Sweat-slick bedsheets decorated the small stone bedroom, carved from the interior of a cove, and the silver-haired teenager shuddered before she forced herself upright and wrenched her eyes open to peer into the darkness of her equally-drenched blanket. She tossed the blanket off of her and her attention shifted to her sword and scabbard in the corner of the room; the runes inlaid on the sword spelled out a codex, which she paid little mind to at the moment aside from the slight glow being the only immediate lighting available.
"Up," she whispered and she sat up on the bed. "Feggin' dream," she murmured lowly in Elic. "Too many feggin' bugs to squash and not nearly enough daylight left to go about doin' it... feggin things."
A knock on the doorway behind her made her turn and peer into the shadows. A weathered figure watched her from the doorway, dressed in an unmistakable duster covered in tattered strips. Her purple eyes focused on him and the darkness around him abated, turning to grayscale as her eyes adjusted.
"How do you feggin' see anything in here?" the voice demanded. "Get up Velle, you've got a feggin' meal to eat before we go out to the south quarter. There's bugs a comin' and they won't care if you're just sittin' around, wasting time. Get up, come on, come on!"
Thad's grating voice was just what she wanted at the moment. She rolled her eyes and got to her feet, the soles of her bare feet touching the cold and mostly-smooth flooring of her bedroom, if it could even be called that.
Her eyes roved around the hollowed-out square room and she took a small wooden instrument from the bedside stand near the top of the bed and dragged it through the air while she pressed her thumb into a notch in the wood. A teal glow floated in the air and she drew the codex for 'light' and tapped on her left forearm, the pale almost grayish skin immediately emitting a soft blue glow into the air and threw the room into various shades of blue.
Velle stood up fully and stretched. She put the instrument back on her bedside stand, then stretched again to try and pop her back. The threadbare tan shirt she wore was cut unevenly at the base and showed off the abs on her stomach, and the knee-length baggy brown shorts she wore were even more threadbare than the shirt. Her bare feet padded against the cold floor to the tied sack in the corner of the room beside her sword and she undid the laced top and shoved it open to reveal the contents within; a somewhat-intact brush aside from a little bit of dragonfire that had burnt the handle, a few more pairs of equally threadbare clothes, and a single baked roll that she had stolen from last night's dinner in case she wanted a snack.
Dirty fingers wrapped around the roll and she took a hasty bite before she grabbed the longsword by the hilt and slid her thumb over the activator codex just below the blade. The blade engaged and she twisted a small dial just below the activator to put it on standby mode.
The codex—a string of runes in a particular sequence—stopped glowing to conserve some power and she grabbed the scabbard beside the sword and hastily threw it on over her shirt and slid the sword into it, then dashed out of the room without changing. She wasn't bleeding just yet and so didn't need to change her smallclothes, nor did she care about changing out of the sweat-soaked clothing when she'd just be sweating even more soon. What's the point of sullying another pair of perfectly good clothes, anyway?
The hallway continued on her right and left. Left led toward the staging area, and right led to more rooms, so left she went. Light had yet to start trickling down from the sky, which made her realize just how early it was. No one else was up and moving. While she walked, the drawn light on her arm faded away.
Must just be my squad going out, she thought to herself while she ran down the hallway. The amber-colored walls were a sight to see at first, months ago, but now they weren't worth more than an occasional glance while she was walking somewhere and not in a huge hurry.
The dream flashed through her mind again and she shook her head. No time for that. Need to get to the staging ground.
If it could even be called a dream. Dreams didn't often leave her soaked in sweat and tossing and turning like she had a fever. Memories of that dream tried to press into her mind, but she firmly shut them out and kept moving.
The hallway opened up into a huge staging area. The ceiling rose upward dramatically and the floor sloped gently downward toward a room bigger than any village she'd seen. The walls in the distance were hollowed out with alcoves, and in those alcoves, movement stirred.
Without any torches to see, all she could see was in grayscale, which didn't make for the best detailed descriptions she could make, but it was more than most of her human friends could see.
"Velle!" A distant voice called out and she turned and looked at a human a year her senior. He had blotches of pale and very dark skin all across his face and hands, and had pitch black hair and brown eyes. His clothes were equally threadbare as her own and he wore only a loose jacket and a pair of black trousers that ended well before his knees. He raised a hand toward her and waved. "Vishala bless you, Velle, and may the winds guide you home."
"Vishala can kiss my feggin—" she cut herself off and then waved back at him politely before she turned her attention back to the alcove in the distance.
The alcoves on the far wall rose up ten times her height and a specific alcove halfway up and toward the right side of the huge staging room caught her attention. The being within grumpily opened up slit eyes and looked down at her approaching form.
The magnificent creature lazily pushed himself off the rock and glided down toward her. White wings spread out some thirteen feet in both directions, the thin membranes between the supporting lathwork of bone throughout the wings were almost translucent, and the air shimmered around the body.
Glowing teal codexes adorned the body of the dragon, which loomed over her. The white scales radiated a cold energy in the air around him and he blinked his intelligent purple eyes and focused on her visage. He stood on four limbs with wicked talons at the ends of his powerful claws. His front legs were well muscled, and his chest was covered in thick white fur, rising up to the base of his scaled neck, which was itself twice as long as she was tall and covered with V-shaped scales up to the base of the skull. His head was nearly completely flat on top, and a great array of spikes jutted out from the back of his head all the way down the back of his neck, most rows consisting of 5 to 7 sharp spikes that he could eject like quills from his back if he needed to do so.
His lower jaw was covered in small spikes, with them elongating as they neared the back of his jawbone and his throat. His eyes, teal irises floating on a purple sclera, focused on her and her sweat-soaked clothes. A leather saddle sat in the center of his back, attached to a spike half as tall as she was, and his tail flicked in anticipation; a launching point for another long row of icy spikes that could be fired off his body like the ones on his neck.
He was a weapon in mind and body, and she needed him now more than ever. But more than that, he was her other half. Velle couldn't help the grin that spread across her lips when she raised a hand and he nuzzled against it. He wasn't emitting his usual frosty aura, so he didn't feel cold to her bare fingers as they slid across his face.
"We're supposed to launch soon," she told him, a mere whisper, "I don't want to feggin' go, I'm exhausted, but I don't want to think what they might do to us if we don't go."
His shrewd eyes flicked to hers and he tilted his head, as if to say 'oh really, you don't want to go?'
And he was right. Velle pouted. "I was trying to be the rebellious teenager."
He rolled his eyes at her—a very strange, human gesture to see a dragon do—and whipped his tail through the air once in impatience. Velle glanced around the staging area and looked at a few more people that had entered the massive room, then turned and looked toward the opening.
To her left, a gargantuan hole was covered by a teal wall of light. The teal light shimmered whenever she looked directly at it. At either side of the entrance, a lantern-sized metal container provided the energy for the shield. A battery codex. Teal light in static lines emerged from the top of the container and spread across each half of the shield wall.
"Surprised to see you up so feggin' early," a nasty voice came from behind her. She turned and looked at Grent, a handsome young man around her age with auburn hair and mahogany skin. He waved his stump of an arm at her. "Still mad you didn't die in the last attack. You deserved it."
"We welcome you with honor and malice," another kid spoke up beside Grent. He was a smaller boy a few years their younger, with pale skin and light brown hair and eyes that darted rapidly around the room.
"It's not honor and malice," Grent snapped at him, "get it right!"
"Get in line." Another voice spoke to them from the side and she turned and looked at Thad, who ushered in a few other adults from across the room. None of them were much older than she was. Just over the age where people stopped treating them like kids as much and expected them to contribute something to their society.
Or that was the joke they traded around at night.
"Get ON the DRAGONS," Thad screamed. "OR YOU'LL BE BUG FOOD!"
Before anyone of them could move, the battery codex disengaged and the shield lowered. Wings flapped in disarray and a tumult of dragons barreled into the staging area, still a good hundred feet away from their current position.
Black, red, and amber wings fluttered. Gore splattered to the ground and Thad whistled and a few cleaners woke up at their little table at the side of the staging ground and grabbed their mops and buckets, then hastened toward the crowd.
Seven dragons spread out from the doorway. Three red, two amber, and two black, and all of them were severely injured. Red blood spilled from gaping wounds on the largest amber dragon. The cries of worried Riders filled the grounds and the air shifted from the eager anticipation of excited teenagers to the frantic rush of the wounded. The shift in the air was jarring and Velle reached out and put a hand on Alazar's head. He gently nudged her hand with the contact and then glanced toward his other draconic brethren and a few wyverns among their ranks. The dragons were shifting, watching their injured kin.
Velle watched an amber dragon, smaller than the other two, literally clutching her own innards to keep them inside of her chest cavity. Blood was sliding around her claws and her Rider was hastily drawing a codex on her body, just beside the chest cavity.
The codex finished with his final glyph and it glowed a soft teal light when activated. The scales began to warp as the blood on the outside of the dragon was transmuted into stem cells and then hyper-activated, aged through extremely specific time references to heal the dragon at otherwise impossible speeds.
Velle turned her attention back to Alazar and walked to his side to clamber up onto him. Thad whistled again and turned his attention to their squad. Each squad consisted of fifteen dragons and riders, and each squad had a strict chain of command.
"Iyar squad suffered half casualties, and that's better than what most squads are facin' nowadays," Thad spoke loudly while everyone rushed to strap into their saddles. "The bugs aren't going away. Eventually, they'll find this place, and we'll have to relocate, again. Until they find us, we'll keep hitting at that hive, until they eventually bleed out and die."
Alazar flicked a tongue into the air and then finally reached out to Velle through their Binding. It felt like a little twitch in the back-left side of her head. It wasn't always words as much as it was images, feelings, sensations, and sometimes, it was a bit of a puzzle to her to figure out. Which sometimes, made it fun. Sometimes, it was extremely annoying. And she was never sure if he was intentionally using "words" or not, so she didn't know if he was aggravating her on purpose, or if he couldn't help it.
Ready, was what he sent her, and she gently squeezed her legs on either side of the saddle to signify she was ready too.
The huge spike that jut out in front of her ended in a flat surface just a foot across in each direction, which made for a convenient chin-resting-spot when she really had to rest her head on it during an extended rest. And she might have fallen asleep on it a time or two.
"Form up!" Thad shouted. The other dragons were limping or being moved off the staging ground floor, and more people were waking up and making their way into the room to help move the dragons and prepare the squad after theirs to go out.
"Squad," a woman in her early twenties—one of the oldest of them left—barked from her Jade dragon and the largest of their lot. The Jade dragon had two gnarled twisting antlers that jut out and curled around toward the front of the dragon, and more than a few glowing codex had been inscribed on the length of the protrusions.
"Assignment; search and destroy in the south quadrant. Wipe out any bug clusters around the Egg. One hour minimum. We do our lot, we save our people, we go back to sleep. Any questions?"
The woman turned around to look at them. She had light brown hair, curled into two tight braids, and deep chestnut skin. Akari, if she remembered right.
"No questions; may valiance soar our wings!" they chimed as a group, and Akari raised her spear and a great rush of wings pushed off the ground.
The dragons surged forward, over their wounded comrades. The gate shut down long enough for them to make their exit and Velle reached around behind her and grabbed a pair of goggles she'd left attached to the small spike at the back of the saddle. It slid over her face and the stinging, cold wind of pre-dawn stopped whipping at her sensitive eyes.
They flew upward, over the cracked and craggy desert that sprawled out ahead of them. The sky above them twinkled with Ringlight, and the higher they got, the farther they could see of their immediate area. After a few hundred miles—she guessed, she wasn't altogether sure of the exact distance—the curvature of the ring allowed them to see distant landscapes, and more if they had a telescope, what wasn't hidden behind mountain or cloud at least.
Velle dared a glance behind them and saw the gigantic egg-shaped mountain they lived within. There were structures on top of it, but they were more visible from the air than they would be on the ground. Wind whipped at her silver hair and she groaned inwardly.
I should have put my hair in a bun before I came rushing in. And I should'a eaten that entire feggin' roll.
Alazar sent amusement through the Binding and she rolled her eyes. Beneath her, the other dragons moved into an arrowhead formation and Alazar joined in automatically. Their group consisted of the Jade dragon, Alazar as the only Freon Dragon, then four Amber dragons, three Red dragons, two Swamp dragons, and three Alabaster dragons.
In truth, the distinctions made no sense. Most dragons had similar offensive talents; a powerful attack that came from within them, which varied according to where they were born and what their codex gave them, and then their claws, teeth, and cunning. Some dragons had blades made of bone in front of their wings; others had spiky tails, or they could manipulate certain things with their mind. The codex gave them the majority of their abilities; it was up to their intelligence to use them, and the codex had originally given them that, too.
With understanding came knowledge of how they worked, and she found that far more interesting than their arbitrary naming conventions. Amber dragons looked like amber, but they could do the same exact things a red dragon could. Only certain dragons were given customized codexes, and they had to be given that by studied Dexxers, who studied the language of the codex for most of their lives.
They only had a few of them left. Codexes were recorded in a codex, a big book with a ton of glyphs in it, and were carefully copied onto a magical device called an Inscriber, which then used a specific codex to write the glyphs onto the bones and bodies of the dragons, which gave them increased intelligence, agility, stamina, and reconfigured a few vestigial organs inside of their bodies to create gases that could be used to breathe out fire, or in the case of Alazar, create a specialized reaction within him to generate a special mineral in a specific state (nitrogen) until it's needed to expel the frost over a wide area.
This was effective against the bugs, but would kill a human, so Velle had never felt tempted to play around with it.
I got way buried in my thoughts, she chided herself while staring straight ahead. Their arrowhead formation banked to the right and then dove down toward the many tunnels and offshoots at the bottom of the large plateau.
The chittering mass grew louder below them. They'd found the bugs.
"BANK LEFT!"
The scream erupted from the throat of a rider up one position ahead of her in the arrowhead and a pulse of blue plasma burnt the air so close to her nose that she felt a nose hair singe and reeled, leaning backwards. The scream of an injured dragon and the blood that trailed through the air as the duo spun toward the ground beneath them seared forever into her mind.
The spiraling dragon had lost an entire wing and half of her body and they crashed against the side of a nearby rock face. The rider died instantly, blood covering the spike on the dragon's back that the leather saddle was attached to, and the tip of the spike jutted from his head. The dragon fared little better, the neck bent backwards and the head at an angle. Velle tore her sight away and dimly noticed the other dragons breaking formation while Alazar banked hard left and she looked down at the grisly sight below.
The bugs were destroying a village that had already been ransacked. Bodies covered the ground, nearly all of them dismembered, some with their entrails spread out across the ground; dried blood covered nearly every surface of the deep brown rock, and no one had been spared, regardless of age.
The bugs that churned beneath them in the village were of a kind she had never encountered before. No bugs before had been able to unleash that beam of blue plasma.
"What new devilry are we facing now?" Velle asked rhetorically. They plunged toward the ground and the lead amber dragon opened her maw, releasing a burst of amber energy in the form of a beam; her entire chest glowed with a radiant glory and the beam lanced out, searing immediately through anything it touched. Smoke trailed from each surface the amber beam graced; bugs exploded in a hail of guts and exoskeleton, their shrieks filled the air.
The squat, sturdy adobe structures of the village—what few were left standing—shattered under the strength of the beam, and then a bolt of blue light made Velle scream as it sizzled the air above her head.
The amber dragon's beam died out, and the head fell from the body to land on the ground with a dull thud. Velle looked at the dead dragon in awe, then turned and looked toward the source of the attack.
An arachnid, larger than Alazar, emerged with blazing speed from a trapdoor built into the base of one of the nearby cliff walls. It was blue with black specks across it, and the black eyes stared at them with intense scrutiny.
A codex was written across it. Her eyes widened as soon as she recognized the glyph for 'growth' on the underside of the monster. Spiders had book lungs; whatever had augmented this thing had most likely restructured the entire inner workings of the monstrosity to make it survive being this size.
"Feg me," Velle whispered, then Alazar dove to the right. Another beam of blue plasma emerged from the two fangs of the spider; how it was creating it, she hadn't the foggiest idea, and she didn't care to know at the moment.
Alazar's claws dragged through the sand and he leaped into the air over the arachnid, which immediately reared up and tried to stab into his tail with it's wicked, curved fangs. He dodged it and Velle faced the sky while he pumped his wings.
Screams came from the amber dragon's rider. Velle glanced behind her toward her and she waved her arms toward them, making the signal with her arms that she needed immediate retrieval. Bugs were emerging from the nearby houses and from bug holes, their large glossy exoskeletons a horrible sight on any day. A few warrior bugs with long, bladed front legs approached the rider.
We have to go back for her!
I'm working on it, Alazar hissed back across the Binding.
He pushed off against the top of the cliff face and arched around in a dizzying midair spin, then swooped down toward the rider, a tall girl with dark hair and terror in her blue eyes. Alazar's talons stretched out and he swooped her up, but the sound she made caused Velle to glance back at the ground.
"Feg, we got half of her," Velle grimaced. Her legs remained on the ground, severed from her torso by the blades of one of the warrior bugs. Blood trailed behind them in the air, leaving a clear path for the bugs to follow if they wanted to, and judging by how many trailed after them, they wanted to.
The other dragons were engaged in their own fights, fighting flying bugs high above the village. They were on their own.
Find a place to set down. We can't go back to the Egg with her like this.
Velle screamed out a curse. "THE FEGGIN' DAWNFATHER'S LEFT NIPPLE!"
Alazar flew toward an outcropping with a slight ridge that would help disguise it from someone looking up at it from below. His mighty wings beat rapidly while he sought to slow down their descent, then his talons touched the outcropping and Velle untied herself from the saddle and slid down. Her bare feet hit the unforgiving rock and she knelt down beside the rider.
The rider's skin was pale and her eyes stared straight ahead. Her intestines trailed out of her torso and her arms were slack against the ground, and already more blood was surging from multiple ruptured veins. If she had a medical codex, maybe she could save her, but even as Velle had the thought, she recognized the light leaving the rider's eyes.
Velle swore rapidly under her breath, then reached out toward the dead rider and grabbed the leather necklace around her neck and yanked it free, then put it over her own neck.
I didn't put my badge on, she realized after sliding this badge around her neck. If I die, no one would know my name.
The thought was simultaneously strangely comforting, and absolutely horrific. Velle patted Alazar's flank and climbed onto the dragon, then reattached herself to the saddle.
Time to go, she nudged his sides with her legs and he jumped off the ledge before she had a chance to grab onto his broken spike.
"Whoa," she yelped while the wind whipped at her hair. Screams came from above and another amber dragon fell from the sky, the head falling a moment after the body.
Blue plasma shot through the air, directly toward them. Velle felt Alazar shift slightly and the shot just barely missed his right wing. The arachnid jumped an impressive distance up the side of a cliff face on their right and Alazar banked hard to the right, bringing them closer to the spider. She felt the air around her rapidly drop in temperature and hung onto him tightly while he got into position.
His maw opened and a pressurized stream of what appeared to be fog shot out of the dragon's mouth, pouring over the thorax of the spider. A loud cracking noise filled the air and he banked to the left, tilting away from the rock face and zooming around a rocky spire that jut from the canyon floor.
They continued around the spire in a spin so tight that Velle felt like she was going to become a part of Alazar through rapid osmosis. The g-forces made her head spin and hurt, and then it was over and Alazar straightened out.
A feeling of intense satisfaction came through the Binding and she looked ahead at the arachnid; the exoskeleton had shrunk, then exploded under the immense coldness of his liquid nitrogen breath, and yellow-green innards covered most of the plateau, with a few broken legs falling from the top toward the canyon floor, where the rest of the broken body remained.
Alazar dove toward the canyon floor, his wings tight against his body, and then he flared them at the last moment and they shot along the canyon floor at extreme speeds. Velle kept her hands on the handholds of the leather saddle as tight as she could and trusted in Alazar to keep them alive.
The canyon walls seemed to rush toward them. Alazar ascended into the sky and then banked left again, back toward the main fight, if it was still going.
An angry buzzing noise from above them made her grimace. A flying bug had spotted them. She peered up and saw the pink wings of the bug, stouter and more round than Alazar in terms of build, with a shiny green carapace covering most of it. It dove toward them and she removed her sword from the scabbard and thrust it out; the bug missed it entirely and she groaned in dismay.
"FEGGING HELL," she yelled, and their aerial combat test began.
The flying bug shot down toward them and Alazar flared his wings, rapidly slowing their descent. Velle clung to him tightly while they killed off all their momentum and his wings folded up, turning them into a bullet. Questioning thoughts silenced as they shot toward the canyon floor a few hundred feet beneath them.
The bug lined up behind them and, from the thick green thorax, a wicked curved blade emerged attached to a long and powerful tail. The long legs of the bug reached out and grabbed onto Alazar's wings and he flared them out, spreading the legs of the bug wide; his maw opened and he bit into the head of the bug and savagely tore it off, then spat it out. His left leg rested on the tail just above the curved blade to stop it from piercing his otherwise thick armor.
The bug fell toward the ground, green innards exposed and soaring through the air and falling toward a dead Green dragon that had been ripped into four separate pieces. As Velle watched, bugs approached the dragon in a horde and began feeding on him, ripping into the thick scales with their mandibles.
"Feggin'--" she started, but could hardly finish. G-forces tugged at her as Alazar accelerated, his huge wings beating powerfully in the canyon and sending them shooting forward toward the main bulk of the battle.
The only two dragons left were the Jade dragon and an Amber dragon. The Jade dragon released a torrent of jade fire down at the bugs, cooking them in their exoskeletons and frying them even as they tore apart a wounded Alabaster dragon, an immense, pale creature that screamed as she was devoured. Her ribcage was torn open by a huge beetle and smaller ants shot inside and began tearing anything they could reach.
The Alabaster dragon slumped and the ants carried out her heart a moment later. Alazar's fury rebounded across the Binding and they banked toward the clump of bugs, wind whipped at her hair and made it difficult to see for a few moments, but she didn't need to see to know what was going to happen next; she could feel the air growing colder around her.
She blinked just after the stream of liquid nitrogen emerged from his throat and coated the bugs that were dissecting the dragon; a long line of white spread out across the canyon floor and the screeches of dying bugs filled the air.
More Jade fire covered the ground around where the Swamp dragons had landed and began to fill the area with their strange, gaseous emanations. Considering their nearly picked-clean corpses littering the ground, the tactic just hadn't been effective against the bugs.
Screaming from somewhere nearby caught her attention, but the noise reverberated against the canyon walls, leaving her unsure of its source.
There. Alazar's thoughts flared into her mind and she looked to their right, toward the Jade dragon; the dragon was flapping madly, trying to gain ground, but the tail was held in the giant pincers of a huge centipede. The jaws of the creature opened wide and Alazar madly beat his wings toward the Jade dragon and his rider.
We've lost so many, he whispered over the Binding. With each beat of his wings, they passed over the remains of yet another dead Dragon and rider.
"AND WE WON'T LOSE ANY FEGGIN' MORE!" Velle screamed, and Alazar screamed triumphantly with her, spittle flying from his maw as they approached the centipede. The large insect puzzled her; how much had these things been changed in order to survive without their bodies crushing them? Exoskeletons could only support so much weight before they began to fail.
Alazar's wings beat with the rhythm loud in her ears and they shot toward the centipede. The two thick antennae waggled through the air and the two venomous fangs lodged deeper into the tail of the Jade dragon.
"Freeze it by the neck!" Velle called out and Alazar released a thick stream of liquid nitrogen toward the body of the centipede. The creature shrieked in pain while it was covered in the white mist and then began to freeze instantly. Not just freeze, but harden, too. Alazar's back legs flared up and he crashed through the hard body of the centipede, splattering it into a dozen pieces of hard carapace.
The Jade dragon shot into the air and they were quick to follow after it.
"Mission is a bust!" the other rider called to her.
"Return to base!" Velle yelled back.
They rapidly moved into the sky and she looked behind them at the insects below. They were swarming the remaining pieces of the centipede, tearing it into smaller pieces and devouring it on the spot. Flecks of orange innards covered the brown and tan rock of the gorge, mixing with the blood that was beginning to pool toward the lowest points.
Rust, dust, and guts.
The scene beneath them sprawled out to its entire scale and she gulped three times in an attempt to stop herself from throwing up. It worked, for now. This wasn't the first time she'd seen a battlefield like this.
It didn't make the screams any easier to hear. The cries of wounded dragon riders just before the bugs found them. There wasn't enough time to try and save any of them, either.
The adrenaline rush waned. Her fingers trembled against Alazar's white scales and they soared back toward the Egg with the wind whipping at her hair. Two left alive out of their entire group.
"Can we win this?" she asked quietly, to no one in particular. The wind held no answers for her.