Every time he traveled to a human settlement or city, it chilled him to the core to see how close it was to their hiding place. Then again, it could have been ten hours of flapping away, and it still would have been too close for comfort.
It gave him the uncomfortable feeling that no matter where they went, how well they hid, they would one day be found. r, worse, that the humans had some way of tracking them.
It was getting to be nighttime. The stars were becoming visible, lighting up the sky in place of the sun.
He and Malika had left with only their smallest sacks around them, strapped around their draconic waists like a human fanny pack but with more satchels. It looked ridiculous, but this was a form over function moment. Malika had insisted on wearing some belts with hers, so it would at least have something to blend in with and to match.
“We need to be discreet. I’ve never been caught before, but it never hurts to be cautious,” Malika whispered in a hushed tone, which he had to lean in to even hear. He only pieced her words together by context, after she already spoke.
“Alright. So the plan is, we go into the town center, pull up some of the flowers by the roots, put them in our satchels and leave?”
“That sounds just about right,” Malika agreed slowly, with a claw poised against her snout, “but we need to pick them very carefully. We need to pull some up every few feet, not from just one section, so they won’t notice they’re gone.”
“My hope is that this is a rare enough flower,” she mumbled worriedly, tilting her head lower in thought, “it’s called the Dragonicus Regionus, and it’s the blue variety that grows here. It’s one of the very most prized flowers, because it only grows over where an earth dragon’s core is buried. The Dragonicus Regionus also helps all the other things planted in the same soil to grow faster. It’s quite useful in my garden, so I return occasionally when I’m feeling brave enough.”
The light dragon put one cautious foot in front of the other, anxious to leave their carefully procured safe space. They were hidden amongst a smattering of overgrown bushes and foliage that was just overgrown enough to obscure their bodies.
“When T’allyandria said she wanted a rare flower, my sense was that she wanted something at least as rare as a landolotl. Do the humans bury many earth dragon cores?”
“No.” Malika shook her head in disappointment. Her hair-like head scales swayed with the motion. “In my experience, they don’t keep many of the cores at all. Maybe one in a hundred. I’m not sure they’ve considered the longevity of their… evil. They just use them up and then discard them, as far as I know.”
She tucked back some of the longer scales that threatened to fall into her eyes. “So if you’re worried about their rarity, don’t be. I’ve only seen three other places where these grow in my entire life, much further north in yellow, much further south in purple, and in the school’s garden. But once you displace them from the core, they live only for a few months before they shrivel up.”
Her lips turned downward at the edges. “No matter what I do.”
“It sounds like the flower only survives while the core is under it, since it doesn’t start from a seed. Have you tried putting an earth dragon’s scale nearby?” Caltyr asked softly, the darkness of near-night hitting the side of his face. The soft light from Malika’s glowing body bounced lightly off of his scales.
Malika’s mouth dropped open into an ‘o’. “Oh my.” She trapped a squeal inside her mouth, but not so well some of it didn’t escape through the edges of her snout. “No, I didn’t, but that just might work. Oh, I think it will. Maybe we can try it on these very flowers we’re about to take.”
“Reclaim,” Caltyr asserted firmly, “reclaim.”
A pause. “Yes,” Malika agreed, “I suppose you’re right about that too.”
The wind whooshed past them, rustling the long grass in a wave. “Have you ever considered just coming out here in the dead of the night and laying waste to an entire city of these thieves? Before any of them even have the chance to wake up?” Caltyr asked as his steely gaze raked from one edge of the gate surrounding the city to the other.
The gate had metal spikes tipped with glowing crystal shards, which he could only assume were either shards of a dragon core or being powered by a trapped dragon somewhere in the city– which was what had spurred his question on in the first place.
It hadn’t been all that long since Malika had been quaking at the concept of working together with him in a combat situation. At his words, he thought he saw some of it return to the surface, but it could have just been the wind.
Her lilac eyes, so bright they were nearly silver like his, shifted away. And then back again. And then away again, as she placed a palm over her ridged nose. “I have. But I’ve come here to take flowers, Caltyr, not lives, so I must insist that we just take the flowers today.”
She closed her eyes and dropped her gaze to the grass. Mournfully, she closed her lids and stared at the insides of them, savoring the darkness and lack of eye contact.
“I’ve thought of it many times since the humans took Miss Tavren away from us and almost killed each and every one of us all as well. It can’t be wise to simply allow them to grow like this, using us for fuel and travel and who knows what else. But at the same time, their power is undeniable, and standing against them alone would be a recipe for disaster. And so, like everyone else, I’m waiting for the council to decide to take action so we can be as organized as possible. Please don’t think of me as a coward.”
Not for the first time, Caltyr wondered inside his mind if the need for a council had passed them by. Just who was the council serving, at this point? The best interests of the dragons, or the best interests of their enemies? Regardless of the intent, it seemed the meetings that required important council members to fly in from other hiding places and schools were holding them back. Their school and all the students within it could be sitting in ruin by the time they finished one of their meetings.
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“I don’t think of you as a coward, Malika. Here you are, right with me, as we’re about to infiltrate a human city in the night without permission.”
“I got permission,” Malika squeaked out speedily. “I said I needed to go procure a flower in the way I always do, and that I would be exceedingly careful, as I always am. I mentioned I was bringing a friend, but I didn’t exactly mention… who.”
“Well, lying by omission to Kraven’s face takes scales too.” He grinned reassuringly.
Malika responded with a soft, careful smile.
“I should explain how we’re going to get into the city, I imagine,” Malika realized. “I’m not sure if your light class has gotten into this. It is rather advanced, and only the most trustworthy of students are permitted to learn this… not that I’m saying you aren’t trustworthy or anything!”
The light dragon spent a couple dreadful seconds fretting if she had offended him, then slowly continued. “But through much concentration, I’m able to change how the light bounces off our bodies and make us functionally invisible. I just request that we walk kind of… slowly, because I have to keep changing how I’m casting each time we move. It’s tiresome to maintain. I’ve been getting better at it, but it’s much harder to use on two people than it is on one.”
“Invisible?” Caltyr gawked. He knew that some of the later levels of water manipulation talked about changing the properties and colors of the water inside the body to render it functionally invisible, but the logistics had always struck him as iffy because there were still scales to contend with.
In this case, it sounded like Malika was manipulating how the light from their bodies hit the eye of everyone who could possibly be looking, at all angles. Which was exhausting to think about.
“That’s amazing,” he marveled. He wondered if, by combining what he knew from his water and light classes, he could one day achieve something close to true invisibility.
“U-uh, thanks… Let’s get going,” Malika puffed out in an embarrassed breath, and shuffled quickly forward through the grass despite having asked him to walk slowly.
Caltyr rose from his crouched position and got in step with the light dragon, who quickly slowed when she realized how very un-slow they were going. “Oh, right,” she reminded herself, “slowly.”
“Slowly,” he agreed.
As they approached the city, the sun ducked further beneath the horizon. A golden sheen remained on the edges of the grass and on the tips of their scales, but they were losing light.
Malika tipped her nose southward in concentration. Caltyr wondered if she was thinking of the times when she had felt invisible in life, or if not, what exactly aided her in calling this particular type of mana to the surface. Her face betrayed nothing besides a deep level of focus, her alabaster face scales tilting inward toward the center of her face.
When Caltyr looked away, he noticed a shimmering around him, like when concrete was so hot it projected illusory waves, but he was the origin of the illusory waves this time. The many rock-like segments of his skin were projecting a confusingly intricate image that matched multiple angles of the scene around him, with the many swaying blades of grass that bent under their steps.
Just looking at it caused a dull ache to sprout between his temples.
“Alright, let’s proceed over the gate and into the city now,” Malika suggested, her voice strained.
The two of them weren’t the largest of dragons, but even they found it easy to hop briskly over the crystal-tipped fence.
As Caltyr touched down on the smoothly paved road that surrounded the edge of the city, a deep feeling of unease filled him. A feeling of unease pulsed through him, like it was forbidden for him to be where he was.
He was reminded of the time when he entered the city much closer to his old school, when he had left a warning in bloody ribbons.
He still didn’t know if it was his warning that had summoned them to his school, but he had deeply regretted it since. And here he was again, wading into one of their cities to commit what he was sure would be deemed a crime in human terms.
It was freeing and terrifying at once.
The gems on the walls created a faint glow that illuminated the streets.
“Do you see those?” Malika asked in a hushed tone, pointing a hand he could barely see toward the crystals. Her voice came out in a low, sad rasp. “Those are dead core fragments, like the one of Miss Tavren’s I gave you.”
“Ah,” he replied, at a loss for words for what else to say. He knew the humans had been harvesting them for parts, but to use them in their infrastructure too… Seeing it right in front of him was something else.
“Them all glowing like this probably means there’s an intact core nearby, or even a light dragon that’s providing them with the mana.”
She blinked. “So let’s be extra careful.”
The pair padded through the empty streets with renewed vigor to be as dead silent as possible. Malika picked her tail up.
“We could just fly into the city center,” he suggested.
“There’s a trellis above the flowers to keep pests out and a mesh metal sheet hanging above that. I think there’s a lightning dragon running electricity through it; we’re stuck grounded, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” Caltyr fell silent.
They curved around corner after corner together, keeping their bodies close. The streets were suspiciously empty of foot traffic, and any vehicles he saw were parked, rusted and half-eaten by moss and vines.
It wasn’t until they were inching closer to the heart of the town that they heard footsteps. They shuffled along in a gait similar to theirs; slow and meandering, but not nearly as careful.
Malika hooked him with her tail.
Caltyr moved with the sweep of momentum and found himself flattened against a wall, a storefront’s awning poking into his back. One of the spikes that ran down his back pierced through the fabric with a ‘pop’. He winced at how audible it was.
The humans swayed into view, grinning. They practically floated along the street, thoroughly absorbed in their conversation.
“I can’t believe it… The flesh worker is on the way, so we’re practically saved already,” one of them stated, slurring their words slightly. A half-filled mug sloshed around in their grip.
“You’d think she would be moving around faster than this. The demons over here are getting out of hand. There’s only so much being sequestered away inside our houses everyone can before we start dying of boredom, y’know?”
“I dunno, I figure you’d be pretty busy all of a sudden when the world realizes you have a world-saving power. I wonder if she’ll pass it along when she gets here?”
The one not holding a beverage sighed and kicked a stray rock forward a few steps. “I’m not sure. I hear there are only a few people able to even do fleshworking, and even then, they can’t control it good. It’s, hicc, genetic or sumthin’.’
The cluster of humans got so far away he could no longer make out their words, especially past the cascade of hiccups that overtook them. He wanted to chase after them, but Malika’s hand found his back.
“Let’s keep going,” she whispered, and he remembered that he wasn’t alone.
It was a comforting thought, but at the same time… Damn it.