Caltyr hadn’t been expecting this at all. He physically recoiled, and felt himself beginning to tumble downward before remembering that he was in the air and it was his own job to keep himself suspended.

It shouldn’t have been this much of a shock to him, to see this place. Basic geography knowledge and thinking about it for even a moment should have told him it would be here, right where he left it, but it hadn’t even been marked on the map as itself.

That was how much of a shadow of its former self his old home—school was.

It didn’t lie in ruins, rather, the area had been claimed by the humans and restored, with new bricks, roads and statues to form a city.

Caltyr could still pick out exactly where he had died, and that was where the bulk of the statues stood. He didn’t even have to descend to know they were depictions of the humans he had fileted after he had been fused back together by Miss Tavren’s dying magic.

Sometimes, what he had done after she stopped moving hurt to remember more than her death. It had forever shattered his perception of what he was capable of, and had even forced him to agree with the verdict of the first battle between him and Sara.

He noticed all at once that his fingertips had gone numb, and his body was shaking, his scales vibrating on him like leaves. The memories had surrounded him in chilliness, and his core had followed suit, surrounding his limbs in a sheen of glittering frost. He could even see cold blooms of shadows beginning to form around him, twirling blackness around his tail.

Before that day, he had never used his forbidden mana on a human, let alone on every other dragon he had ever called a friend.

Caltyr breathed out a billow of frost, and then thrust himself upward, toward the space where the others were waiting, before he lost himself to his regret completely.

The clouds stripped the shadow magic away from him, and reduced the snowflakes on him to warm, balmy droplets.

It was clear from their tense expressions that the others had been becoming agitated by the length of his leave, but the roar of the wind drowned out any potential questions.

Caltyr was thankful for that.

With a flap of his wings and a wave, he was off. He led the four of them far away from the site of his sorrow.

It was hard for him to not think about it, but he had become an expert at pushing this topic down so far it felt further away than it was.

The blue dragon only had to fly for ten minutes more before they were at their destination. He led his team downward then, beckoning them through the calm, cottony orange and back down toward the earth.

The five of them descended from the sky with playful puffs of vapor sticking to them. Yellow, red, blue, white, brown and gray, their draconic bodies left ribbons of color behind as they pulled their wings in and dropped like birds toward the ground.

At this moment, Caltyr wished he could pull the white out of his scales. If only dragon bodies didn’t work this way; as long as he continued to practice light magic though, the white would shine through.

While he was thinking about colors, Vallath snapped his wings outward with a guttural croak of air leaving his lungs.

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Caltyr veered to the left and ran into Vermonysis, who swerved to accommodate him and stopped midair.

They all halted their flightpath with varying levels of grace.

“Look,” Vallath croaked, and pointed at the human city below.

For a human city, it was filled with a startling concentration of deep purple citizens.

Except they weren’t citizens. Screams tore through the air, exemplifying how very unwelcome the deep purple forms were. A wall of them were moving through from one end to the other.

A line of humans stood between the swarm of purple and the other portion of the land. It took Caltyr cautiously fluttering downward to see that they were fighting back. Lines of electricity and fire burst from the humans’ side and the bodies of the figures reflected the mana away like dish soap causing oil to disperse and cower.

He couldn’t pick up what they were saying from so far away, but that they were frantic and frightened was obvious. Vehicles were screeching quickly away, but their ill repair was showing from how many of them had broken down on the exit roads.

Caltyr didn’t know how many humans had access to cars, but he assumed from their infrequent use as a travel device that they had been mostly abandoned in favor of riding on the backs of saddled dragons, or using the wind magic they stole from them.

In fact, he couldn’t think of a single dragon he knew who was a wind dragon.

The closer Caltyr got, the more details about the scene he could decipher.

The plum-coloured humanoids ambled around on all fours, but they took to two feet to look around and survey the area. Long, straight horns jutted from their foreheads. More-so than skin, they also seemed to be covered in shining, latex-like hide.

They weren’t carrying any weapons, and their horns weren’t bloodied. And yet, somehow, they were leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.

“Did you see that?” Vermonysis asked him, nudging him in the arm.

“Did I see what?”

“That.” The fire-and-lightning dragon directed Caltyr’s gaze in another direction.

His silver eyes caught sight of one of the creatures ensnaring a human woman’s hands. Her veins were bulging with blue, winding mana tracks. Those same tracks began to glow an angry neon as the demon latched onto the woman’s wrists.

The thing’s arms rose, and pulsing blue mana exploded in bright streams from beneath her skin.

And then it sucked the streams into its mouth like wet noodles from a pasta dish.

The engraved color disappeared from the woman’s arms and left only the peach of her skin behind, and she was left frantically patting herself in disbelief.

“Are those the demons? They must be,” Vallath guffawed.

“It looks like they’re eating the mana out of the humans,” Fellithe worried, disgusted and amazed at the same time.

“But that’s our mana.” Vermonysis frowned.

“So they eat dragon mana. Just what we needed; something else that wants to eat us,” Caltyr groaned.

He watched with a darkness in his grayed eyes as more of the demons surged forward and did the same thing again, drawing the stored magic out of the humans and consuming every last bit of it with frenzied abandon. The humans struggled, screamed, thrashed and fought, but to no avail.

And then after that, they were just normal humans who hadn’t prepared for a battle where they wouldn’t be able to use magic.

Seeing them being robbed of what they had stolen in the first place scratched an itch within Caltyr, he had to admit. But knowing the demons could be after his people’a mana, and very possibly the core stored deep within them, made it difficult to feel fully satisfied.

The demons didn’t seem satisfied either. The one he’d been watching tossed the woman roughly to the side and continued forward, as if this mere appetizer had been an insult. They were looking for the main course, the real thing.

And it was only a matter of time before they found it.

“Do you think this is enough for us to go back?” Fellithe queried, holding herself.

“No,” Caltyr answered. He felt tired as he hung in the air, like the wind had left his lungs and the blood had left his veins, for so many reasons. “We should contact Kraven about our findings, but this isn’t enough for us to be able to go back. We need to see if we can kill one of them.”