These wings are doing me no favors at the moment. Increasing superhuman strength, maybe. Super sensitive hearing, absolutely. Visual acuity where I can see a mouse in the dark from thirty meters away, is super useful. These wings, oof. The close quarters are not helping. Drenar takes point while Angela and Julia stay right behind him at a brisk pace down the ancient warrens of the mine. The deeper they go, the more Drenar knows something is wrong. And it isn’t the abandoned tools, the floodlights still running like no one had bothered to turn them off, or the unnerving silence

It was the things he wasn’t hearing or seeing that bothered him. No breath of air, no voices. Just his heartbeat, and the two other brave women two meters behind him. But there is something else here. A phantom. An uneasy feeling ran down his spine that he couldn’t put his finger on. It felt like he should be on his guard.

He kept running his fingers to the holster where he kept his mother’s dagger. Let’s hope there is no need to ever have to use it other than striking a flint for a campfire.

“Look, track ahead. The mine carts are still lit.” Angela dashes forward and feels the engine block and pulls back her hand. “Electric motors are still warm. Very recent,” she whispers. Drenar digs around the cart for any contents and pulls a short metallic rod out of a storage bin, labeled with masking tape. It reads ‘Zapper’ as if the previous wielder found it funny. He hands it to Angela who lets out a sound of gratitude

“This looks like a wand. Like an actual, bona-fide wand,” she proposes. “Julia, you’re the one with the plasma powers, this might be up your alley.”

“It’s my electric personality, not the dragon species,” she sighs contentedly. Once she hands it to Julia, she gives it a wave and a spark emerges from the tip. She freezes up for a second, and the spark vanishes. “Okay, I do not feel like experimenting with things that I have no idea how they work, or how dangerous they could be. Drenar, anything else in there?” He’s finished rummaging and found a small red and orange translucent orb about four centimeters in diameter. It looks disturbingly like a grenade, with a safety pin holding an arming lever.

“Um, looks like some kind of deadly thing. I guess a grenade is a grenade, even for mages.” He very carefully puts it into an open pocket on his coat and secures it. Angela motions him forward along the tunnel. The tunnel opens up to a natural cave, towering as high as the light would dare traverse against the barren walls. Stalagmites rise from the ground, and there is a faint trickle of water, somewhere nearby. There are traces of some silvery material in the rock, along with a smattering of other glimmery metals. Whatever they’d found, they hadn’t been interested in precious metals.

“This is so strange. They just left these deposits behind like they weren’t even worth the trouble. I know silver isn’t worth anywhere near as much as gold, but it’s like leaving money behind,” Julia spoke in a low tone after examining it. “There’s also some kind of…fragments of obsidian. Volcanic rock? That makes no sense.” She peers down at the abyssally colored glass-like material, and winces. “Drenar, feel this.” She puts it in his hand, and it feels like someone dropped liquid nitrogen in his hand.

“What is this?” he gasps after grabbing a pair of work gloves hastily abandoned in a small supply area marked as a safety zone. “It’s so thermally conductive.” The gloves help somewhat.

“Dunno, but whatever the Talons are up to, probably has something to do with magic. And bad voodoo magic, if I had to hazard a guess.” She tilts her head and smiles. “Bad Voodoo Magic. There’s a wild name for a band.”

“If you want to start a band, there’s your ticket. Let’s try not to die down here, first,” Drenar motions them towards a four-way intersection, and they take the one furthest to the right. Angela stops him and points to a series of cables connecting the other two passages, running across the ground.

"What are these?” Angela asks before pointing to the metallic cables. They gleam with a subdued blue light. Julia kneels and touches it gently after Drenar hands her one of the gloves. Even with the protection, she pulls her hand back as if burnt.

“Hot to the touch. It’s carrying an awful lot of current, whatever it is. The metal is unlike anything I've ever seen, it's like it's practically glowing.”

“Let’s follow it down,” Angela whispers before they change course. The tunnel slopes downwards even deeper into the mountain. He sees giant warning signs of cave-in hazards and signs demarcating the nearest respirator and shelters, and a series of reinforced rooms that appear to be stripped of items when he pokes his head in. This place feels like a tomb, he thinks silently.

“Hey, these cables are getting warmer,” Angela motions for Drenar to feel one of the cables, and she is right. Whatever current was in this was dissipating heat slower, compared to the chilly cavern. “How much current has to be running through this to get it this warm?”

“Too much. What’s strange is that there’s no plastic wire sheathing.” After a moment, they come to another intersection. A few crude signs had been posted on the rock faces. The nearby floodlight illuminated them. One read ‘laboratory’, another read ‘storage’, and yet another read ‘power’. What exactly each of them meant was unknown. “Eh, let’s go to the power source. I don’t like the sound of ‘laboratory’ in the slightest,” Drenar mutters.

“Neither do I," Angela adds quietly. "Julia?"

"Power core it is. We'll have to check out this lab later. Drenar, hear anything–whoa." She taps his ear, and he winces. It feels like his skull is splitting along an axis, and he can see something else. His ear has reformed into an elongated crest of small silver and azure scales, just in the corner of his eye that sweeps backward. He rubs at it gently.

So far this whole process had been manageable, but now his heart rate is going up and staying up. And the pain is getting worse in his spine. "Hanging in there? By the way, it is quite adorable.”

"Angie, not that I don’t appreciate your enthusiasm for all things dragon–which is me now–I think I made a huge mistake," he replies uneasily. He picks up the pace, trying to will the tension headache away.

The narrower tunnels gave way to broader caverns, with a few nooks and crannies, but there was only one main path forward. The thing he hates the most is the overwhelming darkness. It’s a blur of dark silhouettes, even for him. A Nightwing can see right into infrared spectra. Boy, would that be useful now. But Maridians they–I can sense vibrations? What’s that, like tremor sense? Super fancy sense of touch?

He’s realizing that being a dragon needs to come with an instruction manual that he is sorely lacking. The flashlights are a risky proposition. Julia sweeps the light across the room and taps his wing shoulder to get his attention. "More shards of that crystal." He takes note of the black, glossy shards of glass strewn everywhere. It’s like looking at a hole in reality with how much light they absorbed, and he has to blink to clear the spectacle from his vision.

“Guys, hold up. I feel like…there’s a static charge in the air. Anyone feel that?” Julia whispers when she steps in front of Drenar. He didn’t feel it, except in his wings–specifically, on his scales, for some reason. Why is that?

“Yeah. Static. Or some kind of energy. Feels like a vibration on my skin,” Angela whispers. Drenar picks up the pace, past a large entryway to a larger cavern--some of it chipped away by mining equipment, some of it natural. Julia pans the light around, and a bat flutters by nearby–the only noise in the dead air. “Eww, bats. I wouldn't mind them, but they have several choice diseases. Mind your step for droppings.”

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“An infection is the last thing on my mind right now Angela,” he states with disgust. He swears he can hear an electric hum distantly. And maybe a very, very distant voice, but it’s impossible to make out anything. There are more of those blackened crystals that clink under his boots–but they don't crack. They’re impossibly hard. And there is more of it, further–

“Ladies? I think we have our artifact of doom,” he points just off to the right and ahead of them, towards the cavern wall, by a series of abandoned mining tools, and some strange devices with arcane, organic metal tripods propped up in an arc by the spectacle. Less than ten meters away is a sphere of that black crystal, gleaming dimly in the flashlight. It’s perfectly smooth, and judging by its size, at least three meters in diameter, except the front appears jagged, shattered even. Maybe half of it is exposed to his vision range—the rest is buried in solid rock behind it. The pieces of black glass he just saw a second ago match the material from the sphere. Peering closer, he can see the sphere is hollow on the inside. And his scales feel like they are charged with energy. He rubs at his wing uneasily, what other preceptors is his increasingly inhuman body wired with? Can he sense mana energy now, maybe? Extra-sensory senses? “What do you think? Maybe it’s some sort of rare geological formation, like a geode?”

“No way it could be natural; it’s too smooth, too precise. This was engineered,” Julia states, all of them stepping closer cautiously. “It’s hollow. Which means something was inside it. But these devices…” She takes a mining pick and tries to scratch the crystal. Not even the faintest trace of a scratch. “This is some tough stuff. There are darkened marks here and craters in the rocks. They blasted it out, and it’s untouched by that. What was inside, is the question?”

“Artifact of doom, elder evil, one pissed-off prisoner? Or maybe someone made a magical time capsule, and we're a thousand years too early,” Drenar suggests.

“There’s more of that dark crystal. What is this stuff, like, is there a light world version, a dark world version of this mana?” Angela proposes with a squinted expression.

“It absorbs almost all the light. It's so dark it's causing me eye strain, and the texture suggests--hrng!” Drenar kept a muffled curse under his breath, and he felt his arm go bone achingly cold for a second. It was worse than the fragments. “Damn, that chilled me something awful,” he growls. It was a numbing cold that slowly faded.

“Are you okay?”

“Just peachy, thanks.” He feels his nerves tingling slightly. “It's extremely thermally conductive or artificially cold. Don't touch it. Gloves won't help much, either.”

“And these wires are tacked on too. Look.” Julia points to the cables that seem to have been stuck on, and a single errant spark arcs off the metal–illuminating the room for the first time in the briefest flash of light. “This thing is a power source? Or maybe it's part of the magic baked into it?”

“I’ll call it. Sealed evil in a can,” Angela proposes with a surly expression. “And the Talons broke it open like fools. Go figure.”

“Hang on. If they got what they needed, why’d they stick around, and wire it up?” Julia asks. It’s a thought that is distinctly discomforting.

“Uh, guys? There are fingernail marks on the inside. So something alive was in here,” Drenar utters with disgust. He takes great care not to touch the crystal when pointing to them.

“Yikes.” Angela shows a muted reaction of disgust. Julia already has the camera out and is recording. He checks to make sure his camera is still recording. “Julia, it’s about…what, three meters in diameter? Black crystal, perfectly smooth. It has some level of innate energy–”

“Got it. Let's photograph this and get out of here before Drenar starts looking any more like Pete’s dragon.” She slowly strafes it, taking pictures from every angle. “Scale is about three-meter diameter, material unknown, possibly magical. Extremely conductive thermally, to the point it feels like the void of deep space. Someone tried to claw their way out with approximately human-sized hands. The hardness of the material is through the charts on the outside, beyond any current hardness scale or even natural diamond. Not sure I want to test my plasma spark on it to see if it conducts energy,” she adds as an aside.

Angela tries to pull on it with the same motion she used on the car, and he hears a low hum. A high-frequency vibration. “Careful. We don't know what happens if we test magical abilities on it.”

“Yeah, good point. Grab some of those shards then.” He quickly puts more into a plastic bag, thankful that the gloves protect him somewhat from that biting cold feeling. Drenar looks around after grabbing the fragments. Something is bothering him. There’s mundane equipment all around, but, had all the workers at this mine been in on the task? That would have required some high amount of bribery, especially after witnessing this. Julia’s still analyzing in the background while he examines a discarded phone–it’s partially melted. “These cables are approximately 25 millimeters in diameter, with some kind of rune or other scripture embedded on them. They seem to give off a light of their own," she continued. “Anything I’m missing?” Drenar finally looks at the entryway they’d come in, behind a rocky alcove and recoils in shock. His wings instinctively tensed and he felt his feathers bristle. Like goosebumps–except he was the goose–did that even make sense? He takes a deep breath.

“Angela, Julia, we have problems. Some very bad things went down a while ago,” he says in a heightened tone. Wrapping his wings around his shoulders is marginally comforting.

“What kind of--gross. Dead things.” Lying on the blackened rock behind a pile of debris, are five bodies–their clothes, ash, their protective gear all melted and burnt. Drenar drew closer and knelt to get a better look at the skeletons Their arms are held to their faces, in a final moment of immortalized terror. The bones are blackened, as if someone had held a high-temperature flame for a considerable duration. “That’s a grim fate.”

“Drenar, you’re kneeling on a femur, please get off of it,” Angela whispers anxiously, and he quickly steps away with deliberate precision. “Hey, dead is still dead in magical land, right?” Julia puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder, while Drenar examines the bones quietly. There might not be undead, but he still respected the deceased.

“Well, Amaranth didn’t mention any undead things, so…yeah, hope so. ” Drenar kneels and takes in the gruesome sight. “No shrapnel, debris, or other crush injury to the bones. Just charred. See the stone below, some of the quartz almost appears like cracked glass, you can tell by the glossy texture. This quartz melted. These bones are--basically dust.” He barely touched one rib with a glove and it practically flaked apart and he gently wiped it on his leg. Angela looks practically nauseous, and Julia is grimly taking photos. The flash plays havoc with his eyes, so he gently waves the camera away. “To melt rock, the flame temperature must have been more than a thousand Celsius. Maybe a continuous flame, an artificial source. I guess not all the company employees were on the payroll. This could have been a conventional fire, or dragon fire. I think the latter.”

“Is their ability that powerful? And how do you know this was a high-temperature burn?" Drenar sighs, he really should have gone over more details with her about the dragon species, and Amaranth’s book is likely just a scratch on the surface of the complexity of their new biology. The Draconomicon was more historical than it was about biology.

"Okay, picture this. I toss someone on an open flame. The rest of the body is cooked meat, but bone has inorganic components that last to a higher temperature…it's like…calcium phosphate, I think, an inorganic salt. Once you get past a certain point, like a crematorium temperature, the chemical bonds start to break down." She gives Drenar a disturbed look.

“And let me guess, some dragons spew flames hotter than that?”

"The Siberian Hellkite can render a person from an is to a was in about five seconds, and so can a few other species. It’s plausible," Julia says. "My money is that these guys saw them jailbreak whatever it was in that sphere, and then they had to go." She peers at Drenar intensely. "You're fireproof, right?"

"Not yet, and I'm going to emphasize that I'll be fire-resistant." He is in no mood for testing this one out with his Awakening only partly underway, and he feels shooting sharp spikes of pain down his spine again. "Don't use me as a heat shield just yet, Tsundere.”

“Oh come on, you’re not expendable! You’re irreplaceable, and I gotta keep you in relatively good condition. Because I have to share you with other people.” her sideways glance at Angela almost elicits a laugh.

“Okay, I know it’s a little grim humor, but we’re hovering over dead people,” Angela states with anger. “Let's get out of here. I think we should explore a little more, then bounce topside.”