A/N: I hope everyone had a great Easter. (Sorry I forgot to wish you all a happy one before posting the last chapter.) Anyway, here's the third chapter of this story.
Chapter 3: On the Prowl
The Storm Hawks spent a week pursuing leads on the Birdsong Crystal. Piper and Radarr visited various terras, sticking up posters with an illustration of the crystal requesting to contact the Storm Hawks if anyone had any information. They began the search knocking on doors, chatting up the usual suspects in taverns and sky-restaurants (merchants and other people likely to collect debris from the Emerald Valley), asking them about the Birdsong Crystal. There was one incident where Finn prodded a beefy trader who turned out to be as mean as he looked, his disproportionate retaliation making Aerrow, Piper and Radarr wince painfully. No-one was impressed when a bruised-faced Finn proudly showed them a dirty handkerchief on which his attacker had crudely scrawled 'MAYBE'. Aerrow put out an A.P.B. on the cloaked killer to every terra representative that was on friendly terms with the Storm Hawks. Unlike Atmos' radio communication, the peoples of Ionos used holographic-projection broadcasts to communicate, much like a miniaturised version of what Master Cyclonis had used before her downfall – Crystalvision it was called here.
For days, the Storm Hawks had no leads; none of the traders, merchants and collectors they contacted recognised the Birdsong Crystal. Then their luck turned when they met a junk-collector who'd bought the Birdsong Crystal off a scrap-trader. The junk-collector had sold it on to a recycling enthusiast, reluctantly – the recycling woman had in turn lost it to a friend in a cloud-poker game, her friend had thrown it away when his husband ran off, and the scrap-people who'd fished the crystal out of the garbage had recognised it was unknown and sold it. Each owner's address fit with the Birdsong Crystal's memory of the many places it had zigzagged through. The Storm Hawks were on their way to the next buyer now.
The Storm Hawks had only ever been to Budhamka-Ghor three times in eight years. Budhamka-Ghor was at the very edge of Ionos, in the sense that it was built on the Barrier Cliffs that circled the spherical world and reached all the way into the stratosphere, dividing the Ionos on one side from Atmos on the other side. The monastery itself was built on a ledge in the Cliffs' face, far above any ground yet many miles short of the Barrier Cliffs' inhospitable top. It was cold all year round, and snow could remain unmelted for years on the slopes and ridges surrounding the monastery. The monastery was an ancient, one-floor building of stone with a square shape from a bird's-eye-view, said to be tens of thousands of years old.
The Storm Hawks all exited down the Condor's ramp onto the rocky ground dappled with snow, and were welcomed inside by one of the green-robed Conyan-Minjing Monks. They marched through the monastery's corridors – much warmer than outside the monastery's external walls, sustaining the crop-gardens that grew in the monastery's central courtyard, which the corridors were open to on one side. When they arrived at the wooden door of the monastery resident who'd supposedly held the crystal, a monk stopped them to say the one inside would see only 'the girl who breathes fire'. Which led to Piper entering alone while her friends waited outside.
The room inside had no natural light from the outside world, but it felt homey to Piper – it was suitably sized for living in, with a few crystal-scones on the walls, though the main source of light was a flickering fireplace on the far side of the room, near a large bed. A giant leaf-rug was on the floor, and near the fireplace with its back to Piper was a tall, wooden chair, so tall that she couldn't see the occupant save folds of clothing at the armrests. Piper trepidly approached the chair. She neither saw nor heard any indication that the one in it had noticed her – and her senses were sharp after eight years of transforming into a dragon at will.
"Hello?" A creak as the occupant leaned forward, stringy hair dangling out of their robe's head-concealing hood.
"Are you the dragon-girl?" the woman in the chair croaked in a tired, elderly voice.
"Well, I do turn into one," Piper responded, shrugging and grinning slightly. A smile peeked from under the figure's hood.
"I am Kala, my dear," she murmured. "It is good to meet you. Would you like a seat?"
"Thanks," Piper said sincerely as she smiled. She dragged a stool towards the fireplace and sat opposite the old woman. "I'm Piper. How did you know I was coming?"
"I saw it would happen one day, dear," the hooded woman replied, looking back to the glinting flames.
"How?" Piper asked after a pause. The woman turned her head, and Piper's amber eyes widened subtly. Under the hood, eyes were greyed-over, networks of pale-silver veins spreading through the woman's eyelids and sockets in twin webs.
"I see things before they come, ever since I was four," the woman murmured. She didn't seem all that self-conscious about her deformity nor entirely open about it, as if she was just used to it. "My mum, she had an accident with a pretty, bright-blue crystal – shaped like a butterfly. She said we could see what would happen tomorrow with it."
"A Bakarat Stone," Piper murmured in realisation.
"I've never heard what other people call it before," the woman croaked. "I remember my mum called it a funny word like that. I think that was it." A brief pause passed. If the woman was living here with the Conyan-Minjing, then Piper didn't need to ask to know if the blind woman had any living family. The crystal-mage felt a pang of empathy, knowing what it was like to lose parents so young.
"Kala," Piper began. She held up the crystal to the blind girl. "Did you know about this Birdsong Crystal the last time it was here?" Kala's bony hand took the sliver-sized crystal, and she felt it thoroughly.
"I'm sorry, after the accident, I don't feel things so clearly anymore, and I can't hear well either," Kala murmured. "It's why I don't leave this room a lot." A pause, then: "What colour is it? The monks always tell me what colour crystals are."
"It's bright orange," Piper murmured.
"Yes, I think so…" Kala mumbled to herself, scarred eyes widening. "I used to have a crystal just like this! One of the monks gave it to me as a good luck charm. But then I fell on the stairs, and he sold it for being a bad-luck charm." Piper couldn't help chortling, prompting the blind woman to smile.
Piper let the good mood hang a while before she asked, "Do you know who he sold it to?"
Finn was resting his moustached face in one hand, elbow propped atop the stone windowsill as he fiddled with one of the leaves of the warm garden on the other side – until a thin vine slapped his hand just like his grandmother used to, making him recoil. Finn scowled angrily and raised a fist, until Stork stayed his arm.
"Maybe write a song about how awful that kind of plant is?" he suggested.
"Huh. Fine." Finn groaned. Finn's guitar skills hadn't developed at all since his adolescence, but he'd taken up other hobbies. Not a moment later, Piper emerged from the room, the monk-guard moving to close the wooden door behind her.
"Uh, you find anything?" Junko asked with a shrug as all eyes were on her, Radarr also raising his head and chirping for clarification.
"Yep," Piper said with a nod. "The Birdsong Crystal used to be here, then one of the monks gave it away to a former-resident on Terra Xiaofezi." Aerrow and Starling shared an uncertain look.
"The thief at the museum doesn't seem like the type who'd be living there," Aerrow murmured.
"There isn't that much unchecked room to hole up and hide on that terra," Piper pointed out.
"So this is, um, probably just another uh, stepping-stone?" Junko said.
"Wunderbar," Finn murmured, rolling his blue eyes.
A few minutes later, the Condor was flying out to the skies from Budhamka-Ghor, a monk outside the monastery entrance watching it go.
In the windowless, firelit room, Kala sitting in front of the fireplace pulled a mechanical disk out from her long robe and activated it. A projection of an obscured white figure appeared, not that her grey eyes saw.
"The Storm Hawks just came and went seeking leads on the Birdsong Crystal," she reported coldly. "They are headed to Terra Xiaofezi."
"I see," an electronic voice reported through the Crystalvision disk, scrambled and distorted to the point it had no gender. "Thank you for your help. Deactivate Sleep Crystal programming – codeword Crimson Knight." The holographic figure seemed to raise a whited-out arm-appendage in a gesture, and in an instant Kala juddered, pale-purple light flashing across her blind eyes. The Crystalvision disk deactivated and disappeared in a flash, a moment before the blind old woman slumped forward, limp as a disused ventriloquist's dummy.
In an underground cavern, a figure's gloved hand lifted its finger off the kill-switch it had pressed on a console of many controls.
"Perfect timing…" the figure murmured in its genderless, electronic voice, raising its hooded head.
The Storm Hawks had to take a detour responding to a distress call on their way to Terra Xiaofezi – no biggie so long as they were quick, they agreed, since as far as they knew, their shadowy thief-assassin adversary didn't know they were coming nor had any of the terras they were in contact with reported any similar thefts since Terra Mikonosuin. As it turned out, they spent six hours of the night stuck on a remote terra with shipwrecked Aurora Comets, fighting off the Bone-Wraiths. Afterwards, the Storm Hawks got some missed rest before dawn, resuming their course to Xiaofezi.
Terra Xiaofezi was a flat, dry, light-brown rock underneath an orange, dusty sky, and most of its technological defences were limited. Still, when the Condor approached close enough to the terra, the moisture-less clouds on either side of the ship formed faces which took notice, opening gorilla-toothed mouths. They snarled furiously at the ship, and gave chase.
Stork took notice – he increased the Condor's speed to try and shake the pursuing cloud-gorillas off. They needed to outfly them to the terra's surface, then they'd be left alone.
But one of the monstrous living clouds was approaching fast, flying by and past the ship's stern. Opening its mouth unnaturally-wide as its eye-pockets flashed green, the cloud-gorilla formed wispy clawed hands and rammed into the ship's side. The whole Condor shook with the force of the cloud-gorilla's attack, nearly unbalancing everyone on the bridge. Dry wind-wisps were spreading like tentacles over the windshields.
Aerrow scowled, then yelled into a microphone; "Piper, now!"
The Skimmer bay's doors opened a split-second before Piper's Heliscooter shot out, barely missing the miniature cloud-storm on the ship's exterior. As the Heliscooter rose somewhat higher, Piper barely ducked in time to avoid another cloud-gorilla striking her, the glowing-eyed beast screeching as it hurtled past. Not missing a beat, she removed and threw her yellow crystal. It sailed in a straight line through the air, towards the desert-terra. It suddenly exploded mid-air, opening a carrier-sized circular hole with glowing edges, a breach in the formerly-invisible barrier. A horrid shriek alerted Piper, and she sharply lifted her Heliscooter to avoid another cloud-gorilla.
Back at the Condor, the ship was groaning, metal producing sparks as the latched-on cloud-gorilla strangled and dragged the engine against where Stork was trying to guide it. Junko sprinted forth through the open Skimmer bay and threw a crystal outside – it exploded upon touching the winds at the door's threshold, making the cloud-gorilla shriek and recoil its misty tendrils. It was enough for the Condor to level out of its downward dip. Junko laughed victoriously.
Getting atop her Heliscooter, Piper twirled her crystal-staff and fired a crystal-shot. It hit one of the two encroaching cloud-gorillas, making it reel back with a pained shriek. Not three seconds later, the other cloud-gorilla plus the one attached to the Condor pulled back. Piper's ride and the Condor were shooting straight towards the forcefield's opening, which was already shrinking. The airborne vessels shot through, one right behind the other, a second before the hole would've become too tight for the carrier.
"Yes!" Piper exclaimed. Pumping her fist.
The Condor approached the terra's harsh ground and slowed, landing apparatus extending and enabling the carrier to nest fluidly. The carrier had landed near one of the terra's borderline-ruinous villages, streets lined with decaying stone houses and a few multi-floor buildings of old architecture. Local villagers, mostly wearing rags over scrawny figures, were emerging from the buildings and muttering to themselves. Among the residents to emerge was what could've only been the village-lord, identifiable by his noble white robe and his bloated belly which didn't fit with his scrawny limbs, a scowl on his prominent-boned face. Terra Xiaofezi was one of the more isolationist and traditionalist terras in Ionos (actually probably the most traditionalist), and practically the only people who had any reason to actually live on the terra were its locals and their poorly descendants – the Xiaofezians had an insectoid-looking skeletal structure and joints but with skin and (malnourished) muscles over it, with mammalian-looking mouths that held several rows of razor-sharp teeth, and four pairs of bright-blue eyes.
As six Storm Hawks exited their ship and the seventh landed her sky-ride near them, two orb-shaped crystalline drones floated forward, their appendages crackling with lightning in warning. The Storm Hawks all put up their hands, the cold expressions most of them wore hinting at how unthreatened they were. A small crowd was forming, while the village lord marched through the ranks towards the squadron.
"Who dares defile Xiaofezi?" the approaching lord called in his tomcat-like purr of a voice.
"We're the Storm Hawks," Aerrow announced, green eyes narrowed as he kept his hands raised. "We come in peace. We're here following the trail of a murderer."
"Oh?" the lord all but boomed as he reached the squadron, raising an eyebrow with a plate-like bone underneath his flesh. "And why should you think you'll find him here?" Aerrow's eyebrows were firm as he met the gaze of the lord who stood two feet taller than him.
"Because we believe this belonged to him," Aerrow replied, holding up the Birdsong Crystal in one hand. The lord's eyes widened at the sight of the glowing sliver of a crystal.
"What an interesting valuable you've got there…" he purred. Aerrow immediately lowered it before he could try grabbing it.
"This crystal was on your terra before two years ago," Aerrow said, sticking to the point. "It came from Budhamka-Ghor." The lord hummed somewhat deliberately, smirking as he stroked the swollen flesh beneath his chin.
"It does seem… vaguely familiar," he murmured. "Perhaps my memory will be jogged over dinner. If you will be my guests." He gestured with a bow, but his smug tone all but screamed of the lord's haughtiness.
"Fine," Aerrow murmured calmly and without hostility, scowling ever-so-slightly.
Dinner with the village-lord wasn't a pleasant affair. Everyone was sat around a C-shaped arrangement of long tables – the villagers were miserably eating morsel-sized meals. The Storm Hawks – seated side-by-side to each-other next to the lord – were served food not much better, whilst the lord munched on a moderate-sized bird and drunk from two cups. Piper and Starling silently glared over at the gluttonous lord. Behaviour like this wasn't uncommon in the slightest. Many on Ionos had tried to help Terra Xiaofezi by offering it aid, but… well, its elite stubbornly didn't want any aid from outsiders and their alleged inferiors, and the civilians seemingly didn't want traditions to change badly enough either.
"Hmm… Ah, yes, you were asking me about that remarkable jewel?" The lord suddenly exclaimed, bird-meat juices on his heavy chin as he turned to Aerrow.
"That's right," Aerrow replied evenly, arching an eyebrow.
"There was an outsider, by the name Blacktalon who came to our terra," the lord explained, picking a bit of meat-skin off his swollen belly and eating it. "Requested my protection for a week, they said. Supposedly they were fleeing from sky-pirates."
"She or he…?" Piper asked almost trepidly.
"I don't know which," the lord replied. "They kept their face and their voice masked at all times. Never saw a bit of their clothing. Though they kept themselves in line while they were here."
I bet they thought you weren't worth stealing from, Piper thought with an unimpressed scowl.
"They stayed in the old cave up above," the lord explained. Meaning the cave on the village-overlooking hill.
The Storm Hawks didn't waste time, heading to the cave in question once they were excused by the Xiaofezian lord. The place had definitely been lived in once – it was frankly like a vacated empty house, where anything non-personal and non-valuable had been left behind. There were bits and pieces of old equipment that had been unused for a long time, but nothing identifying that they found right away, scouring the curves, corners and contents with flashlights. Finn moved an empty crate and uncovered a palm-sized Liver-Serpent Crystal like the Nightcrawlers had used – the holographic monster emerged shrieking aggressively at the disturbance, and Finn all but pounced into Junko's arms with a yell, before the creature faded back into the crystal.
"Uh…" Finn cleared his throat into his hand awkwardly. "My bad." Junko promptly let Finn slide to the floor, then firmly turned his back on the indignant sharpshooter.
"There must be something telling in here," Aerrow murmured, opening a crate to find it empty.
"We'd better hope so," Stork spoke up while looking around. "Otherwise, we're at a dead end with Blacktalon."
"Whatever he or she wants, they robbed Terra Mikonosuin like it was nothing, and killed five of its best security-force like it was nothing," Piper said as she cleared dust and soot from an empty bookshelf, finding nothing hidden.
"Piper's right," Starling said sternly, turning from where she was investigating a manmade-looking crack in the wall. "We can't give up just yet." Junko opened a pair of twin cupboards on the wall, disturbing a cloud of dust as he did – the moment it entered his nostrils below his tiny snout-horn, the wallop's facial muscles tensed and seized up, and he found himself fighting a brief battle to keep control of his airways.
AAH-SHOO!
The force literally blew the rest of the squadron off their feet along with a few of the cave's items. As everyone who'd fallen somewhere glared in mild exasperation, a bleary-eyed Junko wiped his face on his muscular forearm.
"Uh… I think I found the pantry," Junko murmured nervously. Finn irritably lifted a crate off his head, then grunted aloud when a small booklet fell from the crate onto his thigh.
"Hey, check it out!" Finn exclaimed, picking up the blank-covered journal. Piper, Aerrow and Stork immediately came over, Piper first taking the journal and scrolling through its pages.
"A journal?" Stork murmured.
"Why would Blacktalon leave something as valuable as that – and for whom?" Aerrow questioned.
"There's only one page with anything on it; the others have all been torn out," Piper murmured. "This is the last page, but it only has a set of numbers. It looks like coordinates. Perhaps it's where he went next." Aerrow nodded his head, then addressed the rest of his squadron.
"Storm Hawks, keep looking," he said. "In ten minutes, we fly!"
The Storm Hawks didn't find anything else in the cave before they left. On the Condor, Stork fluidly traced a straight line on a map based on the journal's coordinates; from their current location, to a remote terra-outcropping that were essentially just no-mans-land for anyone's taking. It was a significant distance from Terra Xiaofezi, and it would take roughly twenty hours' flight excluding pit-stops and sleep to get there.
Though their course would be interrupted by a distress call about Magnamon activity near Terra Bundarlika. One which, as they found out when they arrived, was a trap set by a Kitanen cell, who were planning to bring down the Storm Hawks by testing on them a biological plague they'd intended to use on the neighbouring Terra Bundarlika. Aerrow and Piper got free and easily neutralised the whole operation – the female Kitan commander tried to make a getaway on her Kitan-Eel, but she wasn't able to outfly a pair of dragons, and she surrendered peacefully. Then the Storm Hawks were back to their main pursuit.
The lychee-carrier droned through the multicoloured clouds on its course, the young, jackal-humanoid pilot whistling a tune to herself that her mother had taught her. Her tune abruptly stopped when for but a split-second her ship's radar started bleeping – a large shape thirty degrees to the portside. After four bleeps, the shape disappeared off her radar. Bemused, the pilot looked out her windshield in the portside and then starboard direction, seeing nothing but clouds and the odd spiky rock around her. After a couple seconds, she shrugged to herself and resumed whistling. The carrier-sized, winged silhouette swooped seemingly out of nowhere.
CRASHHH!
The pilot cried out as the entire ship was violently jerked, making the equipment around her fizzle. Then another devastating thump hit, making her squeak – before the ship began to dip with its engine disabled.
The ship fell in a diagonal dip, destroyed engines trailing smoke. It soon crashed to a violent stop atop a rocky dwarf-terra, close to the cloudline.
The skinny pilot was out of the wreckage in a few moments, clutching her head and groaning. She didn't see the airborne silhouette slinking through the clouds' fog with the fluidity of a great eel, vast and cruel-shaped wings spread. Not until it cast its shadow over her face and her eyes widened, the massive creature landing atop the rock with little sound for something so huge. A deep, powerful voice chuckled darkly, resonating through the air.
The Condor was flying late into the night when most of the squadron had retired to bed. Piper was among those who'd retired, having removed her headband and switched her day-clothing for a simple shirt and knee-length pyjama pants, though her sleep wasn't entirely pleasant.
The whole squadron were flying among cloud-banks on their sky-rides including the Stork-Mobile, under a bright-green sky with a yellow aurora. Piper didn't know precisely what they were here for, only that it was urgent and that things were about to get dark as they flew towards a barren-looking terra coated with Kitanen operating stations and towers.
"Attack!" Aerrow yelled, pointing one of his blue-glowing lightning-blades. Finn, Junko, Starling and Stork all shot ahead, whilst Piper leapt up on her Heliscooter, and in the dream her shape morphed inside a corona of pale-blue light and enlarged, until she was transformed into her morning-indigo dragoness form. Aerrow leapt from his Skimmer and likewise transformed into his giant red dragon form. The two dragons flew on their beating wings towards their destination with the rest of their squadron. Piper saw Kitanen soldiers below priming and aiming turrets. It made a growl rumble almost-involuntarily in dragon-Piper as she glowered at them. Aerrow flew ahead of her – and suddenly the skies around Piper faded to darkness, making her beat her wings to slow herself and hover.
She turned her head, looking around at the infinite-seeming blackness around her. She raised her hand, and a surprised yelp escaped her throat when instead of her three-fingered, taloned hand attached to her wing hinge, she saw her five-fingered, fleshy human hand. The human woman looked around, feeling oddly calm though she remained confused and concerned.
"Hello?" she called into the blackness. No echo bounced back. Then she turned in the right direction. There was a dim red light seeming far ahead through the blackness. Piper didn't waste a second before sprinting fast towards the light. Thankfully, the red light got closer to her the more she ran, rather than staying the same distance away as a part of her had automatically momentarily feared it would – it kind of reminded Piper of a fireplace, she could even hear a similar sound coming from it…
Then she shot through a large fissure out of the darkness, into a landscape of light and colours – and she wished she hadn't.
She was standing on a ledge, overlooking a terra engulfed in an inferno – bright-orange flames had turned the once-snowy landscape of Terra Blizzaris into a scorching, flayed rock, the thick smoke blotting the sky stained bloodred by the firelight. Piper saw Blizzarians and humans covered in flames as if they were made of it, thrashing and screaming in the fiery streets before they promptly dropped dead. Her amber eyes were wide in horror, and she wanted to tear them away from the awful sight which awoke some of her darkest memories, but she couldn't.
Then she heard the roar, its source obscured from sight by the smoke. It was a dragon's roar – it was different from her dragon form's roar in that it had slightly less of a hiss in it, different from Aerrow's in that it was far harsher and close to grating. A tiny shard of her mind recognised the dragon's vocalisations but was muted under the majority of her mind ignoring it, knowing it couldn't be him. Piper kept her eyes on the bloodred smoky sky – then, without warning, a shadowed dragon burst through the haze, roaring, its bright, fiery-yellow eyes gleaming as it shot straight towards her. Piper opened her mouth in a cry, too late to do anything as the dragon's jaws snapped down upon her-
-a blinding white flash upon a globe-
And Piper shot up in bed with a cry, eyes wide, body burning, her indigo hair stick to her forehead with sweat.
A few minutes later, Piper found herself sitting in her pyjamas at the bridge's circular table, a hot cup in hand as she sipped from it to try and soothe herself. She was practically alone – Stork who'd stayed up the longest to manage the ship, had put it on autopilot and checked out, while the cream-feathered chicken was asleep in its nest near the wall. The ship felt haunting yet comforting when she was alone at night with no-one else around. She heard the hiss of the bridge's door opening as Starling entered.
"Trouble sleeping?" Starling asked, a small smile on her face as she approached.
"Yeah," Piper sighed. "What are you doing up?"
"I've gotten enough sleep for one night," Starling replied, getting a hot drink of her own from the machine by the wall. She joined Piper at the table. "I heard you from the bathroom." Piper pursued her lips apologetically. "You want to talk?" Piper's eyes shifted briefly, seriously contemplating.
"I dreamed of Smaug," Piper admitted. Starling lowered her drink from her mouth, face shifting with some sympathy. They hadn't spoken much of Smaug in a long time, but both the female Storm Hawks didn't have to think hard to remember him clearly. They'd fought all kinda of rogues, beasts and other villains on Atmos and Ionos, but Smaug… he'd been something else next to all of them. They'd both witnessed the fire and death he wrought upon groups, crew-filled carriers and often entire terras up-close, the way he'd revelled in the wanton annihilation; all to satisfy the bestial-looking yet highly-intelligent monster's lust for crystals and precious metals.
Piper went on, seeing the explanation through, "It was dark, and there was this light. I followed it, and then I came out on a terra. It was burning, all of it…" In her own eyes, Piper was back in the fiery hellscape as she recounted a brief but horrific period from her adolescence where she'd witnessed terrible things. "Just like all those other terras Smaug destroyed. The ones he burned when he had control over the Smaug-bond." Her hand drifted to and rubbed her sky-blue crystal-shard necklace, seeking comfort. A pause passed. Starling reached forward and simply held Piper's hand with her own across the table, a physical gesture of company which the female Sky Knight had used a couple times when Piper had been troubled. Eventually, Piper reciprocated Starling's small smile with a genuine one of her own.
"Since we're up, perhaps we should try meditating?" Starling suggested with a friendly, almost cheeky grin. That made Piper laugh into her hand for a second.
"Since when do you meditate?" While the two women did do team-bonding exercises on a regular enough basis, crystal-meditation was truly not something Starling had ever found a lot of fulfilment in. In response to the question, the Sky Knight shrugged her shoulders.
"A girl's got to find some way to kill the night."
The Kitanen commander was in a dull-grey cell in the single-floor policing building of the terra, reading a book. Behind her eyes, a cold, dark storm was raging. She'd never once in all her career in the great armada of the Home Terra failed before yesterday. And it couldn't have ended with her dying honourably in combat; which made her hate the Storm Hawks who'd defeated her operation at Bundarlika all the more.
Her second night in this fetid prison had gone by with minimal disturbance, when the whole building suddenly shuddered without warning, startling her. The Kitanen heard voices yelling at the building's front maybe twenty feet down the hall from her cell, and she approached the bars. She heard a bestial-sounding roar, the kind which instantly struck fear in the heart as primeval instincts of danger were activated – she saw a rush of flames like from a great flamethrower, orange light and death-screams. For a moment, there was nothing more as she waited on baited breath, unsure of what was going on. Who, or what was this? Were they friend or foe, had that blast of fire come from a tamed beast or from some mighty weapon?
CRASHH-CRACKKK!
She threw her body against the bars slightly as the whole cell wall behind her shattered in a small plume of dust and stone. She coughed amid the clearing dust-cloud, but the stinging of the particles in her windpipe was completely forgotten when she saw what was outside, towering high above her cell. She was completely transfixed, her mind which couldn't make her paralysed body move now filled with awe and horror. A deep growl reverberated inside her rib-cage.
"Good evening," a deep, articulated voice growled. "Do you have a few minutes?"
A/N: I know this chapter and the last one have been relatively short, but I can assure you that the next chapter is the one where we got to see some real plot development. ;)
I'll see you all in roughly three weeks again. ;)