Dragon(s)layer
13
"This development changes everything. Our new enemies have proven that their reach is far, and that it runs deeply. I am not so quick to detract from what you are doing, hatchling, lest I be impertinent. But what has occurred has demonstrated to me that you are in need of aid."
Cynder blinked moisture from her eyes as she passed through the strain of copper clouds. The fluffy wall of flesh left in her wake was parted, leaving a quickly resealing gap daggered by the length of her wingspan.
She tucked her nose lower and breached the current with her breast and shoulders, lowering altitude, to gain a sweeping view of the Frontier Sea as it extended far and below her.
"Reinforcements travel to the Forlorn Watch as we speak. Your hailing for help was most proactive. I am… pleased with your intuition. Forget not; your service, for all its faults, was never marred by so fickle a blemish in its entirety. You are my champion in this ordeal. I have only ever gifted to you what I have deemed the bloodiest of alleys in need of reorganization. I do not level what I am about to make you do out of punishment."
The ocean was almost a blood-red, caught in the tidings of late evening. This far below the brown cloud level just over her horns showed the blurred, burning girth of the setting sun. The colossal ball of dragonflame gradually hid itself over the lip of the oceanic horizon. It emblazoned an upside-down pyramid of golden caterpillars inch worming down the center of the sea in parallel with her line of sight. Cynder's white eyes reflected a golden tint as she dreamed mid-flight.
Being airborne was in a dragon's blood. Yet somehow, she always found her thoughts becoming loftier every instance she leaped from the earth and took a prolonged journey to another landmass.
She supposed she'd been stuck mourning in that wretched tower for so long, that she had forgotten the pleasantries of foreign air and diversity.
Luckily, her wings were powerful enough that she could easily halve her own flight time and be in the accursed Dragon Realms within the same day.
"The war has been shifting while you were away, hatchling. The Daragon Coast is your destination, home to the town of Oversight, Queen Lillith's realm that she arrogantly forgets in her hours of botanistic withdrawal inside Castle Crownhorn. My generals are already overseeing the assault to crush the Northerners' 'Kingdom of Vines'. The siege stalls, but you are not there to influence that."
Cynder eyed the west as she flew, Malefora's words replaying themselves as ghostly echoes in her mind. The Frontier Sea was too vast to view the Ancient Sea from this distance. By extension, the Dark Continent, and the volcanic home of her Mistress were hidden miles and miles away over the horizon. But Cynder could practically feel her gaze. The growing aura of unnatural shadow emerging over the west was growing every day. If the invasions over the waters had already started, that meant that Malefora was going for broke.
She wanted Warfang. And she was willing to kill and burn her way across half the Dragon Realms in order to reach the holy capital of their kind. The Dark One had spent the better majority of the last few years gathering her forces. Cynder had united the Ape tribes beneath the chieftain kings, and Malefora had forged the new Dark Army. Four strongholds of shadow.
Monkano, Forlorn, Concurrent, and the Dark Continent.
Warfang was outnumbered four to one. The end was coming.
"Behold. I send you to find this one. He is cunning. He is dangerous and he has never failed me. He blends shadow with speed and accuracy. The perfect assassin. Find him in the wartorn Daragon Coast. Our hold in the south depends on it."
Cynder felt belittled by it all.
Being forced to seek help.
Not even hours after Malefora had violated her mind for the first time in years in an attempt to dispel the Fallen's enchantment.
-Which was still fucking eating away at her to this moment. She had relented from saying anything to her Mistress after the horrid 'treatment' she'd been subjected to. But she had an inkling that Malefora knew it as well.
What else was there to do without risk of killing Cynder? She'd toughen the enchantment out. She'd been dealt far worse.
If it even is an enchantment.
The copper sea and sky made her reminisce this strange feeling. A pattering sensation, like a colony of moths nesting in her gut. The human's form and physique. But most of all the sensation of his un-scaled skin brushing her hide.
Cynder needed to feel that again. She'd already determined that she wanted the Fallen alive, and had been pained being forced to tell her soldiers to capture him either or. If she'd made her fascination too obvious for Malefora… there was no telling what the Dark One would do.
Cynder had poured through her little library in the Forlorn Watch's observatory. She ripped through stolen books, historical records, tomes and scrolls, and not once had there ever been a mention of anything called a human throughout the Old Kingdom's history. Even predating Malefora herself and the foundation of the Guardians. Nothing at all.
This otherworldly being escaped her literary reach and her emotional.
Gigaw's proddings being dismissed: Cynder desperately wanted to talk. Sheerly because there was no one in her life to ever have done so with. These issues eating her insides made her quick to anger, irritable, and constantly seeking the attentions of another.
Even though the crazy simian had stabbed her, Cynder couldn't rid herself of his fingertips. Soft little skin-nubs that had glazed over her majestic, crimson plated breast.
She had never allowed another to touch her in her life. But Cynder was prepared to let the Fallen touch her like that again, if only just to remember what the sensation had felt like.
I could've encountered him in the swamps myself during a patrol, captured him, bound him and carted him back with me. I wouldn't have brought him to that crumbling ruin. No, Forlorn wouldn't have sufficed. I'd have brought him to Concurrent. To my home.
Cynder shivered, flapping her wings to gain her altitude back. Her body felt like it was being coursed by a pleasant little tingle of electricity. At the mere thought of such a fantasy.
Her castle was dark, and shrouded in mystery, but most of all: it was private.
High in the floating crystal islands of Concurrent Skies, hidden away in the magically conjured Blue Hurricane that had been concealing the cavernous airborne landmasses since the first ages was her fortress. The thought of dragging the Fallen inside, binding him over the tiled floors, hanging him from chains, letting him mount her…
Cynder wasn't even hiding the infatuation from herself anymore. She could rant and get angry all she wanted and it wouldn't change the facts.
The Fallen had done something to her with his touch, some kind of effect that followed him wherever he went, and only impacted beings of her type and construction.
Cynder was going to capture that pristine, vitalic alien male. And she was going to kill that little purple bitch that was currently starving her of his company. He would be all hers.
But first, she needed to fulfill her master's wish.
No matter how much she loathed doing so.
Land came into sight. It crawled over the sea and started to shield the dropping sun. Coastal cliffs and skiffs of creamy sand swathed out to the far east and throated in the north. The black shapes of warships bobbing in the surf were ant-sized dots as she gained altitude. It was impossible to tell the identities as naval units hung back and waited for night to pass before resuming hostilities. The crude constructions of Ape dreadnoughts contrasted the rich crimson and gold trimmed steam-ships of the moles, the dragons' ancient allies and protectees.
Larger ships made of molten earth and pulsating crystal emerged in greater numbers from the west. The Dark Army's navy.
The crone of warhorns etched out in the backdrop, as did the occasional, hollow report of an explosion and whoosh of fire. Tiny dots that resembled spiraling flies over the coast signified the presence of aerial combatants on both sides. Though this ambiance bled across the entire coast like a macabre blanket of interspersed happenstance, it centered thickest over and around Oversight.
Oversight was an artificial sprawl on the otherwise natural coastline of the Dragon Realms. The walled draconic town had black soot rising in towers from many a place. Fires brewed on the beaches its cliff walls overlooked as engines of the Dark Army- destroyed in the initial landings –continued to burn. Every so often, a broiling fireball, launched from a catapult or a mole cannon would careen in the respective angle, leaving behind a black arc of soot, and would land in a muted whump~! –that would thunder up and down Daragon.
Cynder's inner turmoil was briefly silenced as she considered indulging the warrioress side of herself by engaging in combat with the Northerners. But this theater wasn't hers. At least not yet. She needed to find her goal and get out of this war with him. Get back to her tower and finish her war first.
Cynder swept low and fledged out her wings, making sure to keep them daggered, with the brunt of the wind beating off the spines instead of the membranes. She didn't want to be known in her excursion. The last thing she needed was her own trademark scream echoing across the beach and letting every eager dragon champion loyal to Lillith know that the Terror of the Skies had entered the scenario. This needed to be quiet.
The surf bucked against the coast with white foam against rocks and sand. She slipped over it and a pair of wrecked hauler ships that had been used to disgorge friendly soldiers. These dark transports lye as black, mangled corpses interspersed up and down the beach, their bellies cracked open and their masts collapsed. Some of them were burning.
Impact craters and rock fields mostly after that. Bonfires ringed with shuffling little ants, skeletal siege engines and dispersing bat-like fliers. Cynder targeted the nearest campsite, offering the overhead visage of Oversight's cliff-topped walls a disdainful sneer.
She landed and readied her heels in sandy, dead grass, her white eyes narrowing as clinks of steel, surprised grunts and mournful groans symbolized the presence of others.
Armored, cloven heels crunched in the grass on all sides as she was quickly surrounded. Cynder preened her wings and then concealed them to fold. She gave an austere crane of her neck, and grunted when a motley assortment of black shapes- ones slightly larger than even her –shuffled closer.
"Mistress," Droned a gravely, deep-seated voice. "we almost mistook you for a dragon seeking honor-death."
"It would've been the last mistake you made." Cynder chanced a second-long smile, answering the attempt at humor with a darker side of her own.
"My lady."
The creature sacrificed a knee and bowed its crocodilian, armored head, a double-handed battle axe sticking into the grass butt-first. Nearly twenty other examples of this hideous, gangly creature followed suit, all kneeling in a ring of worship around the black dragoness.
Orcs.
Cynder snorted and reached up to shove her brooch into her snout.
Mushrooms, Apes, death, Orcs. There was always some offensive odor to do battle against, forget the fucking war.
"We were informed by Lord Urukal that you would bless us with your presence. You seek our pathfinder." The same Orc righted himself before the others, a snarled excuse of a grin developing on his underbitten, hideous jaw. His fangs were disorganized and yellow. Cynder found it a miracle the abomination could manage speech so fluently, especially seeing as Orcs were some of the more brutish of her master's earthen-borne creations, known to be even more barbaric than Apes.
"Yes." Cynder said, her eyes sizing the Orc up. "You are an officer?"
"Indeed, my lady." The Orc chuckled. "Taskmaster Gulukai, overseer and director."
"You will take me to my charge."
"Right away."
Gulukai parted his squadron of armored Orcs with but a wave of his claw. The beasts' labored, ragged breathing was the only ambiance for a while as he led Cynder through the mob.
They all stared at her with a strange mix of adoration and hunger. Tens of beady little red eyes gleaming in the evening dusk underneath triangular, horned helmets. Cynder had to let go of her brooch to walk and immediately regretted it.
These Orcs stunk. Like feces and corpses. She peered over several of their shoulders and witnessed a mangled elk stuck through a spit and charring over the burning timber. A trio of green Grublins chattered and wrestled over a discarded bone in the sand at one of the Orc's feet. The whole encampment was like this. The beach had become infested, just like Malefora had intended.
"The siege has lasted a month. In that time, we were repelled from the shores six separate times by dragons attacking from the air. Naval bombardment was nearly ineffective. Only a Wing brought in from the Dark Continent, and the actions of our champion pathfinder were able to secure a beachhead for the invasion to commence." Taskmaster Gulukai relented, edging his hideous, reptilian mug past his shoulder at her. "The champion pathfinder you seek, I might add. Lord Urukal is most anxious about having him removed from combat, especially when Daragon is so close to falling."
"Urukal will survive such a surgical relocation." Cynder rolled her eyes, disinterested in maintaining the conversation.
"Of course, my lady." Gulukai said. "I am not a conduit for his concerns, understand, but as Taskmaster, Urukal has placed in me a set of responsibilities that warrant my asking."
"You have been promoted?"
"Upon the death of my predecessor, yes." Gulukai's black tongue swiveled about his teeth, and he spoke with a wet burble of musing. "Taskmaster Lukpom met an unfortunate end at the hands of mole riflemen. He was blown to tatters and stringed into the surf as soon as he leaped off the carack."
"Unfortunate."
"Very much so. The Northerners drew first blood in cauldrons, but our superiority in numbers and quality saw the day. The dragons felled were appropriated by the Apes for ceremonial feasting. I was most tempted to join them."
Cynder answered that with silence. Strangely, despite everyone in this conversation being a practiced killer, the idea of her regal kin being eaten by her army…. disturbed her.
A cannon shot landed not too far off in the campsite. The explosion was like a crack of thunder. Over a hill rise, fire bloomed and the flaming carcasses of Grublins and an Orc or two hurled themselves down to the ground below. When bones became blackened by heat, they tended to crumple like cheap charcoal when subjected to trauma. Listening to their spines crack was like hearing a thin woodland stick snap.
Gulukai didn't even take notice as he jogged to the other side of the camp. The walls of Oversight were high overhead, up the spanning maze of cliffs. Cynder sneered as she hunkered lower and used her enhanced, draconic eyesight to sweep the tops of the defense palisades.
Moles, armed with crossbows and flint rifles, scurrying everywhere like the rodents they were. Brass, floor-mounted cannons topped with barrels carved to resemble dragon heads. One belched occasionally and rained another comet of death on the beach below.
"Taskmaster, time is not an ally for either of us." Cynder hissed as they reached a patch of thin foliage. "Where exactly do you think we're going?"
"Forgive the detour, mistress." Gulukai breathed, pointing at the brush. "But our pathfinder does not reside within the garrison."
"Then where the hell is he?" Cynder laughed sourly.
"Engaged in reconnaissance at the edges of the enemy walls. He's been observing Oversight's defenders for the last week."
"And his general location?"
"By the copse of trees, there, several yards from the farthest cliff face beneath the walls."
Cynder kicked her wings and blared past Taskmaster Gulukai faster then the Orc could blink.
"Beware the woods, my lady!" –His ragged shouts met her in the distance as she vanished into the shaded woodlands. "Enemy scouts are in there too!"
The woods at least offered some degree of quiet, if you didn't mind the staccato ring of siege weapons dully firing overhead. Cynder quietly slipped across the foliage on all fours, ringing trees.
Only when she reached a small clearing did she pause, her breath heavy from the exertion of the sprint. Some crickets chirped nearby, and the trees oversaw everything in a glossing canopy of dark browns and blacks. The sun was almost entirely gone by this point and the forests around Oversight's lowlands were getting swallowed by shadow.
Cynder sniffed the air. Finding the usual scents of pine needles, wood, soil, grass…
But death too. Spilled blood, relatively fresh. There was no mistaking that metallic tinge. Not even here in this hell.
Cynder examined the clearing for a short while before casting an accusatory glance to her flank. She crossed some distance and swept aside the snapped hulk of a fern, crinkling her nose when she revealed a corpse underneath the branches.
It was a Mole, still wearing his black and gold combat armor, and a set of little spectacles that crookedly remained on his nose even in death. He'd been slashed open from shoulder to hip. The puddle was starting to become part of the ground.
His handiwork no doubt.
Cynder looked up. The little alley through some trunks showed the scene of a massacre. At least eleven more Mole warriors, elegantly carved swords and crossbows haphazardly loosed next to their cadavers. Two of them had been decapitated. Organic gruel created now crusting trails that linked the cleanly sliced stubs of removed limbs and heads to the torsos they had come from. Some of the blood was black. There were maybe six or seven Grublins and a pair of Orcs meshed in with the pile. The Orcs were of a thinner build, with red plated armor.
Archers. One of the two breeds of their kind solely created for war. Cynder wondered if one of them was her quarry. She'd almost be relieved if such was true.
Footprints, and an unlinked trail.
Cynder was careful not to touch any of the dead as she traipsed through the thicket. She bent lower and viewed the carnage wrought upon the bloody grass. A clear indicator of movement showed footsteps and broken twigs leading to an edge in the fighting. Black blood dripped in interspersed globules between steps.
A little groan caught her attention. Cynder looked down at one of the 'corpses' and sneered as the Mole twitched, lying face-down in the dirt.
The black dragoness stepped closer and rolled him over with a poke of her bladed tail. The rodent gasped, his arms flopping across his ruined chest as he was forced onto his back to view the darkening sky.
He had a pair of mechanical goggles strapped over his eyes. Cynder could hear the lenses inside whirring as they focused on her face from below.
"…T-Terror of the Skies." The mole whispered hoarsely, blood flecking over his chops.
"Indeed. Your target appears to have escaped you, rat-man." Cynder looked back at the dead Orcs. "Which way did he go and how many of you are left?"
The Mole gurgled, the proud, crimson and gold helmet on top of his diminutive little head rolling off to lay still just over his scalp. He slouched and the tense muscles in his neck relaxed. Cynder sighed in annoyance.
They always had to die when it was inconveniencing.
Metal clashed and someone nearby shouted. Her wings flapped and she shot through a pair of trees, leaving the site of the battle.
The commotion was coming from one of the subsidiary cliff faces, the steps leading up to the foot of Oversight's walls. A single Orc battled a trio of Moles wielding glaives. Cynder readied herself to join in the engagement, but found there was no need.
The Orc- despite suffering slash wounds across his breast and left leg –flipped, head over heels, in a backwards roll. He carried himself from the slashes of the Moles and righted atop a boulder, a crossbow readied in his one claw. The weapon kicked and a Mole screamed with a bolt sticking out of his furry throat.
Another closed the distance and swept at the Orc's feet. The Orc jumped, landed beside his attacker, and brought a dagger in his other claw across the smaller warrior's face.
The Mole screeched like a mouse caught in a trap. He tossed back with an incision opening him from his jaw-hinge to the brow on the opposite side of his head. When he fell, the Orc had already reloaded a second bolt, and the last Mole died when the round punched between his eyes and sent him sprawling.
Cynder landed on the edge of the plateau and preened her wings, staring across the bodies at the Orc with her soulless white eyes.
For a moment, the Orc paused, his breathing labored as he reloaded his crossbow again, slipping the bolts from a bandolier wrapped across his painfully narrow waist. He regarded her with little red eyes under his helmet, his yellow teeth bared in a constant snarl.
"Zargos the Pathfinder." Cynder greeted.
The Orc closed his mouth, and snorted up a trail of blood that was leaking. He remained silent.
"I bring word from the Dark Mistress." The black dragoness said. "You're being reassigned."
Zargos sheathed his dagger, swaying a bit as he stood to his full height and continued his staring. Cynder was expecting the usual gruff voiced, overzealous and cocky barbarian that all Orcs inevitably wound up being. Instead, when Zargos spoke, his voice was just an octave above an agonized whisper.
"M'lady." He belatedly uttered, bowing his head slightly.
"I need you to come with me." Cynder folded her wings and nodded back towards the beach, now in view from their height on the cliffside plateau. "Word comes through me from the Dark Continent itself. Malefora requires your talents."
Orcs had trouble with any other kinds of facial expressions besides contemptuous sneers and angry frowns. But Zargos looked like he wanted to say something. The battle fatigue was still draining from his system. He merely closed his jaws and gave a little bow again.
"M'lady." Was all he parroted.
{🐉}
Zargos said nothing when Cynder brought him back to the very beach he had fought so hard to take with his erstwhile kin. Malefora had been prepared. There was an Ape carack waiting just off the rocks for him, and a small dingy was beached with a trio of the simian warriors lumbering about to transport him.
Cynder had never fought beside Zargos the Pathfinder before, but from what she had heard about him, his prowess was certainly a spectacle as was her own.
Zargos had been fighting since the beginning of the war. He was reputedly one of the oldest Orcs in the Dark Army and had survived earlier campaigns where the Dark Army had secured holds on the mainland and had summarily been driven back. He had lived through more battles than even Lord Urukal, and Urukal was Malefora's most decorated Orcish general in her entire army.
Zargos had very little to say as the black dragoness told him everything that had been happening in the southern swamps. The prophecy of the Purple Dragoness being born. The flaming asteroids from the sky. The rise of the Fallen. Zargos didn't speak, but she could tell when his interest piqued due to the inclinations of his crocodilian head. He would raise his chin whenever Spyra and the Fallen came into play.
When Cynder was done, they had reached the dingy and stood before one another, 'ness to Orc, before the end of their brief meeting.
"The flow of Mana Crystals from the south is dependent on my tower. The Purple Dragoness doesn't just threaten our source of soldiers, but the very foundations of the Dark Continent." Cynder spoke. "We both toil to find her and limit the inevitable damage she will deal."
Zargos made a small grunting sound, and looked off towards the carack bobbing in the waves past the beach. Even the Apes by the dingy looked intimidated by his presence. He was covered in scars, his armor was ancient and worn and the red color was starting to fade. He was missing a finger on his left claw, and one of his cheeks had a permanent divet carved into it from a past blow to the face.
"Do you have any questions regarding your quarry?" Cynder allowed herself a brief smirk. "Given their unique nature and status."
"The stories that the dragons have spun." Zargos' voice sounded like magma bubbling, or like there was tar in his throat. "They were true all of this time. I believed our Commando teams were being wasted, lingering in the tombs of the dead and the warrens of your kind's soothsayer monks."
The Archer paused.
"Why haven't they been gifted my new task?"
"Malefora practices compartmentalization." Cynder reminded glumly. "One messenger is rarely aware of another, least of all whom they travel to meet. I'm quite certain your comrades have been selected for due quests themselves."
"The Lady of the South is no mere messenger." Zargos narrowed his beady little eyes. "The Dark Mistress rarely acts so brashly. If the situation is as grave as this suggests, I'd beg of you to tell me."
"It isn't like I was swept away to maintain transport coherence at the foot of the volcano." Cynder sighed. "The Daragon landings apparently leave little wiggle-room, so to speak, for any others. Malefora believed you should hear it from the next best thing to the source. The flight was not long."
Not that Zargos had any inclination to give a shit. Cynder was small-talking.
"Your reputation precedes you." Zargo said out of the blue. "I was curious when I saw you land before me, freshly covered in blood from victory. I almost was convinced that the end had grabbed me in my absence of thought, and I was hallucinating. But, nevertheless, the Terror of the Skies herself has gone out of her way to collect a lesser savant of the Dark Continent. Me."
"Whether it is for better or worse I am all too real." Cynder huffed, snorting at her brooch as the sea-salt started to grate on her nerves. "My Mistress told me you have repeatedly refused positions as an officer. I can read your talents in your speech. Why do you do this to yourself?"
"Why do any of us do what we do, m'lady?" The Orc chuckled. "I live for the hunt. The Dark One bids me to draw blood for her, and so I shall. Such is one's born purpose. I shall take my leave."
He started to stomp towards the dingy. Cynder held up a wing and stopped him.
"Wait." She choked, still deciding whether to speak aloud by the time she said it anyway. "There is more."
"M'lady." Zargos paused.
"I discussed to you compartmentalization. There is an addendum to these instructions of yours, Zargos, and it is one that I have no doubt will complicate things for your inner mind." Cynder breathed, and said very quietly. "The Fallen. I want him alive."
"Has the Dark Mistress not instructed his death?"
"I have instructed his capture." Cynder said dangerously. "And it is the closest word you are to receive above all else. Malefora punishes, but so do I. Do I make myself clear?"
Zargos remained silent for a second. Then, there was another little bow of his head.
"Yes, m'lady."
"Good. Bring to me the Fallen alive, and bring my Master the Purple Dragoness' head mounted on a pike. Leave the excuse for the Fallen's disappearance to me and me alone." Cynder nodded for the boat. "My men will start you on your journey. You are on your own from that point on."
"Understood." Zargos bowed. "My hunt will reap fruit."
"See to it that it does." Cynder's claw extended, and when her talons opened, Zargos stared at a small black pearl clenched in her palm. "Take it."
Zargos pinched the little stone and put it in a sash. He bowed lower. Cynder took one last look at Oversight. The walled town would hold yet, and the towering triple spires of Castle Crownhorn sat vigilant over all the soot and the night sky, now highlighted silver by the rising blue moon.
"We'll be in touch." She stated, before her wings kicked, and she was a black strip vanishing over the sea's horizon.
Zargos watched her go and sneered at the beach.
Inner politics made him sick. But as long as it meant him getting out of this fucking meat grinder, the Orc was all in for any assassination contract he could get. He'd hunt down Mistress Cynder's quarry. He did better alone anyway.
"Those look like sum nasteh bites those do." One of the Apes lumbered closer, examining the blade-wrought wounds fresh on Zargos' body. "Ya want a bandage or sumthin, boss?"
"That isn't necessary." Zargos looped around him towards the dingy. "And I am eager to leave."
{🐉}
The flight back felt quicker. It was probably because some kind of weight had been lifted from Cynder's wings.
At least she knew there was some preservation of her ideals from someone other than herself.
She landed back at Forlorn's observatory, and, preening her wingspan on the balcony plat, she gave a pleased hum as she saw a pair of metallic objects seated in the center of the observatory chamber.
A pair of lead-colored pods, swept and roughly egg-shaped. Both the size of large wagons, sitting ominously on the tiled floor.
The pods. The ones that had fallen from the sky. Tinker must have had them delivered up the flight of steps. Cynder hummed again, this time, considering the difficulty of lugging the obviously very heavy alien objects up an entire tower's chute of stairs.
The black dragoness stepped off the nighttime balcony and into the chamber, her eyes glazing over the alien pods. She ran a claw down the flank of one, marveling at the slick, perfectly smooth metal. It was far beyond the capabilities of the Dark Army or the Northerners to construct something so… streamlined.
It confirmed as much as everything else just how alien the Fallen, and wherever he came from, really was.
Cynder didn't understand where he would've gotten inside the unit. There were no visible openings or buttons or latches anywhere. She tried picking at it with the tips of her talons, the blade of her tail, and at one point (though she glanced around before doing so to keep face) she did nibble on it a bit hoping for her teeth to answer the question.
Shit almighty. She was like a quarreling little monkey fawning over the technological brilliance of a god.
"You fall into our world, wound my mining operations, stir up the pot of my lordess and her lieutenants, and you slaughter a cadre of my soldiers…" Cynder sat on her haunches and leaned into one of the cool pods in defeat. "…You ignite a fire in my body."
Cynder traced a talon over the space where the sword wound used to be on her breast. The markings tattooing her body flared in the dark, barely illuminating themselves with colors of dark blue to match her shadow element.
Cynder sighed as she worked down from the stress of the last few days. Her body was so tired and yet so desperate at the same time.
She couldn't even describe the void she was suffering right now. There was an emptiness that bit her and clawed her. Her paw wandered down her breast and she slid lower onto the floor of the observatory.
"Ah~." She grit her teeth and hissed, peering down as she moved a shapely, feral leg out of her path.
She knew the temperate air would only make it worse. The swamp's atmosphere was a mood killer, to be sure. But being so close to her homeland had allowed all kinds of things to wander in her mind, and her hormones to free themselves up.
In the darkness, partially illuminated by her body artwork runes and the blue shimmer of the moons outside, her draconic slit glistened. Its folds were puckered, and the delicate, pink lips protecting its exterior were puffy. The red scales trenching it in at the sides were flushed with blood, and arousal dripped in a handful of wet beads that fled down the length of her labia.
Cynder breathed through her mouth and stared at herself with admonishment.
Damn it.
She chanced a look at the closed doors leading down to the chute. The distant sound of forges and Ape hoots told her that company was an unlikely occurrence. Neither of her Cold Legionaries or her Orderly were here either.
Gigaw must have wandered down to inspect the forges again. Or, he had appropriated an overseer's whip and was tormenting the slaves in the lower catacombs. Again.
"….O-Orderly?" Cynder asked in a whisper, just to make sure. No response. Biting her lower chop, the dragoness looked back down at her loins and sighed.
It had been a while anyhow. No time anymore these days.
Slipping off the alien pod, Cynder rounded it and headed towards the back of the observatory. Through an arch, her makeshift study stood bathed in blue light from the little window. Maps of the swamp with red X's drawn through all the tombs and ruins she had recorded lie sprawled on an end table beside her scroll shelves and the bookcase. Her nesting was beyond that, made from piled furs, rolled carpets and a ring of fine polished stones.
She laid in it and immediately fell to her side, spreading her hind legs again to dip her talons gingerly in the culmination between her thighs.
Two talons spread her lips and another two sank into the warm folds they were protecting. Cynder sighed as she wriggled her fingers in a circular motion, working herself over with her tail curling slowly underneath and ahead of herself.
Cynder was in debate about a suitable partner to fantasize about. Her immediate reaction was to picture a strong drake wreathed in some kind of cooler shade of scales. She always did like males colored in contrast to her darker hue, and while Night Dragons tended to be thinner in their constructions, Warfangian Northerners had bulk and girth on their side. Males from the North were always filled out more and with handsome sculptures making their finned facial details.
Cynder huffed as she finger-fucked herself, rich draconic fluid running in translucent trails down her groin to pool around her anus and the thick base of her tail. She arched her back to present her breast, one of the most erogenous zones on a dragoness past the treasured valley beneath her tail.
She was a prime hen, she'd always been. The mutations that had grown her from the egg had been keen on following a set of- perhaps –too perfect a female model.
Cynder was heavy in the rear, lithe at the waist and front limbs and fat-thighed. Somehow through all of that curvature, her muscles had been appropriately distributed. She still had the strength to crush rock. It just was distracting sometimes that while she was powerful, she was also a freaking sex symbol.
Part of her knew Malefora had done that on purpose.
Maybe it was a mockery through flesh of the North.
Look at what I've done to your gene-stock. A deadly, but breedable little hen that I've created to doom you all.
Cynder git her teeth and upped the anty. She dug practically her entire paw into her cunt and spread out her talons, gapping the quivering, dripping trench walls inside with a tiny moan slipping past her fangs.
She gyrated her hips in the air and fucked her own fingers, trying to sink them to the palm into her own canal as juices continued to leak in torrents from her. Bit by bit, she worked herself closer to a rising plumage of heat building up in her thighs and her inner core. Sweat glistened her black limbs as she worked herself into a fervor, humping up from the nest with little growls coming out of her throat.
The imaginary male was looming over her, stabbing her mercilessly with his draconic member as it punctured her defenses and dug deeply into her trench. The little ridges running along the rod's length ground against the tight velvet sealing it in, advocating fertility to cycle through and prepare her womb for the insertion of his genetic gift.
Cynder heard a paper rustle somewhere inside the room as she masturbated. She pinched an eye open and gazed around the study.
It had just been a draft from the observer plat outside. The night was cool tonight and the wind was acting up.
But looking around tore her from her fantasy when she laid eyes on the leaden pods sitting in the lobby.
Her chest lit on fire and Cynder's mental imagery started to shift.
Now, instead of a vibrant drake rutting her, she envisioned the creamy-limbed Fallen. The human had stripped his torn jumpsuit and had mounted her belly, using those thin fingers for leverage on her hips. He pistoned into her and plunged his member inside Cynder's flower with a rugged ruthlessness that she felt wasn't even in her own mental making.
Cynder growled possessively as she orgasmed, her tunnel quivering over her talons as slightly milky ejaculate blended with her drippings. She made one hell of a mess. Squelches echoed around the room and her eyes opened in a sort of drunken stupor. The ceiling shifted as a bubble of euphoria slammed into her skull, and she rode out the torrential downpour of her sexual satisfaction.
Flapping her wings and whipping her tail, Cynder moaned quietly and let her horns sink into the bedding beneath her.
Fuck all, she needed that. She'd needed it badly. You could never argue that rubbing one off at least temporarily undid the daily hazard of living.
She still felt alone, however.
Cynder sighed and slipped her paws away from herself, rubbing the exterior of her now slightly sore vent. She brought up her talons to her beak and idly lapped at the nectar drenching them. As she ate herself, she got down to thinking, staring at the pods while she did it.
I wonder if the Purple Dragoness has experienced the same effect as I have. If this Fallen has poisoned her mind as well as mine.
In all likelihood?
Probably.
Cynder understood magical potency. One went for all. And if that human was walking around able to impact hens just by touching them….
That Purple Dragoness was probably ready to eat her own legs.
Cynder grinned as she finished licking her paws clean. She curled like a feline in the nest and draped her blood-red wings over herself.
This was supposed to be a war.
So then why did she feel so excited?
{🐉}