Harsh language, interspecies smex, blood, gore, dismemberment.

Uncensored cover images on my art feeds, DA and FA.

All dragons in this story start as feral, but will not all remain so.

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If you choose to utilize the listed soundtracks, I recommend playing them on loop until the next paragraph break, and on low background volume, soundtracks listed often go outside the range of the brand the current fanfiction is written about. I expect no one to use/not use listed tracks either way, they're purely there for those willing to give it a shot. This story will work without them just as well for people who don't want to keep zipping between two tabs.

And one last thing: if you're a Trump supporter, you're going to hell ;)

This is part of my Portaljumper Multiverse series, which means it shares a crossover universe with most of my other Fanfictions, so if you're confused, consult my bio.


Dragon(s)layer

🐉 1 🐉

Night Fighter


"Dragons: Beings of scale, solitude and pride. Armored exteriors... velvet insides."


(*)

Do we seek faith in darker lands

Where fathers slay sons with eager hands

From the north should be a golden glow

To drive back the howling winds and snow

Might we pray to gods who are dead

And forget the precedents in our founders' stead

We are stone, faced with fire

Weakened by the west with every pyre

We have seen those beneath hills so steep

Forever stricken with the secrets they keep

Upon fallen shores do we thrive

Relying on treachery to survive

Do not mourn us and weep

For we are peaceful in eternal sleep

(*)

- Darkseep Tome, Verse of Stormwatch, Page 355


{Legend of Spyro Movie Soundtrack: Prelude to a Dream}


How could a creature with wings be flightless?

She didn't remember coming up this far, or exactly when the moment she had lost control of her wings had struck her. From a soupy void drowned in blurry visions and uncertainty, reality came to her in the middle of a deathly, and terrifying transition. She was born here in a fall, already on a descent for the unseen ground below, and the altitude she was plummeting from was high.

No matter how hard she tried, she could not get her wings to work. They were frozen over with ice that she could not see, and her eyes were veiled in a blanket of darkness that she could not remove. The sensation of powerlessness dominated everything in her being. She could not formulate a solution, or a reason, as to why things were the way they currently were. All she knew, was that her life was in peril, and there was nothing she could do to save herself.

With her legs passing her hipline as she tumbled, the dragon was wreathed in flames that lit the dark sky like a torch in a grand cave's chamber. She sliced through the haunch-thick shadows on a chariot of hell, and with such high velocity that each time she spun, the wind would whip her opposite half to fruition: threatening to tear her spine in two with each violent rotation.

Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. End over end.

She was beginning to wonder if she had hit the earth already and just hadn't felt it, that maybe, everything she was seeing were all things of delusion. They were all stops erected by her own mind, to allow it respite, and to close pace with the rapidity of the trauma that was undoing her.

Yes. That seemed to make sense.

The terror in her guts was not the boiling inclination of death having yet come, it was the afterburn, the madness and confusion of someone who had already been rendered a corpse.

…A dashingly beautiful corpse, of course.

Even if she was a little crispy. That ultimately sat fine with her: she'd always wanted to go out in a bath of her own Element. Regardless, she was endlessly on the descent. She was a meteor thundering for the earth, to crater the land.

Nightmare.

As the flames roared and the air screamed, the earth started to materialize below her, rapidly. It shot up suddenly out of the blackness, like the mocking face of a hungry eel emerging from its lair to feast on her vulnerable flesh. It was gray, and immense, and very, very real.

She cursed. She cursed so loudly that even the howl of the air vortex couldn't steal the word from her, and a very choice word at that.

Down and down she went, until- bathed in hellfire -casting a terrible glow through the night sky, the reptile's feet streamed behind her. She angled for the ground head-first, crying out in defiance as death lifted itself up to claim her.

She was a fireball. Unceasing. A bronze meteor penetrating the dusk heavens. She broke the clouds. She broke the air itself, and then, she kissed the earth, and everything was lost in a deafening explosion, and a phantasmal sheet of pure white…


{🐉}


{Halo Wars OST: Flollo}


bKKkkmmMMmmmm~!

Spyra gasped, and she almost tumbled out of her nest.

Her purple eyes were wide, and they glinted like silver platters in the dark, darting to find the source of the disturbance that had torn her from the nightmare.

Just a nightmare, the dragon repeated over and over as she panted, gripped by a cold sweat. It took effort to convince her of that truth, at least for the first few seconds of the ordeal. But soon, as reality crawled back into her head, she was able to get a firm grasp over what had happened, and that word kept coming back to her as a thing of reassurance.

Nightmare.

Just a nightmare, nothing more.

-She groaned under her breath, paws digging into her snout as she fell back in an exhausted heep, her orange wings blooming out from behind her shoulders, like tangerine-tinted, yellow-limbs flowers that splayed into the nest furs. She wallowed in the sensation of her blood chilling, a morose squelch echoing around the room-nook as she swallowed a mouthful of bile.

She didn't need a mirror in here to know how bloodshot her eyes were. Exhaustion was a hollow animal with cold, burly muscles that clung stubbornly to the back of her skull right now. Her head pounded dully as the dark crept in her vision like a sea of spiders.

At least she was okay. Dreams always made things briefly uncertain, but nightmares? Sheesh, what a wagon ride. She looked down at herself, past her gold-plated breast, whose edge caught just a sliver of silver from the dim luminance of the night through the nook's rounded window.

Her body was colored a regal, navy blue in the dim light of the burrow, and it flowed like liquid sapphire as she uncurled from the hays and fronds, eager to move to relax her tense muscles.

She was shivering. Enough for her fangs to start chattering. Spyra shook herself, trying to cast off the tremors like they were some kind of residue clinging to her, but it did little to solve the problem, and so, standing in her nest, her one-dragon earthquake kept itself up: rattling her for all she was worth.

Well, that was pretty awful. Note to self: never submit a job application to become a meteor. I gotta' stop letting my ma' feed me those Muckmander steaks. I knew that last one tasted a bit funky.

Spyra subconsciously licked her chops, and swept her gaze around her home. It was the dead of night, and the frond-coated clay blanketing the thicket's roof was pattering lightly and consistently under the attentions of a significant amount of rain.

BkKmMMmMMM…~! –came from outside again, an echoing and deep drum of war.

Thunder. Rain and thunder.

Spyra deflated, chuckling coldly under her breath as she buried her snout in her paws. She could feel the bags developing under her eyes, and the dull throb inside her skull. It made her want to yank her horns.

It was the same thing as always, just with a little bit of spice.

God damned insomnia.

What a trip.

Spyra's nostrils gave off a bit of soot as she snorted. A yawn did little to bring back her desire for sleep, and so, licking her dry fangs again, she whipped her tail and stood up.

No use trying to go back to bed now.

Itching her flank provided a doggish kick from her rear paw that made her giggle. She stepped out of her nest and padded across the nook, dismissively palming stray bits of hay from her forelegs.

BkkkMmmMmmm…~! –went the storm outside again, rumbling the earth and shaking the walls of her home. Spyra blinked at the archway to her room whilst she passed outside.

There was no way to tell what time it was with all the clouds overhead. Though the foyer to the family den was as dark as ever to speak of a midnight hour. She silently hoped it wasn't so, for that meant she was in for a long, restless night.

Again.

She didn't have a good reputation for managing to go back to sleep after a bad dream. It was just never part of her chemistry to grasp it when she lost it. "Springy"- her father had always described her as. Springy or not, the purple beastess had never whittled down her insomnia, and there wasn't a big glimmer of hope anywhere for that to change. It wasn't exactly a repeat-occurrence with her, but every now and then, every few months, the insomnia would hit her like a brick wall and would take weeks to go away. Spyra had never been able to explain it, and seldom had tried to. Just like her dream-self had done in that terrible dream, all she'd ever been able to do was ride out the waves, and wait for it to subside. Not that that sounded like an appetizing option to begin with.

Tiny snores emanating from her parents' den told her she at least hadn't disturbed them. She edged her snout past their frame in the lobby, and smiled at a small pair of pink and blue lights obscured in their tiny nesting.

Anybody might have asked where her actual parents were in this scene. But Spyra would be the first to say that she was already looking at them.

Because they were dragonflies.

Dragonflies indeed: the most influential of their kind in all the swamps, too. They were oblivious to her troubles, and she was thankful for that. Two little insects, nestled together in a little bird-bath looking protrusion in the middle of the room.

With no heart to disturb them, she tip-clawed out the frame and checked in on her brother's state. His room was smaller: small enough for a mouse. Or maybe a gerbil. She always compared him to rodents, which drove him crazy and usually earned responses such as thrown objects and hurled insults.

Firefly was there, with the leaf-covers up to his mandibles, like he had done since the day he had grown up from his nymphood in the pond right outside their home. He was a tiny amber light in the darkness, sparkling a little, but never fading, like an eternal candle.

Sighing, Spyra backed out of the room and stepped to the front of the thicket, watching as a torrent of rain transformed the earth outside their abode into mud, thankfully barred by the dam of stones bordering the open archway. Now that she was awake, and with no one to talk to, her mind began to wander, like it usually did when she was bored, and alone.

Alone.

She decided with the nuclear option, and went through a few workout stretches to finish waking herself up. She was a purple, scaly cat with how she stretched out her legs to let the joints pop. Her sinewy muscles rippled beneath her purple coat of beautiful scales as she turned the lobby of the thicket-home into a preparation gym.

Spyra spread her wings and twitched them in the cool air, wishing she could give them a flap and lift herself from the dreary interior of her home. Though cowed by the weather, Spyra stared at the storm outside as she finished her preps.

Welp', sleep's out of the equation, she reasoned. That don't leave much else to do. Lemme' think…

She scrutinized a wall in thought.

…She could go play in puddles.

Nah. Her ma' would flip her shit, and start yelling at her for tracking in the mud that seemed to cling to her all the time, like she was a magnet.

…She could go hunting.

Spyra went three-foot as she stepped over to the side of the thicket-home, yanking open a little slot-hinge cubby in the kitchen cell area.

Looks pretty full to me, she gave a snort at the piles of food stocked in the dry-pantry. There was still a keg of amber-beer left over from Firefly's birthday a few months ago. Spyra would kindly label herself only 55% a lush, and so wasn't tempted to finish it off for the sake of it.

She pushed aside some of the moss-satchel covering up a stack of cured meat carvings and eyed the stuff hungrily.

Muckmander. Some leftover butchering from her last hunt. Wasn't she just saying something about this stuff earlier?

Spyra wing-shrugged and pinched the edge of a tiny steak between her talons. She popped the raw palm-sized morsel in her snout and chomped down it with a quiet squelch, soot crawling from her nostrils as she gave it a little burn mid-chew.

Eh, who cares? That shit hits the spot.

Swallowing, she shut the pantry and clicked her tongue.

What else was there to do? Going back to sleep certainly wasn't an option.

Maybe a bit more of a claws-on approach?

She headed for the front entrance with a sway in her tail.

The rain was cold and uncomfortable against her hide. But after the first few torrential waves of water, it started to have a sort of cooling effect on her. The droplets practically sizzled to nothingness when they made contact with her azurely shadowed skin, and that wasn't just because of her fiery internal workings.

It's always too wet around here.

The village was almost haunting in its stillness. Bulbous and hunchbacked thicket-homes built into the bases of top-heavy willow trees that towered into the misty blackness sat humbly to and fro. Not a single window was alight, and thus the bog was blanketed in a sleepy overcast of blacks and blues.

However, there was one source of light in the evening.

Spyra squinted through the downpour and spotted on the edge of the swampy property a round hobble of thickets and twisting tree trunks. A faint, ominous and amber-colored glow resonated from inside a warped arch frame made of bramble tangles.

That was the Shrine of the Mayfly: the holiest site in the village. It was where the village elders- led unofficially by none other than her own father –would convene to seek prophecies of the coming future. It was also where the dead were interred, and where marriages were proclaimed.

Marriages, pfft.

The feisty dragon licked rainwater from her chops and stalked into the shrine's front entrance, ridding herself of the rain as she hopped over the little flood dam barring the arch.

Who needed stuff like that anyhow? It wasn't like there were any suitable applicants for her own claw in this place. She was too mighty, too regal for something like a… a bug.

Splat~!

Spyra growled as her foot implanted itself into a mud-pie. She countered by unceremoniously wiping her palm clean on a frond growing from the shrine archway's flank.

Dude, she knew her brother would say to her. People are buried in here.

Yeah? And? So that means all weeds and crabgrass in a ten-foot radius were somehow off-limits to the call of nature? Why did dudes always complain the most about where the waste went? At least they could aim. Maybe it was just swamp residue in the rainwater getting into her mouth, but Spyra could detect the sour taste on her tongue before she actually recognized it.

Yes, that was her only family she was talking about, but she was a dragon, for Ancestors' sakes! Dragons were the stuff of legend. They were the great Northern City Builders, the Bulwarks against the Darkness! The Epitome!

….At least, that was what she had read in the very limited sources her father had been told her about.

She supposed it could've all just been propaganda.

But weren't dragons supposed to be above all that?

I hope dad didn't lock up the dummies again… Spyra shook herself like a soaked canine. Water glistened everywhere as she duplicated the storm outside with a small typhoon of her own. I need to hit something. That'll wake me up.

The last bit of her to be dried was her golden tail tip. Everyone always said it looked like a leaf, but she liked to think of it as a flame's lick. She glanced at it over her wings as she flicked her fifth limb and sent a globule of rainwater off into some dark corner of the chamber. Her tail tip winked at her in the shadows, metallic, and sculpted, almost as if by some phantasmic artificer's hand.

BkKKkMMmMMMMMmm~!

The dragon jumped, sneering. The rain battered the roof of the Shrine of the Mayfly relentlessly as if to spite her. There were disadvantages to the cheapness of leaf-frond roofs, she figured. What they needed around here was some good limestone or cobble, not that the little insect village had the means to procure or create such materials. But then again, she'd never been one for semantics.

Now… where were those dummies?

Spyra turned her attention back to the interior of the shrine thicket. A circular cell awaited her there. It was a decently sized habitation, though, one meant for things much more refined than simple living space for some of the village drones.

Ornately carved pedestals arose from a crack-ridden floor of ancient stone and swept clay. There were six of them, all roughly egg-shaped, and riddled from top to base with almost unreadable scripture in an alphabet Spyra was still struggling to grasp even in her young adulthood.

Dragonfly-script was… complicated to read.

How did one explain that?

It was –(to her at least)- a whole lot of really complex symbols and workarounds that all were invariably meant to center on a simplistic subject.

Such as: the amount of time it took Dragonfly scribes to say something like: "There was a stone on the ground" –was enough space in other folks' scrolls to write several tomes, and tomes focusing on things much more significant or epic than a bloody rock. But who was Spyra to judge? She hated reading anyway. The scrabbled shit on those pedestal-blocks could've been about the funniest skit she'd ever heard, and still the amount of text made her gorge twitch. The pedestals were stories, at least, according to her father. Albeit ones she had no desire to know even in the slightest.

Each one of them detailed an age of the village's ancestors and founding. A new one was carved every one hundred years by a whole new generation of scribes. If that crude timeclock could be considered accurate, it meant that her home had been here for six centuries. Six centuries of quiet. Not the place a thrill-seeking dragoness like her belonged.

Spyra grumbled as she stepped over the cracked stone and clay of the shrine's dais. The constant glow of amber from over her head attracted her attention whilst she passed under the temple's tiny ceiling.

For a dragonfly on ground level, it was pretty high up. But for her, all she had to do was stand on her haunches and tap the stonework with her talon. Ten feet, she reckoned. Up there, made from a kind of quartz crystal that not even her father, the chieftain, could identify, was the brilliantly sculpted sigil of a colossal insect.

The Great Mayfly spanned the entirety of the cracked, vine-strewn dome like some sort of cathedral ornament, or a mosaic detailing but one single slide. The quartz crystal making the hollow-filled mayfly shape glowed like fire due to the ancient magicks flowing through the shrine like lifeblood. It bathed the interior in a ghostly orange, despite there being no fire present. During the day, it was hardly noticeable, but at night…

Spooky.

Spyra paid heed to the rounded walls of the shrine, studded with tiny slots that she could fit her paw into individually. They were burial shelves. Tiny sarcophagi made out of rootballs and fronds were in many of them. The shrine was both blades on the theoretical handle.

Here, life was consecrated, as was love, but also death. Every dragonfly to have ever lived here was interred in these walls. When Spyra had been a hatchling, she used to be terrified of coming here, telling her amused father stories of how she would- 'See dancing dragonfly lights in the temple at night.' –even when the whole village was asleep.

Now, Firefly made fun of her even to this day for her little ghost-stories when she was tiny. But Spyra knew she wasn't one to give in to hysteria. There had been lights in this shrine, ones not belonging to the quartz mayfly carving high over her head right now. Long ago had they been very real.

She wondered if they had stopped just because she had gotten older. She knew no one would ever believe her, but she'd been exploring this swamp long enough to have seen some crazy shit, and dragonfly ghosts were certainly one of the weirdest episodes so far.

There you are.

Dummies made out of burlap sacks and sticks. There were only three of them, and they were half her overall size, meant to mimic some of the predatory animals in the swamp, like badgers, or ferrets.

Of course, the description of predatory was from a dragonfly's eye, not a dragon's. If the real things had shown their mugs, she'd have eaten them.

Little slip-in holes lined the shrine's farthest, southern rim. Three of them were there: one for each dummy whenever the warriors of her village wanted to train beneath the eyes of their ancestors.

To Spyra, it was all the same. She'd lived a life without an audience, and for some reason, all she had ever wanted was one.

But the dead didn't count. Not even a little bit. Not to her.

She had to use her teeth almost as much as her claws. The stakes for the dummies were made of this old wood that for some reason tasted like mothballs to her.

The dummy bucked loudly inside the slip-in, its stake grinding against the stone from repeated blows delivered via claw and tail. She let it go with a disgusted "-Blegh-!" –and let her lizard-tongue hang limply as she backed off.

"Sometimes I hate being a quadruped." She spat, sitting on her haunches and taking a second to scrutinize her prey. "But, at least I don't live to be punched in the face, like you."

The dummy's burlap head almost looked saddened as it slouched pathetically under its own weight.

"No hard feelings, babe'."

Spyra grit her fangs and hunched over in a feline and preparatory pose. With a wiggle of her hindquarters, she leaped outwards, and slashed with her wicked, purple paws, the front ones first, for offense. She had trained long enough to know that any potential parries or surprise hooks needed to come from the rear talons.

Slash-slash, kick, slash. Two swipes, a backward jab, followed by a finishing arc. It sounded much more simplistic than it really was to enact it.

But the hard work was the part she adored when it came to this stuff.

The dragoness was lighting fast. She had self-taught herself from an extremely young age and spent her pastimes hunting the creatures of the swamps, mayn of which could fight back. She'd always been a tomboy of sorts. She loved adventure, talking about it, dreaming of it, exploring the wilderness in her waking hours.

But most of all, she loved to fight. Fighting was just such a release for her, a crux that she could never quite separate her own soul from. It wasn't just something to vent her frustrations on: it was poetic, almost song-like too, like she was getting out something inside her that no words ever could.

Slash-slash, spin… punch, kick.

Spyra grinned as she spun like a top, landed perfectly on her slender claws with a tiny click! of her talons hitting the floor, and returned to the dummy for more.

Let's see you stand up to this, burlap man.

The dummy silently protested its own torture, the sack flailing with each hit and tear. Strands of hay were starting to bleed from wounds that were almost as make-believe as they were real.

Spyra only saw the yellow straw, but in reality, she sometimes wished it was the crimson warmth of blood.

"Lemme' see the gore, meat," She landed once more, and wound back for a crushing blow with her tail, face contorted in a grim smile. "-time to taste da fii-yahh, baby-~!"

"…Spyra?"

Mid-swing, she lost it with a started yelp.

The purple dragoness stumbled on her footing, and she wound up hitting the floor of the shrine, hard, gritting her fangs as she skidded to a halt.

There was a blue, fluorescent shape floating in midair, cutting off her view from the torrential downpour outside as it floated in from the rain, like a little ghost.

"Spyra?" The sapphire will-o-wisp said, filling the air with a soft whisper of insectoid wings, as Lightnux, Chieftain of the Dragonfly Village, levitated into the bramble, revealing the details of his exhausted, but concerned, little face. "What in the world are you doing in here at this hour?"

"D-Dad! I was- uhm… I was-" The dragon glanced once between him and the shredded dummy- which was now behind her –and settled for staring at her own front paws as she fiddled with them. "…I was… practicing."

The chieftain's wings fluttered in the dark. His eyes- as blue as the bioluminescence cascading from his tiny body –flickered as much as hers did. First to the burlap dummy, then to her, and back a few times.

When Spyra thought he was going to scold her and tell her to go back to bed, he surprised her by chuckling quietly under his breath.

Or at least as well as his mandibles could let him. Speech was possible, but to her, it always sounded like the dragonflies of her home were talking through bubble-wrap, if that made any sense.

Her father sounded crinkly in the dark. Plastic-ish.

"…What's so funny?" Spyra pouted childishly on the floor of the shrine, craning a scaly brow-ridge at the older insect.

"You." Lightnux shook his little head, floating closer to her, lowering his flight path so that dragon and dragonfly were eye to eye. "I just think you're funny."

"Mom always says I'm funny." Spyra glumly remarked. "Did I wake ya' up leaving the thicket? I was pretty quiet..."

"I saw you walk outside into the storm." Lightnux dusted water off his arms as he spoke. "And, since you are my daughter and I know a thing or two about you, I found it perplexing that someone who hates rain so much would just get up and decide to take a stroll in its worst form."

"A stroll? There wasn't any strolling going on." Spyra shook her head. "It's not like I can wiggle my talons and just teleport on the other side of it or nothin'. I wanted to come to the shrine."

"Uh-huh. So, either you have developed a case of sleepwalking, or something is troubling you." Lightnux listed. "And seeing as you clearly have some recollection on the matter, I doubt it's the first thing."

"Mmmph. A little fatherly intuition?" Spyra grumbled, standing herself back up with a pained grunt.

"Something like that. You've always moved around when you were troubled. You've done so since you were small." He mandible-grinned. "You used to rock sometimes, back and forth, when you were excited. Rocking or pacing. We could never get you to stay still."

"Yeah, well... y'know me..." Spyra chuckled. "It isn't a big deal. I just couldn't sleep."

"Is it truly that simple?"

"Yes." She paused, her tail flicking in the monotony. Her eyes stuck back on the dummy. "Totally."

"Spyra," Lightnux held his hands out. "talk with me. What's in your head? Truly? Was it another nightmare?"

"...Everyone has nightmares, dad." Spyra lowered her chin. "-Okay, truly: I might still be a bit peeved about what Firefly's little friends did earlier this morning still, you know the two, Whipwing and Spriteleek?"

"Promising young nymphs, those two. They have excellent manners whenever Firefly invites them over." Lightnux cheerily said. "Did they want to play with you?"

"They snuck up behind me with a creeper stuck through a splinter." Spyra crankily creased her chop. "Pin the tail on the dragon. They pinned. I torched. It was a rough morning. Guess it'd be worth it to have in the anecdotes of my eccentric life."

"Oh." Lightnux cringed. "Perhaps they could use some work..."

"Yeah. Maybe they could, but I think they learned their lesson..." Spyra clicked her canines together and chanced a spark on the back of her tongue. Fire was certainly liberating when it was giving those who displeased you a fat ole' smooch. "Reaction timing is a pain anyhow for them. You know our warriors would never stand a chance if, like, another one of me decided that they didn't like the insect-village soiling their view of the mangroves and shrooms everywhere, and came in claws blazing. Right?"

"That's why we maintain the curfew." The chieftain sighed. "No dragonflies past the fringes of the village. For safety! I'd never assumed that law applied to you as well. Not that anyone had much of a choice."

"Aren't I just a sweet little peach~?" Spyra stuck two talons in her cheeks and squished them, giving him a raspberry. "Eh, but peaches are white, and shit... what am I?... I guess... a plum? Aren't they related? Mom would know, she could actually ask them."

"Plant-Speaking isn't as easy as she makes it sound." Lightnux admitted. "It takes years of training, and perfecting techniques."

"Yeah, ya' lost me at years..." Spyra rebuked. "...Who's got time to not be out there and exploring anyhow? Not this 'ness."

"Is that what the nightmare was about?"

"Daaaddd, I never said there was a nightmare. At least be subtle..."

"Allow me to rephrase:" Lightnux patiently folded his fingers. "Are you up right now because that is what is bothering you?"

"I mean..." Spyra adjusted the burlap of the dummy's tortured torso, pinching and straightening it out, like one would a worn shirt. "...it isn't helping."

"Spyra, I've lived long enough in this swamp of ours to be able to tell the stories of a hundred dragonflies. A hundred. Can you believe that? I got there because I read each one of them, like the stories they really are…"

"Dad~." Spyra rolled her eyes, groaning. "-Not the people are all stories thing again…"

"-and in reading them," Lightnux continued, having not even heard her, much to her dismay. "I can tell you right now, that I would know when one of them wasn't feeling right, for a specific reason."

Spyra lolled her head against her shoulder joint, and sighed, drooping her eyelids, and rudely waiting for him to get to the point.

"So what's bothering my beautiful, purple book tonight?" The dragonfly crossed his tiny arms.

"…Is that what you interrupted your beauty sleep to come up with?" His daughter snickered a second later.

"I put heart into that question, you little brat." Lightnux grumbled after a pause, making the dragoness snort with a bawl of uncontained laughter.

"-You're such an old bug." She cackled.

"That I am, but an old bug nonetheless who strives to do you the best that my abilities can offer you." The chieftain fluttered back and pointed at the dummy behind her. "Besides, you cannot seriously attempt to explain to me that you aren't being bothered by something. Look at that. You and I both are aware that when you get upset, you just love hitting things."

"Hitting stuff isn't any less recreational than like, swimming, or taking a stroll, or finding a hobby."

"-That last one of which I have so strongly recommended you do." Lightnux sighed. "Results have varied."

"Dad, I'm a claws-on kind of dragon! Hobbies are for nerds." Spyra adjusted her haunches on the floor and waved a paw at him. "Why am I gonna' fiddle around with artsy-fartsy crap that no one will ever care about, when I can just break a mountain and change the world forever?"

"So… tearing up the straw-man behind you is helping you to break a mountain?" Her father's mandibles creased up into a smile.

"Straw-man's my muse." Spyra patted a palm on her golden clavicle, just above her breast. "It's not a mountain today- or, rather tonight –but someday, it will be."

"Ah. So, your dreams of mountain-homicide are what dragged you outside our home in the middle of a storm?"

"No, I…" The dragon paused and looked away briefly. She cleared her throat and stood back up. "…okayyeahIhadanightmareagain..." –She mumbled, turning back to the dummy.

"Was that so hard?" Lightnux sagely asked, zipping to her side as she hunkered down like a feline, getting ready to pounce on the dummy again. "Is this like the other bad dreams you've been having?"

"Dad, just let it go. I'm fine." Spyra's tail whipped, and her talons scratched into the cobble. She kneaded the rock with impatience. "I'll be inside in a bit. You don't have to stay up with me."

"Well of course, I am not required to." Lightnux laughed. He cringed when Spyra gave off a loud- 'hee-yah~!' –and struck the dummy viciously over its burlap head with a twisting swipe. The cloth ripped and hay danced down to the floor like a small cloud of dissipating, golden snow. "But my heart is in a certain place where I'm bound to."

"-Ooyeah~?" Spyra panted, whirling back into a ready position in front of the dummy, her vibrant, purple muscles bulging against her flanks as she began to feel the tiniest of strain from her activities. "What place is that?"

"Fatherhood." He chuckled, as if he had just sipped a fine brew of tea.

"Sounds exhausting." Spyra said before leaping forwards and cutting the dummy abreast thrice. More hay flew, and a strand landed right between Lightnux's compound eyes like a loose feather. "Maybe you should sleep on it."

"I could, perchance, abandon it, certainly." The chieftain precipitously plucked the strand off his face and flicked it away. "There is no need to be rude about it."

"I'm sorry."

"All is forgiven. But much more pressing is you." Lightnux trailed around to her other side, ignoring her as she lashed out with a hook and summary kick. The dummy squeaked and the stake ground loudly inside the slip-in hole. "Sleep is supposed to be your temple, the time when you recuperate after a long day of responsibilities, family stress and in your case-"

"-Yah~!" Spyra hit the dummy so hard that the stake splintered. Lightnux sighed.

"-physical exertion." He concluded. "It is a time of zen. Zen is only interrupted when our minds aren't at ease."

"Yeah, well I got the temple part covered. I think." Spyra, panting, stared at the cracked stake of the dummy and ground her fangs. The dark shrine around her did little to hide the evident frustration marring her draconic snout. While it was true, her muzzle was set in rebelliousness, only because of, well, him being who he was. Dad and all. There was also something else there, something deeper.

Lightnux appeared on her other side, and leaned in close to say to her:

"My consul is open to you, my daughter. It always has been. I beg of you to use it. And I'm asking you," When Spyra snorted and made to move forward again, the chieftain calmly, and sluggishly worked his wings, until he had floated into her path, where he defeated her with a simple smile of his mandibles. "…please. Do tell me what you saw."

The dragoness slowly worked her breathing down, darting her eyes from him to the dummy. She tried to smirk and cover herself up, as usual.

"I hope I don't piss off the woodworkers too much. I snapped that dummy's stick bad, I think. I break things too much." She said, her words quietly dueling with the roaring raindrops overhead in the dark.

Lightnux simply kept smiling, and said nothing.

When her breathing finally normalized, and she was able to flush the adrenaline enough, she sifted on her paws and sighed silently.

"…Dad," She started.

"Why don't we start with something simple." He said, fluttering closer to her. "Tell me how you felt when you woke up after your dream. What emotion was in your heart? What did you experience?"

"Dad, I really don't wanna' talk about what I-"

"So then let us not focus on the situation, but merely your soul." Lightnux's words came to her like calm air. "Are you sad? Are you angry? Displeased? Or is it none of those things?"

"…I…" Spyra stepped back, and then grumbled. "… I'm freaked out."

"Ah. So you awoke tonight feeling… freaked-out." He said. She snickered at him for how he said it, but evidently, he did not notice or express care.

He's such an old guy sometimes.

"This is something that can happen to anyone. Happens to everyone. Your dream showed you something uncertain, or imprecise. I see." Lightnux folded his chitinous hands and nodded at her. "Do you think what you saw is a premonition?"

"That's stupid." Spyra scrunched her snout, looking away from him.

"Your mother might disagree." The dragonfly offered.

"Mom's a gardener." She squinted. "I don't want to say anything mean about it, but, dad, c'mon…"

"Plants are the neurons of our world." Lightnux said. "Just like our dreams are visions into the neurons that make our very complex minds. You're worrying over whatever it is you saw."

"I'm not afraid of anything." She denied, standing taller, pumping out her golden chest. "Mom would agree with that."

"Yes she would." The chieftain chuckled again, doting on her lovingly. "My daughter. In your prime."

Spyra deflated a little bit and sheepishly took away her gaze from his blue glowing form. She grumbled something unintelligible and stared at the floor of the shrine.

"…You deny this?" He asked after a long moment of silence.

"No." She growled.

"Your dream, it did not-?"

"No. Okay, just, no… It wasn't anything like… that." She shivered, her orange wings twitching behind her as memories of her youth came flooding back, afternoons coming home from dragonfly school crying because all the other children hated her. "I'm not the insecure little lizard that you found in that river anymore."

"You were never insecure." Lightnux laughed, brushing off her brashness as if it was nothing. "You were, and still are, finding your way, Spyra. It is a path all people must take, throughout their entire lives, mind you. There is always a choice to be made and time to reflect on it. Is that what your dream was of? The past?"

"No, dad."

"Then what else could freak-out my purple book?" Lightnux drifted a bit closer. "What else could take away your sleep?"

Spyra gave him a toothy smile.

"You're good." She said.

The chieftain sighed sadly, but he did not drop his happy expression. He never did, even when Spyra became exhausting. He gave in.

"Perhaps another time." He stated. "I would never force you. Very well, then, are you staying up for much longer?"

"I don't know." She shrugged with her wings, her eyes wandering around the dark, as she had completely forgotten about the stupid dummy. "I was just trying to clear my head."

"If I cannot convince you to confide in me, then may I at least convince you to remember your health?"

"I'll go to bed, dad."

"Very good. My daughter," Lightnux lacked lips, of course, but they had always made due. Spyra reluctantly bowed her head, even rolling her eyes while she did it. The dragonfly laughed at her quietly, and touched their foreheads together, before fluttering past her flank. "I love you more than anything in the world."

"Even mom?" She mock-gasped, watching him as he moved for the bramble-arch of the shrine.

"Well, perhaps there is more evened ground there." Lightnux mused. "Maybe you would speak with her about whatever it is you saw in your dream?"

"Yeah, maybe."

"Goodnight, Spyra."

"G'night, dad."

There was nothing then, but her, the dark, and the roar of the rain.

Spyra rolled her eyes and looked over at one of the rows of tiny bug-sized sarcophagi slots lining the western wall. She harrumphed at it, and blinked.

"Well, what're you all looking at?"

Thunder crashed, and made her jump inside her own scales.


{🐉}