of Sornieth, fellow wanderers, a bard, a tinker, a field scientist… He never knew when or if he would see them again, and whenever he did, he drank them down with his eyes, glutting himself on the sight of them. Moon and Day were a special pleasure for him because of the hundred crass and clever in-jokes they shared from thousands of days together, the rough, tough, loving chemistry between them that was even more bold and beautiful than either of them apart.
“So!” Moon cut to the chase, as always. “No Ceremony for you?”
BlackIce shrugged. He’d been so sure. “It feels like I have unfinished business, now.” he replied.
“They came in at the end,” said Tarnish, arriving with the pitcher and two empty cups on a tray strapped to his front. “You’re going to have to tell them the whole story. Drag it out; I’ll keep the pitchers coming. They can afford it.” He rose up on to his hind legs to slide the pitcher on to the table, and then swiped behind him and came up with a chubby obelisk hatchling, tiny spirals twisted around her horns. He hoisted them all high above his head as they squealed. “Ah, ah, ah! Behind the bar! No little hatchlings under big derg feet!”
“I’s big!” squeaked the little obie. “I wanna work now! I’s plenny big enuff!”
Chittering titters filled the air as Tarnish’s fullgrown children, almost all of whom took after their spiral mother, begged to differ.
“No Ceremony, after your last round of goodbyes and everything.” Day said, her violet eyes teasing. “So-- what’s she like?!”
BlackIce hesitated. “Pink,” he admitted.
Day’s scruffy jaw dropped and Moon almost spilled blood beer all over the table. Quick as battle, they recovered from their shock that there actually was a 'she' and leaned across on the table, studying BlackIce as intensely as he'd ever looked at them.
“That palest pink that shades down to palest purple, and, uh, straw-colored mane and membranes. Labyrinth-born. Long, and low, and, pretty good heft, and,” he took a deep breath, “she’s got that poofy undercoat, you know, the kind that gets-”
“Blossoms,” they all three said together. Burr-blossoms were unique to gaoler; their fragrance was said to be the exact opposite of the reek of Shade. Their roots in the skin were endured as a continual pricking, and they required constant combing, so from time out of mind they had been seen as a symbol of the virility and vigilance of the breed. A gaoler who bore blossoms in their fur would be admired, if not accepted, even among the elite purists of the Southern Icefield.
“Pale blossoms,” he added. The tissue-thin petals had been the color of papyrus, and they had smelled, she had smelled like-- like-- like when the fresh snow covered everything and all the world was an crystalline paradise and you wanted to throw yourself into it and to keep it perfectly pristine forever, she smelled like that feeling.
He came back to the present moment to find both the grrls still staring at him. "We had a moment," he said. "Maybe that was all."
Moon growled in rumbling disbelief. “Name?” she demanded.
He said nothing.
Moon groaned, and Day reached over to plant a paw on the back of her head and shove her face down into her beer. “All right, Blacky, tell it from the top.”
Quietly, the dark gaoler began to speak, and the two white ones leaned in close to listen.
- - -
“He had style,” SpringThaw sighed. Her forelock flopped into her eyes and a couple petals drifted down; she floofed it out of the way and went back to raking her claws through her fur. “It’s not just that he was tall, dark, and handsome, and that he had the gnarls and clearly knew how to use them, and that he had the patience and persistence it takes to run down a Shade-tainted mouse, which let’s be honest is the really impressive part, but on top of all that he had style. The kind of style where you can tell he doesn’t even know it, he’s just swimming in it, like a fish doesn’t think about water. Ooo!”
The great gaoler paddled her forepaws wildly against the ground and then bapped her forehead against them, raking the ground with her antlers. “And he just looked right into me and said, ‘Yes,’ in that low, breathy voice, and smiled, and I could not move a muscle, and he turned and walked away. And he never looked back. If he had looked back once, I would have followed him anywhere, but he didn’t look back, and…” she heaved another sigh. “Do you think I should have followed him?”
The succulent had no response. It just sat there, in the cliff-face, as it had been doing the entire conversation.
“Ooo, I’d love to eat you up, but there’s just not enough of you here. Too many goats in these parts, likely to eat up all of you and starve themselves out. Can’t let that happen, can we? Besides, his paw pads looked just like you,” SpringThaw continued dreamily. “And he had eyes the color of the new tips of pine needles. Wind-born wanderer. No catching him unless he wants to be caught. If he circles back this way, I’ll know, at least he’s curious. Curious as a little troop of goats slowly creeping closer and closer to check out a lazy, fluffy dragon lying around talking to plants.” SpringThaw smiled. “I can be patient, too. Don’t you think so… Lunch?”
Three goats had just enough time to be astonished that anything that big could move that fast.
- - -
“BlackIce, you’re a subtle soul. What would you even do with a brazen joker like that?” Tarnish protested.
For one moment, Moon and Day actually looked like twins as they turned to stare at the obie with identical expressions of disbelief.
“Everything,” BlackIce replied thoughtfully, as though it were a serious question, and Tarnish rolled his eyes while the white gaolers turned to look at each other and grinned with all their teeth.
Last call had passed. Lanterns were being allowed to dim away to dark. Benches were being stacked and ledges staked out. Tarnish’s only obie son stalked the main floor from table to table, passing out pillows and collecting coins from the larger customers who’d elected to spend the night. A ridgeback who’d had just a little too much squid-ink wine had started grumbling about how expensive it was to be big. “Hey, tomorrow’s a new day-- we could pass a hat and have you scrolled to something better while you sleep,” someone called out cheerfully. All sound from the ridgeback ceased as if by magic, and a brief, last purr of sleepy laughter from large and small alike rolled once around the common room.
It had been a good night.
“Time to go,” said Moonstriker, bumping her horns against Day’s antlers.
“You never stay,” Tarnish complained. He had treated himself to joining their table after his hatchlings had curled up snoring between his wings. He didn’t protest any farther; the grrls were already getting up to go. Instead, the innkeeper reached out-- very carefully, keeping his clutch of daughters securely balanced-- and planted a great paw on BlackIce’s shoulder. “See them out and bar the door behind them, would you? I know you won’t mind a little fresh air.”
BlackIce took a moment to stretch and shake out his legs before moving to join the white gaolers. To his surprise, they bracketed him, walking side by side up the long ramp to street level. His eyes shifted left to Moon, then right to Day, well aware that he had been surrounded and the next move would be an ambush.
They waited all the way until the top of the ramp, where the three of them slipped their antlers under the bar of the door and lifted it out of place with ease. The cold air of the moonless night came to kiss their faces. Winter was at hand; soon, the mimics would come boiling up everywhere. He had expected to be fighting his way through the demon season in the honorguard of a god.
“You’re going back for her, right?” Moon said, clipping his horns with her own as she moved out into quiet night.
“We had a moment,” BlackIce said, as he had said earlier in the evening. Why had it felt like it had changed everything?
“And you want more,” Day said, smugly, as she pushed her way past him.
Was it really so simple as all that? Was that why this world, this here and now, suddenly seemed so charged with potential. “There was something about her,” he admitted in his soft voice, “something…” The dark dragon moistened his thin lips before choosing the single most seductive word he knew “... adventurous.”
Moon said no more but reared up on her back legs, spreading her forelegs wide. In a moment, all three of them were pressed together in a group hug, his head high above both of theirs even with Day’s long legs.
“Come see us again soon. It’s the off-season; no crowds.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed. He stood still in the great hewn doorway, watching how they walked away with their wings draped over each other’s shoulders, until their big white bodies disappeared into the dark.
- - -
A decade later, a young band of centaurs on walkabout in the wasteland would stumble upon the garden SpringThaw had idly created in her sojourn. They would be drawn close by the mysterious ring of tall fig trees thriving where she had buried her fewmets. They would exclaim in surprise at discovery of the curving rock walls she’d piled for shade, and then fall into reverential silence at the sight of the blooming succulents ascending within in streaks of different colors, sheltered from harsh wind, insulated from frost, nourished by little basins built to catch the rain. Slowly, they would dare to venture into the center of the strange flat space, hard as stone and bare as ice, where the weight of the dragon rolling and coiling and sleeping for days had compressed the earth. It would become a sacred space for them, and for many a year to come, young centaurs would climb into the hills at evening to lie in that space at night. There they would meditate upon the moon until their hearts and minds became one and they were able to utter out loud their innermost desire in the space where a young pale gaoler had once done the same.
“I want to see butt-rocks,” SpringThaw said.
The moon looked down upon her, almost entirely eaten up by the Shade. SpringThaw felt as though she were a little hatchling again, being lured out into the scary dark by the story of the warrior moon who every month is almost defeated by the Shade but who will always fight her way back as long as there are little hatchlings willing to come out into the dark and show her how brave they can be.
“I want to see butt-rocks blooooom!” SpringThaw roared defiantly at the first fresh sliver of the moon that she had watched diminish night by night. “I never knew that I wanted to travel. I didn’t know it was mine to want, I thought that was for Wind dragons. I didn’t know what I wanted; I’d be Exalted now if that mouse hadn’t charged across my path. But the happiest moment of all my hatchlinghood was when my parents brought me to the Icefields to prove my worth to the Order and I first saw a snowdrop forcing its way through the crust of snow, blooming where you’d never expect it to even live. And the mighty Behemoth itself doesn’t fill me up the way these succulents do, because of how they live on the edge. And there is nothing that makes me happy in cities but the one thing, seeing dragons coaxing herbs and tiny trees and even orchids to grow in bitty buckets of dirt and corners of light. And growing up surrounded by leafy green all over what I always loved best were the tillandsia, the free, floating tendrils of growth and beauty feeding right off the air.”
“No wonder I’m crushed out on a Windy!” SpringThaw laughed, leaning her head back as she splayed her paws into the air. “But if he comes back or not, I’m going to see the butt-rocks bloom. With him or without him. I’m going to hunt Shade all over Sornieth and rejoice over all the littlest lives living on the edge in the most unexpected places. And maybe we just had a moment, or maybe we’ll cross paths again. And maybe a grass-eyed gal who never spends a night indoors unless she has to and would rather eat food raw than cooked is a bit much even for a Wind dragon!”
“You’re not too much for me,” said a confident, low voice almost right on top of her.
SpringThaw whirled to her feet. For a shocked moment she had no words at all, and when her voice came back to her, it was as soft as his. “... how?”
“Air currents are my friends,” said the tall, dark, and handsome dragon with the icy gnarlhorns. "And you built walls."
She blinked up at him, as if still trying to get herself to believe he was really there. “You came back.”
“You waited.”
Her eyes spread wide. “Does that mean you are done making me pay?”
“No,” he promised, in his low, soft voice.
“Good!” She grinned, and wiggled her rumped and flounced her tail from side to side. “I’m Spraw! For SpringThaw, because I can’t be stopped once I get started.” Her forelock fell into her eyes.
“BlackIce. I can be… somewhat unexpected.” The dark dragon smiled a private smile, as if remembering something. “It’s quite a while until the butt-rocks bloom,” he continued. “What would you say to coming off the map with me? I owe a visit to some friends in a Water-blessed clan on the backside of the cliffs of Light, beside the Wood and facing the Labyrinth.”
Her eyes grew big again. “I’d say-- you gonna make me?”
He lowered his head still farther. “Yes,” he growled.
Their bodies slammed together in midair, the force of their leap carrying them right over her shade walls and straight off the steeper side of the hill.
“Whoa,” SpringThaw gasped.
She’d expected to be grappling, what she did best, rolling him down the hillside to battle at the bottom… but air was flowing through her fur.
“Too late,” BlackIce arched his head to whisper into her ear. “I don’t think you want me to stop now.” He did not mind as she dug her claws deeper into his fur. He had her gripped tight enough, but it was only to be expected, her first time airborne. He’d caught a good updraft; it would be a long, smooth glide down. Time enough for her to learn to trust him. Petals blew out of her fur and tickled his face, and he buried his nose in her fur once more. “The moon is watching. Show her how brave you can be.”
Upside down in the air as she pressed herself to his belly for dear life, SpringThaw looked up beyond him at the sky. The sliver of the moon smiled down at her as if laughing at her plight. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder if the wind dragon might be a bit much for her. She shivered beneath her thick fur, and just before they hit ground, a single, almost treasonous thought ran through the great dragon's brain.
This just might be better than butt-rocks.
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