The wings in the sky belonged to the partially clothed bodies of four dragons, but it was the clothing they were donning that had Caltyr’s mouth running dry. Firstly, he could see the bottoms of human shoes poking out from beneath them.
These dragons had riders, humans who had strapped them into saddles.
Dragons were a proud and stubborn people, so what could it have taken for them to have given up their rights and freedoms? To have surrendered their backs to be mere hosts for seat cushions that kept a homosapien’s ass cheeks comfy and cradled for the ride?
“Sara,” Caltyr shouted urgently, “can you shock just the humans without hitting the dragons?”
Miss Tavren hadn’t been objecting to their presence on the battlefield, presumably because they had been being effective and useful instead of using her as a table to cower under. But something about the arrival of these dragons had her using her massive claw-hands to usher them away in a panic.
“Don’t attack them at all, you two. Just go.” Her voice was kind but firm, like a mother’s, or what Caltyr imagined a mother to be like.
His memories of his own were hazy at best, making him even less likely to listen to her instructions. He wasn’t just going to leave her here to deal with whatever these dragon riders were flying to do—nothing good, and probably something gruesome or worse.
Imagining Miss Tavren’s scales being stripped from her body like a fish’s was enough to have him growling and digging his claws into the dirt. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”
“That’s very sweet, Caltyr, but—” A smile stretched slowly and warmly across her lips before she was interrupted.
“No buts,” Sara stated emphatically, cutting her off, “and if evil Caltyr is staying, I’m staying too. Now, why are those dragons letting humans ride them?”
“I don’t think it’s a ‘let’ thing,” T’allyandria stated flatly.
The dragons were soaring downward, not one of them looking back into her eyes when she looked for theirs. To her, that spelled shame.
The quartet of dragons landed one at a time with a resounding boom, making the very earth quiver at their feet. Dragons had such an effect, which was why it was all the more chilling to see them topped with naked, scaleless apes.
Except they weren’t actually naked. The first dragon who landed was being ridden by a human in silky, flowing robes cinched together with a metal-and-scale-lined corset. Their hair was white and floppy, tumbling over to one side of a sharp face inlaid with deep, gnarled veins thrumming with black, white, and red.
“And what,” the white-haired human began jauntily, descending from the saddle and bravely into the mud, “do we have here?”
They looked up Miss Tavren’s long neck, lined with iridescent white scales, and into her face.
“Leave now!” Caltyr’s mentor boomed in a tone more authoritative than he’d ever heard from her before.
Caltyr would have thought her words would be directed at the invaders, with how she sounded, but when he checked her face, she was looking straight at him.
She really wanted him to leave. Just who were these people?
Caltyr dug further into the earth, his feet disappearing beneath the ground, making his feelings on the matter known.
“Fine, don’t answer me. I don’t need my next meal talking to me anyways. Guys, it looks like we’ve got water magic, shadow magic, electric magic, and light magic. And there’s more than enough to go around!” the white-haired human shouted backward at their buddies in a feminine-sounding voice, ecstatic at the amount of options available.
Caltyr noted that this person was referring to them as ‘magic’ rather than as ‘dragons’ and freed his feet from the dirt he’d buried them in. He stepped closer to Sara and nudged her in the side to get her attention. “Let’s do the same thing again.”
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“But what if we hit the dragons?” Sara replied with a creased brow.
“Maybe this is evil or something of me to say, but we’re on the menu here. Not them. We need to think about protecting ourselves.”
Sara considered his words for a second before giving a single slow nod. “Okay, let’s go again.”
Caltyr didn’t need to raise his hands to cast this time. He simply conjured a stream of water into being. He felt like he was overflowing with power, waves of it crashing against the insides of his chest like water against a dam.
He fountained a sustained gush of liquid outward, soaking the long, flowy outfits of their attackers as more of them began to slide off the backs of their mounts.
Sara’s jaw clenched. She stepped backward in preparation before loosing a fat bolt in the direction of the ample pool forming in the grass.
Except this time, it didn’t connect.
“Maurine!” shouted the white-haired human leader, head craned to the side.
One of the humans with yellow veins raised their arm with purpose and arced the lightning into the sky.
Sara’s gaze followed the lightning into the sky. She gawked for a second, two seconds, before growling softly and pulling another bolt from her core. And then another. She released them both like arrows from a bow, each one flying toward opposite ends of the small pond.
But ‘Maurine’, with her flowy golden hair and snappy reflexes, caught both of them in midair like softballs and tossed them skyward. Sara struggled to pull them down, but she wasn’t strong enough to reorient them before they were mere specks on the horizon.
Maurine laughed deeply at the poor lightning dragon’s bewildered expression.
Sara’s eyes narrowed into slits at the sound. She crouched low to the ground and pulled her back half upward toward the sky, her chest grazing the concrete of the school grounds. She dug her claws into the rock beneath her.
She let her anger at these humans, with their hunger for the power that was hers to wield, course through her body, right down to her bone marrow. She pictured herself as a master caster, fit to direct her strikes wherever she wanted them to go. Then, she summoned a fat, crackling lightning bolt that shone so brightly it hurt her eyes.
Sara shot it at Maurine’s laughing face with purpose.
In the same moment, Caltyr heard the slapping of feet against the ground and looked behind him. Some of the dragons who had escaped from under Miss Tavren were speeding back toward them with a fire in their eyes.
One of the other humans reached out and caught the surging bolt from a distance. Their veins glowed an angry gold as they struggled to keep it from inching closer to Maurice, whose eyes were wide at the energy simmering inches from her face.
In a split second, Maurine used her own command over the element to turn the attack around and send it flying toward the dragons sprinting back into the battle.
In another split second, the surge was upon them, and the one running closest to the front let out an echoing scream that ended abruptly as they fell limply to the pavement, their scales smoking.
Sara gasped in horror. She knew she had put enough force behind her attack to kill, but not one of her own classmates!
“Look what—look what you made me do!” she shrieked, holding up her claw-tipped hand in remorse.
As the life left the body of the dragon fully, it began to glow an eerie orange color. Its skin folded outward like a blooming flower as a swirling ball of pure energy rose through a hole in the flesh.
As soon as it hit the air, several of the humans with colored vein-like markings began reaching out. It looked like they were trying to harness the ball, to redirect it like with Sara’s lightning.
But it was no use. The concentration of pure energy screeched like a pot that had just boiled and exploded into searing flames that toppled the nearby dragons, the student’s former allies. A wall of flames lapped over them like a wave and left their skin sizzling with heat.
“Damn it,” growled Maurine, “we almost had it this time.”
Several humans began to run toward the fresh body now that it had discharged, causing the dragons who had just rejoined the fight to rise to their feet and scatter. It took two of the humans to lift the body, which they began to lug laboriously toward one of the saddled dragons.
Caltyr could see other draconic bodies being carried in the distance as well, limp and floppy, their chests folded open just like the one that had been killed by the electrical bolt.
Miss Tavren, seeing the carnage being inflicted upon her students, wrinkled the ridge of her snout in searing rage. Her eyes glowed like two suns, and she roared through her teeth as she fired a beam of light straight for Maurine.
She tried to do what had worked for the young dragon’s spell to redirect it, but the light was too quick, too ephemeral. It hit its mark and burned a hole through the human’s chest, bursting straight through the other side.
Maurine fell squelchily into the puddle she was still standing in, holding the hole that used to be her breastbone. “You—”
‘You’ was all she could get out before her body, suddenly with no working heart to speak of, gave out.
“Oooooh,” purred the white-haired human, flipping her hair over from one side to the other, “it looks like hurting her students gets to her. Why don’t we try and kill another? Let’s make it…” Her eyes grazed over the small collection of mana-generators still remaining and stopped on Caltyr’s blue form. “Him.”