Iris could feel her senses slowly return to her, the feel of damp and cold stone on her cheek as she strained to open her eyes. Her head pounded like a drum and her body ached. As her eyes opened, she could see she was laying face first on the ground in some dark cellar room lit only by the light of torches in a far off hallway. She groaned and tried to get up but her arms could hardly find the strength.

“Careful now,” a woman’s voice called to her and a person’s outline could be seen sitting up against the wall of the cell.

Iris slowly lifted herself up and she heard the sound of chains scraping across the stone. She pulled her leg and found it was bound fast by a shackle. She looked over and through her blurry vision could just slightly tell that the chain was fastened to the stone wall.

“Can you hear me?” the woman’s voice called again, soft and soothing.

“Bellona?” Iris called out in a raspy voice, sitting up and leaning against the wall.

Iris’s vision started to clear up and she could see a young blonde woman with bright green eyes against the other wall, a shackle wrapped around her ankle as well under a tattered dress. She was beautiful, but definitely not Bellona.

Iris looked around her with her eyes clearing. She was in a damp and rusty stone cell, two straw beds up against the walls for the two women. To her other side were iron bars that led out into a long hallway of more such cells and lit by torches down the length of the hall.

Iris came to the imminent conclusion. “Where are we?” she asked the woman, trying to get more information.

“We’re in a prison built into the mountain face,” the woman answered. “This place is under the rule of the Lord Oldalthur.”

Oldalthur. Iris’s memories were coming back together; that giant black dragon Arylos fought.

Iris suddenly realised that Arylos and Bellona weren’t with her and she jumped up instinctively, but the dizziness of the sudden motion and the tension of the chain attached to her ankle pulled her back to the stone floor.

“Are you alright?” the woman asked in a concerned tone.

Iris waved her off and returned to her place by the wall. That may be the reason why the woman hasn’t moved from her place by the other wall this whole time.

“I’m fine,” she told the woman, “have you seen my friends? A big pale man with black hair and red eyes and a woman with short black hair?”

The woman shook her head as she answered, “the Lord was furious and left with a large portion of his soldiers but only a few have come back so far and you were the only one they brought.”

Iris lowered her head. She really wanted to think the other two were okay, but Arylos was nearing his limit during their last fight. How much longer could he really last? What would happen if his limits were reached? Does his body die? What then?

She shook away the thoughts; she can’t allow herself to give in now. This wasn’t the end. Instead, she calmed herself as best as she could. They’ll be fine, she told herself. At the very least, they won’t go down without a fight. The only thing she can really do right now is have faith in them and pray they make it out okay.

“My name is Iris,” she told the woman, trying to make some small talk to make the anxiety go away. “And you are?”

“Serhas,” the woman responded.

“Serhas? I was actually searching for you!” Iris exclaimed. “We were heading here to rescue you and put an end to this. Well, that was until I got captured.”

Serhas’s face lightened. “Really?” she asked excitedly. “Is my dad okay?”

Iris bowed her head. A part of her really wanted to lie and say he was, but that would only make matters worse.

“I’m sorry, but he died while I was trying to help him,” Iris answered. “He told me to find you and save you before he passed.”

Serhas bowed her head, hiding a tear from Iris. “So he’s gone,” she said in a shaking voice.

Iris wanted to comfort the girl, but the shackles wouldn’t allow it. “I’m so sorry,” she told her. “I did what I could, but he was saving his strength to tell me to find you.”

Serhas wiped tears from her eyes. “Thank you for trying at least,” she told Iris. “You have already done more than I would have hoped.”

“I know what that’s like,” Iris responded. “Around six months ago, my own village was raided by people we couldn’t stop. I lost everyone; my parents, my friends, even people I didn’t like. But there was one person who was there for me the whole way and even faced pain I wouldn’t be able to face all to try and help me.”

“Sounds like a good friend,” Serhas smiled.

Iris smiled in turn. “He is. Honestly, I couldn’t understand why he would bother with any of it to begin with, but I’ve started to understand more recently. He really does want to help.”

Serhas looked through the iron bars, an expression of longing or of remembering what she no longer has.

“Why is all of this happening?” Iris asked. “Why the attacks? Why the dragon? Why any of it?”

Serhas sighed and looked towards Iris. “What do you know of the Dragon Wars?”

Iris was confused for a moment. “Almost three thousand years ago, the dragons came to this world and invaded. We spent a hundred years fighting them back until we won. That’s about all I know.”

Serhas shook her head. “Does it not bother you that’s all anyone knows?” she asked. “It was a big part of our history and yet that’s all we saved from that time. Why does no one know why they attacked? Or who struck first? Or why our language has portions of the Reig’s language in it?”

Iris thought for a moment. She had these questions herself but no one knew the answer. It was like no one knew anything about the war, or rather they didn’t want to know anything.

“What are you getting at?” Iris asked, her confusion obvious.

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“The war was more than just an invasion,” Serhas explained. “Oldalthur and his men talk about it all the time and they plan to reignite the war; to plunge Kaiyumi back into the Dragon Wars.”

Iris thought about it for a moment and then a realisation hit her. “Does this have to do with the hybrids we fought?” she asked.

Serhas nodded. “They weren’t invading,” she explained, “they were dominating, subjugating. They didn’t want to kill us; they wanted to enslave us and cripple our culture and civilization. To wipe us out and turn us into little more than unnamed slaves from a broken world.”

Iris could only shake her head in disbelief, but it suddenly rang true. She remembered all of the seemingly foreign words in their language and cities, how Arylos mentioned that the Kaiyumian culture was a broken and bastardised relic.

A sickening thought came to her at that moment.

“Then those hybrid soldiers?” Iris asked, her voice shaking.

Serhas only nodded and gave a simple answer. “It was Kalndahvok’s original idea; ‘if we can’t beat them into submission…’” She let Iris’s imagination fill in the rest.

Iris felt her stomach turn. Oldalthur’s hybrids and taking villagers prisoner suddenly made sense. She knew the war was a dark period of time but this was a different level; no wonder modern Kaiyumi had all but forgotten what happened during the war.

“Oldalthur intends to finish his father’s work,” Serhas continued, “he is intent on seeing us suffer. That we are not even useful to them dead. That we’re so less ‘evolved’ than they are that we are not even ants to them.”

Iris shook the thoughts from her head. Oldalthur may be plotting some evil war, but he won’t get away with it.

“Then it’s best we put him in his place,” Iris told Serhas in a determined voice. “Out there, my friend is the greatest force they will ever see. I promise you he will find us and he will burn this place to the ground and mount that damned dragon’s head over our fireplace back at home!”

Serhas only stared at Iris with a blank expression, not sure if Iris had lost her mind. “Can you be sure of that?” she asked.

Iris nodded. “He can rip the wings off of the gods themselves,” Iris told Serhas. “I guarantee you he’ll make quick work of these bastards and this nightmare will be over!”

Serhas was quiet before she let out a chuckle. “You really have that much faith in your friend, don’t you?”

Iris nodded with determination. “Of course I am! And not just him; there’s a woman with him who wouldn’t mind kicking these bastards’ faces in!”

“That I would love to see,” Serhas continued laughing, as if her worries were taken away. “It’s good to know there’s still people like that in this world.”

Iris nodded, but she secretly had to remind herself that they’re inhuman and not from this world; maybe that’s why they seem to care a lot more than the average person.

A series of thudding footsteps started echoing down the corridor, approaching their cell. Iris for a moment hoped it would be Arylos but corrected herself; if it was him, wouldn’t the corridor be on fire?

A tall dragon-man hybrid stood outside the cell and glared at the two women with orange animalistic eyes. “The blonde one comes with me,” he said in a booming voice and began unlocking the cell.

Serhas began to stand up and Iris clenched her fist. She wasn’t about to let this thing have its way with her but Serhas waved Iris away.

“I tend to the prisoners; that’s my only use for them,” she told Iris, trying to calm her down.

Iris calmed herself but also felt a sting of sorrow. If she has no use to the Reig except to tend to the prisoners, then she can’t help make hybrids, which means…

Iris could only watch, angry at herself as she watched the soldier unshackle Serhas and take her away, leaving Iris alone in the quiet cell. Her mind went blank as she quietly prayed that Serhas will be alright and that Arylos and Bellona will get here in time. This was all too much for her.

She wanted to go home.

She wanted to rest, spend more time with Arylos, get to know Bellona, see more of Sentoraya, go to the few shops she hadn’t gone to yet, maybe even take that vacation with Arylos. She wanted to leave this behind and go back to her uneventful life. The journey was fun in theory but the real world isn’t some adventure story in books; it’s out here and it’s far darker than she would have hoped. She learned many things the past few days she wished she could just forget. She sat for around half an hour with these thoughts poisoning her mind, breaking her heart.

Down the corridor, she heard a commotion; shouts of soldiers and footsteps of more arriving to the commotion. Iris then heard a voice, a scream of a woman in pain.

It was Serhas’s voice.

Not her.

Iris felt her anger grow to new heights, her heart pound like a warrior’s drum, her ears ring and her head spin. She clenched her fists and she felt a great heat surge through her veins; the very sensation of her blood boiling.

Not her too.

Iris pulled on her chain with all of her strength, white flames beginning to burst from her skin and dance. She could hear the whine of the metal begin to give out under her iron grip.

Not her you bastards!

The chain snapped and the flames around Iris exploded into a brilliant display of white and blue. She rose to her feet as her hair turned silver and her eyes a deep and brilliant blue. She approached the bars and pulled them apart with ease, partly melting under the heat of her flames.

Iris stepped out into the corridor as white flames poured into it like flood waters filling a ravine. She watched several hybrid soldiers at the end of the hall with weapons drawn and regarded her with fear.

“The witch!” one of them called out, “the witch got out!”

Witch, huh? Iris thought, a smirk escaping her lips. I’ll show you the true meaning of that word.

She lunged forward and closed the distance between her and the soldiers with blinding speed. She reached out and her nails grew into claws, much like Arylos’s own hands, and tore into the soldiers; sinking nails into their scaled skin and pulling out muscles, tendons, even trachea from throats.

All the while, she delighted in it, she enjoyed it, she relished it. She wasn’t going to let anyone else die tonight without good reason, and if that meant slaughtering an army of hybrids, so be it. She had the power to prevent Nageki’s fate from happening to anyone else and she intended to use it to the full extent of that goal.

She grabbed the last soldier and with a mighty force crushed his skull against the wall and he fell to the floor in silence. Iris took deep breaths and brought the flames down to a controllable level. She felt proud of herself; she was starting to get some rudimentary control of it, even though she still didn’t fully understand how to call on the strength.

She settled herself and looked further down the corridor and felt her blood chill. Serhas was laying on the ground in a pool of blood with a spear running through her back and out her chest, still moving and coughing up blood.

Iris knelt down next to the dying Serhas and took her into her arms, her white flames now a soft and warm blue. Iris kept shaking her head, not ready to accept this reality, rejecting it entirely.

“Help them,” Serhas coughed. “Help them get out.”

Iris looked up and down the hall she saw other prisoners; various boys and girls shaking, frail, broken, and afraid of what awaits them. Iris realised the commotion earlier was because she was freeing the other prisoners.

“But what about you?” Iris asked.

Serhas shook her head as she answered. “This is my fate; there is nothing for me here. My village is gone, my father is dead, even my lover died trying to protect me from the soldiers.”

Iris shook away tears. “That doesn’t mean you can just die!” she exclaimed. “I lost everything too but I still keep going.”

“You haven’t lost everything,” Serhas answered. “You still have your friends. And they can give these people back their lives. That means more than my life.”

Iris hesitated, wanting to tell Serhas to get back up, but she knew this was a one way road for her. “I will get them out,” she answered.

Serhas smiled and her eyes faded, as if staring through Iris and into nothingness. In that moment, she was gone.