Caeden shot up with a shout of confused fear. At least, he tried to. A sharp pain in his side and the complete lack of sensation in his legs made that motion a laudable parody of his normal skill. Instead, he flailed his arms in the air ineffectually before coming full to his senses. Which only made everything more confusing.

He was under a thick canopy of brilliantly green foliage the likes of which he had never seen. The sounds of life, birds chirping, insects humming, resonated all around him. He remembered the ship exploding, sabotaged by some method. He remembered surviving with Cat in his grasp. That was it. Then it hit him.

"Cat!" Once again, he tried to jump up, still unaccustomed to his lifeless legs.

"What?" The familiar voice of his female friend called back from a short distance away. He turned to see her sitting on a fallen moss-covered log nearby, looking incredibly bored. "Are you going to stay awake this time? Cuz I'm kinda tired of you yelling at me then passing out."

"What?" Caeden asked, confusion increasing. Then everything went black.

He returned to consciousness slowly this time. More than that, he remembered every time before this that he had been forced awake by his shrouds trying to purge the massive amount of damage he had sustained in the explosion. Each had played out similarly to the last one, with him jerking awake only to yell for Cat and pass out. Her original concerned relief had slowly shifted to boredom, then annoyance. But this time felt different.

Caeden's back no longer hurt, and he could feel his legs again. His mind also felt much clearer. Though that did not make his surroundings less confusing. The cruiser had detonated nowhere near a forest of this description. The grasslands they had flown over were limited in how much plant life they could sustain. A small stand of shrubbery with a few trees was the most they would have found within a couple hundred miles of where the ship went down.

Instead of jerking up as he had before, Caeden explored his surroundings through his aura, trying to figure out where they were. He had a several-mile range, so hopefully, the ship's wreckage would be within that limit. He only ended up more confused and discouraged. There were no grasslands, no remnant ship fragments for him to follow back and rendezvous with Lily and Erik. But he did find three other things of note much closer to him.

The first and most important was Cat, sitting on the same log, looking as bored as ever. He had noticed several of her specters moving through the forest, scouting around them. He even saw that one had secured a plump-looking bird, likely for them to eat. The second thing made him finally get up, just to check that his senses weren't lying to him.

As he rose, Cat's attention turned to him as she huffed in exasperation. "Are you finally good? It's been almost an hour since we landed."

Caeden wanted to respond, but his focus was entirely consumed by the path of absolute devastation behind his head, leading all the way up to where he was lying in a small divot of churned earth. Trees were knocked over; plants ripped from the ground. A line of turned soil led hundreds of feet back. It looked like a meteor had cruised through the forest, only to land exactly where he was now laying. "What happened?"

"Oh, that?" Cat glanced at the destroyed swath of forest, suddenly looking smug. "I just saved your life, no big deal."

Caeden turned to look at her, his attention completely focused. "I'm gonna need a bit more than that."

Cat sighed. "If you insist. So, the ship exploded, and you managed to get me out of there, so thanks for that. Probably would have died. Anyway, on the way out, you got slammed by a big hunk of the hull right on the back of the head. Then a chunk of the overloaded flight crystal is buried into your back, right up on your spine. Nearly severed it, too. It was still going, so we took off real fast. You got knocked out, and I think your shrouds were busy keeping you alive, so I had to deal with the landing." She gestured to the impact trail.

Caeden laughed. He couldn't think of what else to do. "How'd you manage that?"

"Oh, I just manifested a bunch of Guardians and let them take all the damage they could before manifesting another one." She shrugged as if that wasn't an incredible feat of timing and precision. If she had been too late or too early with her manifestations, they both would have died or been severely injured. Caeden's shrouds would have been overwhelmed keeping his brain and spine together, and Cat was basically human on a durability level.

Caeden smiled and shook his head. "Thank you, Cat. You saved my life."

Now she looked embarrassed. "Yeah, whatever. You all good now? That chunk of crystal popped out about five minutes ago, so I figured you were basically healed."

Before answering, Caeden tested himself out. He flipped up to his feet, shaking out all his limbs, and did a couple of jumping jacks just to make sure everything was working like it should. "Yup, seems I'm back together. Concussion's gone, and my spine is fixed."

Cat looked on with jealousy. "What I wouldn't give to be able to shrug off hits like that. Your durability is insane."

"Yeah, well, I can't create a ghost army of hardened warriors from nothing, so I think it evens out." He teased. Cat and Caeden rarely talked like this, just the two of them. Although they were friends, and he trusted her to have his back implicitly, he always felt that she was closer to Lily and Erik than him. It was nice.

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"Pshh." Cat blew a raspberry. "Definitely not the same."

Caeden chuckled. "Agree to disagree." Then he focused on the final thing that had drawn his attention during his search of the area. "Could you get off that log for a second?"

Cat looked at him curiously, "Sure."

Formshifting, Caeden shoved golden, purple-accented fingers under the log and flipped it with little effort. The ground underneath was wet and thick with fungi and insect life. Cat made a disgusted face, but Caeden shoved his hand deep into the dirt, ignoring the invertebrates moving across his enhanced skin. He just had to know if what his aura noticed was what he thought it was.

Finally, his hand, now almost elbow deep, encountered an oblong, smooth object about as large as his two enhanced fists put together. Gripping it carefully, Caeden extracted his hand from the dark, wet earth. In his grasp, he held a brilliantly emerald green egg. Its texture was not perfectly smooth as he had first felt but had subtle veins and ridges across its surface and a slightly leathery texture.

"What is that?" Cat asked. "And why did you need to flip my sitting log to get it?"

Caeden snorted. Of course, Cat would be more concerned about losing her seat. "I think, and I could be wrong, but I think this is a dragon egg."

As he spoke, a crack ran across the emerald surface.

{}

Lily and Erik crouched low, though it did nothing to hide them any better. Out in these open grasslands, there was little in the way of cover. The only reason they weren't entirely visible was Lily's use of her Cloud shroud in conjunction with Concealment sense. Her aura worked to dampen any signs her and Erik's body put out like heat and smell while her shroud covered them in a deceptively thin blanket of fog.

She hated it. Lily prided herself in the efficacy of her stealth. On her own, she could become completely undetectable. But she had to hide Erik as well, and that was a whole new challenge. She had little practice disguising the presence of others. A big part of her ability to hide came from her formshift, which she could not pass on to Erik crouching next to her.

It didn't help that he had no concealment abilities of his own. Outside of healing and fighting, Erik had no skills. All he could do was crouch in her mini fog bank and hope to not be found. While she worked to disguise every element of their presence she could, Erik listened.

Because they were hiding from dragons.

When the ship exploded, Lily had known what Caeden was going to do, probably before he did it. When he had yelled for them to brace for no apparent reason, she knew something had gone horribly wrong. Caeden would obviously go to defend Cat. She was the most vulnerable of their group, and Caeden was the tankiest. He could protect her.

With that in mind, Lily went to work building the thickest, strongest ice shell she could imagine. She included Erik in the shell, knowing his own defensive abilities were evasion based, not through durability. Erik added his own shroud, stitching the ice together and reinforcing it.

She managed to get the shell about a foot thick before the explosion hit. It almost wasn't enough. A huge swath of her work evaporated instantly, and what was left shattered under the impact of shrapnel going hundreds of miles an hour. She rebuilt the shell as fast as she could, but Lily would have died in the first barrage if Erik hadn't been smart enough to activate Freewalking.

His mnemonic automatically deflected half the weaponized ship parts flying their way, and her shell survived what made it through. The fact that anything made it through Freewalking told Lily all she needed to know about how fucked they were. In the months she had known Erik, nothing made it entirely through Freewalking. It was his trump card. A purely defensive skill that mitigated or outright stopped any attack coming his way. It couldn't always stop an attack, but it would deflect it. Pieces of the cruiser were making it through Freewalking untouched.

If either of them had been in that explosion alone, they would be dead. It was only the tight-knit teamwork that had emerged on the last continent that kept them alive. Without needing to speak, they watched each other's backs all the way to the ground. Lily managed to switch over to Cloud once they were a couple hundred feet from the surface, and the shrapnel was less of a threat. With it, she made hardened cloud barriers that cushioned and slowed their descent. It was necessary because they were falling at terminal velocity by that point.

When they hit, her shell gained some cracks, but the two of them left the ice unscathed. An absolute win as far as Lily was concerned. That explosion was the single most deadly thing she had experienced since coming to the Academy. Even the monster wave under Black Reach had been more of a constant pressure than a moment of absolute death.

But the danger didn't stop once they reached the ground. Cat and Caeden were nowhere to be seen, which was troubling. Lily refused to believe they had died. Caeden was too tough, and Cat too resourceful. Her best guess was that they were thrown farther away in the blast, considering they didn't have a massive ice sphere to ride in. If so, there was a simple solution. They just needed to head toward the structure that had been their original goal. They would either meet there or run into each other along the way.

Unfortunately, simple didn't mean easy. The explosion was no small thing, and dragons came looking not long after Lily and Erik exited their icy escape pod. Angry-sounding dragons. And here was where the problems began. Lily and Erik were both terrible with communication sense.

Aura senses formed a spectrum between active aura and passive aura. Usually, a person was good at one end or the other. Investigative sense was at the far end of active, while defensive sense was entirely passive. Communication sense sat squarely in the middle. Normal shrouded had a fifty-fifty shot at having an innate talent for communication sense.

Erik and Lily weren't normal people. Erik's aura was warped to the point that defensive sense was basically the only thing he could use to the exclusion of all else. Lily was similarly atypical, being good at both investigative sense, which was wholly active, and concealment sense, which was about two-thirds passive and one-third active. Her aura senses were all over the place. But she was absolutely horrible at communication sense.

No communication meant they couldn't explain what happened to the angry dragons, which meant they were likely to be attacked as invaders or terrorists, blowing up things over dragon territory. So they hid. Three dragons moved through the rubble of the cruiser that had made it to the ground, sniffing and talking amongst themselves. Which was why Erik was listening.

Communication sense was in the middle of active and passive aura because it involved both listening, a use of passive aura, and talking, a use of active aura. Erik's strong predilection for passive aura gave him half that. He could understand the dragons, but Erik would never be able to talk back. Lily just hoped he learned something useful. Maybe the dragons had found Caeden and Cat.

She had no idea what she was hoping for at this point. They were hiding from creatures that could and would kill them easily, with no backup and no way out. All they could do was sit here and pray to whatever gods might listen that they weren't found.