Dragon(s)layer

17


Surviving with Dark Towers


{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: Tall Plains}


Jute couldn't remember the last time he had frowned for this long. Frowning was an expression he detested. His nature was always calling for him to take even catastrophic losses with a hearty air of levity, no matter what.

The death of Visigoth was too lofty, however, for even him shrug off. Jute was so deeply impacted, that his facial features changed, and he became a pale white underneath his brownish fur.

Charlee, Jute's prized Dreadwing, had been bonded to him for so long, that an unnatural connection had been born between their minds. When Jute felt pain, so did the Dreadwing, and likewise. Jute's defeated demeanor speared not only his own soul, but his mount's. The beast was uncharacteristically quiet the entire flight.

Jute's fur flowed in the wind like brown fire, and the feathers and fronds decorating his body whipped in the current. He cast an empty gaze at his flanks, harboring the pit in his guts as he recalled that he was flying back alone.

His entire flight of Dreadwings.

All gone, crushed or blasted to pieces with the rest of Cynder's tower. There was no getting away from it now.

Sure, he had more Dreadwings, but his tribe had never suffered a loss before where over sixty of them had died in a single battle.

Sixty.

Numbers like that took years to amass. Grim as he was, his economical sageness wormed its way to his forethought and did make him wonder: just how long would it take his Apes to recover from this?

The Frontier Sea was a gray blanket below, matching the dreary clouds above. Charlee's sole screech of the entire ride echoed up and down both vertices of colorless mirth.

Jute took up the reigns and double-wrapped them around his wrists. Eerily, the division between the water and the sky began to blur as a heavy blanket of fog materialized. The sea now resembled an oceanic graveyard.

Jagged rocks made low formations in the waves, and the roar of crashing water was solemnly pitched. The first island slid out of the fog as if hoping to ambush him and his mount. The island was a cliff rise, a cylindrical protrusion of vegetation-capped stone. Jute swerved Charlee lazily to the side and slipped around the foothill island's waist.

The islands became common after that. There were mazes of them, creating a formation that forced Jute to weave back and forth, avoiding wicked cliffs, suspended plateaus overgrown with tropical plants and low-hanging bushes of green vines.

Tall Plains.

His tribe's new home.

A large plateau was his destination. Charlee banked his ragged wings into a dive, flapping to steady and land heavily.

Jute sighed with some measure of relief. The lukewarm, plush feel of the grass on his feet was a beautiful thing, especially after he'd spent days tramping in swamp muck and waddling on old, dingy drag-stone.

Bird calls and insect croaks were thick on the air, blending with the oceanic wallops of the waves battering against the maze of islands' feet.

Nobody knew how many of the islands there were in total. Jute ran a few numbers in his head, and for some reason kept pulling up seventy-two. It was something like that. The Northern presence in Tall Plains had been pitiful, as most of the islands had belonged to the native Llama tribesmen before Jute had stormed the islands with his Dreadwing flights and line-dropped infantry. The Llamas had been the smarter of the two opponents. They surrendered as soon as they saw the bat-wings flapping in the sky.

The little Mole outpost had been a different story, one bloodier. Jute had lost over thirty men just to drive the Moles out, where they fled on a pair of steamships. One had beached west of Stormwatch, and its people had been captured by Visigoth's tribe. The other had most likely made it back to Beacon, or some other port. It meant that this time of quiet occupation was limited, and soon the dragons would come, wrathful and very displeased.

Jute didn't fear common dragons. He did fear the Purple Dragoness and the hoo-man. Especially after what he had seen them do.

Charlee drew close and nudged Jute with his helmet. The Chieftain muttered some meaningless praise and stroked the Dreadwing's mane.

"Aye, don't let them tethers strangle ya none there, lads." Jute snorted, glancing under Charlee's massive shoulder. "…It's just over the top… down the loop… oh, come now, I know yu aren't that dense… there!"

There was a pained gasp and the ruffle of a pair of bodies dropping onto the grass.

"Wuz that so hard?" Jute chanced a half-hearted grin. Ancient monkeys, he didn't even feel alive right now… He didn't feel like himself.

" Hard? I must address this with a complaint!" Tinker snarled, feeling around the grass for his monocle, and giving up halfway. "There was a perfectly functioning saddle, why not allocate it for an express multi-passenger purpose?!"

"Gigaw chosen Orderly of Mistress! Gigaw deserve better!" The Grublin's shrill voice made Charlee growl, the massive beast's mane quivering with the tone of its displeasure. Gigaw went very still, claws spread out as he avoided touching the Dreadwing's paler colored belly. "…Gigaw not mean offense…"

"Blimey, you Grublins: so many rocks in your birthplaces, and you still couldn't take two of them to use them as a pair of balls." Tinker snarled, rolling between Charlee's foot and wingjoint. "Now about that saddle, my chap"

"No one else sits on me bloody saddle, because I'm Chieftain, and I say ya can't ride with me." Jute calmly reminded. "Ya haven't earned the right ta mount a Dready, specially my boy Charlee here. You lot should consider yourselves lucky that I even bothered ta pluck ya out of all that carnage."

"Think of the brain-power you would have watched go aflame." Tinker sulked, looking around. "…Good heavens, this really is it, isn't it? Tall Plains? It's hotter than I last recall."

"Get used to it, southerner, and from now on, you'll be callin me Chieftain, none of this chap shite. I'm normally a pretteh forgivin kinda bloke, but I'll break yer jaw if you disrespect me on me own turf." Jute stuck a finger in Tinker's chest. "And yu, Grublin-kin, your 'Mistress' is probably dead. Cynder had a good run, but not good enough for that hoo-man and Purple Drag team. If I hear another peep abou what you think you deserve, I'll chuck ya over the plateau. Yu both got it?"

"C-Completely." Tinker swallowed.

Gigaw didn't say anything as he crawled out from the Dreadwing's underside. He was running his claws through the grass in fascination, and drinking in the tropical rises of trees and thickets visually.

Tinker awkwardly pointed at the Grublin.

"Why him too?"

"He was clinging onta you like a wet rag." Jute rolled his tusks. "Unless you wanted to take a pitstop in the burnin toweh and brush him off, we didn't ave time. Right though, little Grublin-kin, I don't have use fer people who're use-less. You were Cynder's little book keeper or something? Or her foot-rubber?"

"No! Never! Gigaw know this: Mistress never let Grublin, or Ape, or anybody touch her regal body. Nononono…" Gigaw scrabbled, drooling green spittle on himself. Jute snorted. Gigaw talked a mile a second. He sounded manic. "Gigaw know Dark Arts and lore! Taught by Dark One herself! Yesyesyes…"

"Mmmm, there's yer ticket to livin." Jute sighed. He'd honestly been looking forward to tossing the booger with legs into the surf far below.

Gulls cried in the afternoon, orbiting as white fingers dabbling the gray sky. Jute looked at them and noticed Charlee had stopped growling, and his mount's evil eyes were focused on the birds.

"…Tch, alrite, go do what yu gotta do, ya earned it." Jute slapped the Dreadwing's flank, Charlee screeching and spreading his massive wings.

Tinker screamed and threw himself to the ground as the Dreadwing soared over him and up into the sky. Charlee banked and clamped his massive jaws, trapping a gull and snapping all its bones like they were toothpicks. Soon the Dreadwing's roars and the panicked caws of the gulls became distant.

"Is it over?" Tinker asked from the grass, cooing as he found his monocle and slipped it back on. Gigaw shivered and made a sneezing wheeze.

"Gigaw understand plight Gigaw is in." The Grublin blinked with one eye at a time. "…Gigaw submits his service to Chieftain Jute…"

"Beggars can't be choosas." Jute huffed, his arms swinging as he stomped between them and moved for a footpath leading into the jungle. "Stay close to me. Me lads haven't squashed all the dangerous shite yet, and there's quite a few beasties still lurkin about."

"O-Oh dear." Tinker quivered as he hobbled after him, his eyes locked in terror on every thicket and palm thrush. "Isn't it possible to get your mount back and fly over this n-natural barricade?"

"Barricade? These ain't them geyser fields in the north. You Visigothians are so reliant on wagons and the wheel, ya can't even rememba yur own roots." Jute chuckled, tearing a battle axe from his backstraps, its handle made of polished, thick bone. "This is how our ancestas got by. No armor, no tools, maybe even a little less wit, out in da wilds surviven for a living. Just stick ta me like glue, and I'll get ya through nice and sweet like, eh?"

"To be honest, I haven't utilized mobile transport in months." Tinker muttered, shadowing the Chieftain closely beside Gigaw. "The whole tribe was penned up in that blasted tower, gathering up all of those Mana Crystals, and processing them to keep the war effort in the west going. I wonder how the Dark One will suffice once casualties start to inevitably climb…"

"Malefora managed ta throw enuff-a-him into the meat-grinder before Cynder owned Forlorn. She'll manage again methinks." Jute pointed lazily at Gigaw with his axe as he walked. "….Ya smell that air? Crisp and warm indeed. I missed this place, and all those Llama folks were so generous to donate their homes and farms for us Apes to get all snug in."

Truth be told, it hadn't just been the village infrastructure. Jute had been sure to keep the wheat fields the Llama villagers so reverently tended going to ensure a steady food supply for his men. The Llama's masterful understanding of aqueduct systems and mills was working quite nicely for Jute as he exploited them for his own war machine.

Sure, some of the Llamas had complained and hemmed and hawed about 'displeasing the Island Spirits' –but a few executions there, a beating or two here, and all of that had gone away in a jiffy. The Llamas made good slaves. They were quiet people by nature, and couldn't fight worth a damn for beans.

Besides, in addition, when they ran out of Armordillos and the population of quails living on the islands for meat, they could always start eating the villagers themselves.

Jute loved it when things came out so effectively. Nothing was being wasted here.

"Chieftain, what is that?" Tinker pointed off the side of the footpath.

A massive Llama's head leered back at them!

…Well, one made of stone.

The idol was cracked and overgrown with vines. Two once proud and tall ears protruding from its top had snapped off and were lying as detritus around its pedestal. The remains of a temple built into the cliff face sprawled just behind it, crude windows yawning black, and mounds of bricks broken with ancient trees splitting the foundation.

"Llama ziggurat junk." Jute waved at it with disinterest and kept moving. "Most of the islands are covered in the bloody things. Their pretty quiet fer the most part, cept when they're not, and they got these ancient Stone Golems runnin amok inside and out. We avoid those ones. Least the ones we got mapped."

"And you must have mapped most of these sites during your stay here?" Tinker asked.

"A few of em." Jute shrugged. Tinker felt his blood turn cold. Then, a pair of parrots squawked and flew overhead. The poor engineer danced in the middle of the path, whining and swatting at nothing.

"I hate it here!" He cried.

"Everything green, green like Gigaw…" The Grublin was either uncaring or oblivious to the danger surrounding them. Jute's disgust with the creature diminished just a smidge. Any Ape could appreciate fearlessness, whether through stupidity or not.

Distant howls echoed through the jungle. In a crack of the thick canopy, the air rushed, and the heavy silhouette of a trio of Dreadwings swooped over the trees, their calls shrill and bleak.

"It isn't no staging point, but me lads have a bettah start then you lot." Jute allowed a bit of emotion to creep into his voice, gesturing to Tinker. "News is gotta spread fast after a whoopin like dat. For all we know, Cynder's dead, one of the Great Ape Chiefs is dead, and Visigoth's tribe has officialleh been put on the endangered list. Monkano's gonna be in an uproar."

"…Indeed." Uttered Tinker, his mood calming. "And I lost all of my field notes, my potions, my alchemy laboratory and my mixing tools."

"Valuable pile tha's soundin like. You were close with the Mistress?" Jute said the title scoffingly.

"No." Tinker admitted. "In fact, I believe she did not even realize I existed. I was purely Visigoth's second hand. He sacrificed much to keep me comfortable and active."

"And what have yu given in return fer all that?"

"Has this suddenly become a quiz?"

"If it is or isn't, it don't matter, cause you answer when spoken too, or I lop your perky head off and mount it on Charlee's helm horn!" Jute gripped the engineer's furry shoulder and shoved him to the ground, balancing his axe. "So? Tell me your worth there."

"You used to be a lot more jolly, Jute the Boisterous."

"Now you are realleh testin my nerve."

"Ask yourself this: your Spika-Cannons, Chieftain, the ones I know you've fortified the region with, have you ever thought about who designed them?"

Jute paused for a minute, glancing at Gigaw, and then the surrounding jungle. Some twigs snapped and a quail fluttered overhead.

"The rotating mechanical ring? The pressure device fed via gunpowder in the rear casings of the Spikes?" Tinker carefully sat up, tapping his temple. "I carved the operation sticks for the first prototype from willow wood."

"…That's a find, if any." Jute snorted. "Maybe we'll have yu take a gander at some of the older guns lying about, see if you can get em in order. Me lads would be grateful."

"If it solidifies any further proof you seek, than capital! You have your fixer." Tinker bowed a little and scurried after the Chieftain. "What other devices might you have stocked in your armories, Chieftain? I'm curious, as, perhaps, I can help you kill my lord's murderers when they do inevitably arrive."

"Really." Jute grunted. "How do you fancy that?"

"I see plenty of fallen logs in the area, copious cover provided by these fascinating ancient Llama ruins, strong vines and much stone to quarry…" Tinker tapped his chin, smiling deviously. "Forgive me if I'm proving too assumptive: but my readings on the North-kin of the great Jute have provided me much evidence to believe your men specialize in the construction of booby traps?"

"We've had a hand in some bloody effective things of less orthodoxy appeal." Jute rumbled laughter. "You think yu can do bettah, wrench-monkey?"

"I know I can." Tinker bowed a little. "My lord Chieftain."

Gigaw started to manically laugh.


{🐉}

Once, it was called the village of Bri'Ca, the modern descendant of the ancient Llama hold of Gee'RuNu, whose central ziggurat still stood on the highest cliff overlooking the quaint village center itself.

A rocky cliff fall filtering crystal blue, clean water fed into the Gee'RuNu Canal, which cut the plateau into three fertile triangles. Bri'Ca's wheat fields were reliant on aqueduct veins bartered from the river's fringes, and a wheel had been constructed to power their only grain mill.

The village sported a population of merely fifty-two souls, a quarter of them children. The jungle ringed the village in two ways, and a spanning cliff overlooking the far ocean below took up the other two ways.

Bri'Ca was the only Llama settlement on this island, and it was a member of a larger network of over thirty-one other villages and hamlets across the high islands that had survived the ages, in the wake of the collapse of the ancient Tall Plains Civilization, whose mysterious ruins still dotted the landscape to this day.

Never in its long history had the War in the North ever touched Bri'Ca. Its fields were calm, its river quaint, and its people peaceful, and content to hide in their beautiful cliff pocket from the world.

That all changed when the Apes arrived.

Since Bri'Ca was a community of farmers and monks who prayed at the crumbling ziggurat, there was virtually no opposition standing in the Apes' way, and so they simply walked in and began to 'Improve' the village to meet their needs.

The first thing Jute had done, was order one monk in every village taken to be hung, to serve as an example. Bri'Ca was not spared this precedent. However, the monk chosen had become noisy, and difficult to wrangle.

An Ape officer had taken it upon himself to improvise the botched execution, and hack the monk to death in the village center. The Apes laughed and howled, finding the bloodshed entertaining. The children and the females in the horrified Llama population screamed the loudest that day.

Once 'Order' had been established, the Apes set about damming the river, drying up the Llama-made aqueduct chutes for the first time in over two thousand, two hundred years. The wheat fields were fed by crudely assembled timber chutes diverting off the dam. The Apes then converted the dried canals into defensive trenches, wiring Spika-Turrets and lookout towers throughout the network. The ancient ziggurat didn't suit Jute's visions, and after labeling the ancestral structure 'Ugly and stupid looking' –he had it knocked down to a shorter stature. The Apes then used a combination of stone from the wreckage and timber to construct a keep tower, the new headquarters of Jute's tribe.

The Apes were calling it: Fort Leaftopper. Jute had turned it into his own personal palace of sorts. Llama stone carvers were already at work chiseling out a large bust in his image in the village center under threat of death.

Finally, the Apes had set up pens for their Dreadwings, suffering only occasional 'accidental' instances where one would get out of its chains and maul a helpless villager.

The warm weather, clean air and bountiful food was a high improvement over the geyser fields that Jute's tribe was native to. They were in the process of transporting the whole tribe into Tall Plains. Soon, the region would be nice and Ape-i-fied.

Jute showed Tinker the ransacked interior of what had once been a barn in the west of the little village.

"You think you can build me machines-a-war?" Jute had a series of tables, desks, raw materials and papyrus sheets brought in. "Get to work and prove it."

Tinker couldn't have been happier.

Even his workshop back at Forlorn hadn't been so well stocked.

Jute's tribe had access to quality timber, milestones better than the willow-wood crap that he had been working with back with Visigoth. Stone was appropriated from ancient ruin bricks and cliff sides, and evenings were rationed with fresh mangoes, papaya and citrus fruit harvested from the jungles, in addition to bread forcibly baked by the Llamas.

By day three, Tinker had all but forgotten about Forlorn. Visigoth was a fleeting memory, as all Ape bosses were to their own men.

The moment the gettings got better elsewhere, right?

"So you can fix cannons, tie ropes and make pull-wheel fings, eh?"

"Wheels and pulleys, my Chieftain." Tinker smiled, chewing an orange in his new workshop.

"Whatever it might be. I'm still not seein these traps me and me lads were promised."

"I just finished working on this the other night."

Tinker ripped a tarp off something in the center of the barn's hay-ridden floor. It was a carved block, extracted from one of the Llama ruins. There was a vertical slit carved into the face, to match the patterns of a predatory animal that had been chiseled into it already.

Jute looked at the setup dumbly.

"…Ain't that grand? Ya fancy yerself a stone worker." He chuckled. "Now tell meh how that block is supposed to kill something."

Tinker looped around to a little skeletal cube of pipes, a gear, and a tiny lever. After some clicks and clangs, the slit on the block hissed, and a pair of black darts the size of a finger each embedded in the barn wall before it with two snaps of impact.

Jute blinked.

"Each one of those is coated in the skin secretions of local frogs I have been observing in the area." Tinker smugly leaned on the back of the block. "After some volunteer quails ingested the secretions, I discovered that the toxicity killed the birds within fifteen minutes and thirty-three seconds. The frogs create this toxin from ingesting these."

Tinker held up a green, spiky berry between his paw fingers.

"These berries are avoided by the Llamas because they taste abominable. But when combined with the digestive bacteria in the frog's stomachs, poof, it becomes a highly acidic solvent, of which a drop could kill a fully grown dragon within an hour."

Tinker tossed the berry, and Jute scrambled to get out of the way, watching it bounce on the floor as if it was an active mine.

"That's just my inauguration project." Tinker crossed the workshop, gathering a bundle of papyrus papers from one of the tables. "We can discuss further designs of effective lethality, of course… with your permission, my Chieftain."

Jute tore his eyes from the menacing little berry on the floor, and he grinned from ear to ear. The Chieftain's boisterous laugh filled the whole barn, and he crashed a paw over Tinker's back.

"I knew it was a stewpid ideer when I thought about letting Charlee drop ya into the ocean! Bygones, eh?"


{🐉}

Cynder had only cried twice in her entire life. Once, the moment- as a hatchling –before she was infected with Convexity. Again when the Fallen had used her own mind as a distraction in Forlorn.

Twice.

That wasn't natural. Nothing about her really was.

The last few hours had thrown her into utter turmoil. It was probably for the better that she suffer a mental breakdown in the air, rather than, say, her castle. It meant that she could vent her rage on air and water, and those things were omnipresent, you couldn't destroy them.

She tried to bleed the chaos from her mind by exhausting herself. Cynder was a white missile streaming over the ocean, kicking off two colossal, silver waves on either side of her as she torpedoed through the air with her Wind Cyclone ability.

The whipping breeze, the roar of water and howl of her wing membranes screeching made it easier to drown out her constant sobs.

She didn't know what to do, or what to think.

Her tower, months of hard work, and Visigoth's entire tribe were all gone, taken from her by the very human she had become so enamored with, the Fallen, who had wormed into her mind and found everything that made her miserable and had sought to change it.

How could someone heal and hurt you so much at the same time?

Duality.

Cynder could never just be one thing or the other. There were always split personalities dueling in her mind with vicious teeth and rending talons.

Zargos had betrayed her, but only because she had betrayed Malefora. What would her Mistress do when she found out?

She didn't know what had happened to the Fallen and could not turn back. Had Zargos killed him?

Had she killed him?

Cynder roared and broke the cyclone with a thunderous clap. She caused ripples in the air and spread her membranes as far as they could go, breaking so violently that her joints threatened to pull from her scapulas.

No.

No, the Fallen was a powerful creature. He would not be felled so easily. Zargos had to have failed.

She hoped he had failed. She had never wanted to recruit him. It had all been her Mistress' idea. Malefora's word had risked the Fallen's life, not hers…

Cynder screamed. The mutations burnt into her body were beginning to deteriorate, literally beginning the slow process of killing her minutely, one cell at time.

The more she disconnected from Malefora's mental link to her, the more her powers would become unstable. She had felt it through the link itself, the destruction of the last thing Malefora had that connected her with the south.

The Vison Pool.

If the Fallen and Spyra had destroyed that, then the Southern Marshes were truly lost to the Dark Army, and all of that defeat's responsibility would be put on her. She had never failed Malefora so catastrophically before, but she had also never felt so distant from her.

The runes on her body flashed a myriad of colors. They turned white one moment, then transformed into blue, regal shades of cyan, raging crimson and finally relaxed pink. Her elemental powers behaved erratically and drained her Mana faster than was normal. After but one Cyclone move, Cynder was exhausted, and felt her eyes becoming heavier.

A fresh scream kept her in the air. Retching, horrible pain began to stab her in very particular places.

When she thought of the Fallen, her head became inflamed with the sharpest of migraines, and her hips, her chest: really everywhere he'd made her feel warm at –would become cold as ice.

When she thought of Spyra, her Mana would redouble. She could cause almost a mile around her flight path to visually quiver as potent reams of Fear vomited from her in torrents, killing fish unfortunate enough to be swimming in the upper currents, and felling any passing coast birds.

Cynder would have rather dealt with pure defeat.

If Spyra had beaten her to within an inch of her life, burned her tower, killed Visigoth and wiped her army out, Cynder would be half as distraught as she currently was. She was used to being hated, and assaulted by everything around her. She could deal with attempts on her life, or horrid, vulgar insults. All of that empty when your life was a spiraling hell.

It was the mutations. Malefora had designed them like a virus that only her mind's presence could keep subdued. If Cynder didn't find a way to banish her newfound feelings for the human, or- impossibly –break away from the Dark Mistress, her own body was going to destroy her.

She'd finally die.

Cynder hated herself for wanting to live. After spending so many evenings wishing for death, she couldn't understand how thinking differently because of someone else was acceptable.

She couldn't turn back, the South was gone. She couldn't go to her Mistress, Malefora might attempt to kill her.

She could only limp back home.

Home.

Her lonely place of misery, brooding and isolation. Cynder flexed her claws as she calmed her flightpath, sagging under her own wings as she cried and let her tears fall to the ocean below.

Desires to kill, rend and bleed were becoming mixed with hungers for attention, physical contact and peace. All of those did not go together!

This was madness! She was losing her mind! She could not take this anymore!

Cynder folded her wings and darted nose-first into the ocean waves like a dolphin, parting the water silently with but a tiny splash.

The cloudy sky was immediately replaced by a hollow sounded, blue void that got blacker the farther down it went. Cynder floated in this amniotic, going limp, folding her wings flat so that she would start to sink.

She watched as bubbles fled from her snout and pushed to the shimmering ceiling of the ocean's calm surface above her horns. Illuminated bands of light playing off the waves painted her black body like carpets of caterpillars in ghostly motion.

….Peace.

How quiet the water was. Cynder exhaled, and the bubbles redoubled in number. She let her paws spread out beneath her in the cool nothingness cocooning her body. She began to sink, until the void of blue started to turn black, like her scales.

Her body art glowed silver, and then pink in the deep. She closed her eyes, trying to work up the courage to start inhaling the water so she would drown. Her mutations wouldn't save her from that. And neither would her Mistress. By this point, she'd probably be doing Malefora a favor.

"Haven't you wondered who you might have been if you had actually been allowed to live a normal life? From egg to young adulthood?"

The Fallen's voice echoed in her memory, bouncing off all the water.

This is all she had wanted to say to him. Instead, she'd hidden it under a veil of bullshit.

Of course she wondered.

Of course she hated Visigoth for what he had done.

Of course she hated that she had come from the same clutch-hoard as Spyra.

Her parents. Her givers of life. Did they even exist? Where had she really come from? Why had Malefora not just let Visigoth's men smash her to death like all the other yolks, and the babies?

Cynder could see it as her vision started to turn black.

The bodies.

Smashed shells lying everywhere, and small bundles upon the floor stranded among them like islands of welp-flesh. Half-developed hatchlings, their tiny bodies dashed to the ground, crushed by Ape feet or bludgeoned by their fists. Cynder realized that she could remember the infants crying as they were butchered.

And out of all of those lives, mine was the one chosen to live…

Cynder's eyes opened.

She could see absolutely nothing now. She'd sunken too deep.

She wanted to start wailing in grief, but she couldn't.

Instead, she inhaled.

Her gag-reflex immediately threw her perception into chaos. Cynder's lithe body twisted, like a snake being tortured by hot coals in the water. There were more bubbles, clouds of them. Her chest felt bloated and her throat caught fire.

Her mutations tried to save her by building elemental magic in her breast. She fought against it.

I never want to fly over the land, screaming through my wings ever again.

Cynder had always been grimly precise, and surgically efficient with her participation in the war. She'd command legions of Apes or Grublins from above, swooping down only to terrify the enemy or deal with their most troublesome champions. So much blood was on her paws. She could fill this ocean. She could drown herself in that, and it would be more fitting.

She wanted peace, and it was coming to her soon.

Stab

-Cynder was just transforming into a corpse. She barely felt it when something sharp penetrated the flesh of her arm.

There was a hurried whoosh, flurries of bubbles. The dark was receding. Cynder's eyes opened, seeing the dappling ceiling of the ocean shooting towards her face.

Splash~!

Cynder's attempt to cry out in pain was muffled as she vomited a torrent of foul seawater. She thrashed in the surf, bobbing with the roughened waves. She sputtered and wrenched her eyes shut, spreading her wings in the water like lilly pads, and snatching at the thing latched into her bicep.

She gripped something metal and held it there, before discovering its alignment and quickly slipping it out the way it had come. Cynder shrieked. Her lungs were on fire. She gasped rapidly, soaked to the bone and deprived of oxygen.

I once read somewhere that a great writer should be awakened to their life's best work after attempting to end it.

Cynder snarled and bowed her neck, punching the water and creating a misting funnel with her unnatural strength.

Damn it to hell.

Now she needed to kill something.

Cynder glanced down at the metal object in her palm and examined it.

It was a tri-round hook, tethered to a heavy line that draped through the rocking waves like a giant hair plucked from the wrist of a titan and left to drift.

Cynder followed it up the side of a rocking boat, to the rod the line was reamed from, held in the quivering paws of a Mole.

For a moment, neither the dragoness or the fishermen did anything but stare at one another.

He was a tiny thing. All of his people were. He had gray-brown fur, a pair of fat spectacles perched on a stubby nose with whiskers on only one side, and he wore an overcoat, rubberized for the water's wrath, colored dull tan.

His ship was a small yacht, a little hut making up the deckhouse and a pair of quaint sails making her drive. Cynder took all that in for a second, steadied her breathing and regained her usual composure.

Clack-!rckckc…

The Mole dropped his fishing pole behind the deck guard, frozen like a statue.

Cynder snorted and looked off in the direction of the south. She must have drifted. But even drifting, what was a Mole, a civilian no less doing this far out in Frontier?

The Mole's jaw was flapping, and judging by the little drags of air escaping his buck teeth, she could determine he was trying to say something. The dragoness huffed, mimicking a crocodile as she swayed through the waves and gripped the side of his yacht, praying it could handle her weight.

The whole ship creaked and groaned, the Mole stumbled onto his backside in the center of the deck, watching with a grim fascination as the beautiful, glistening wet reptile slipped otherwise without hitch over the guard and curled on the boarding. The ship was barely wide enough for them both to have room, but Cynder didn't make any sort of care obvious at the moment.

Coughing, she relaxed against the guard and let herself drip a pool on the boards. She fanned her wings and sent drops everywhere, making the Mole flinch as a few caught his whiskers.

Cynder looked down at the little gouge on her arm and growled. The Mole lost all color but otherwise was unmoved.

"…Afternoon." She mumbled, shaking her neck and horns.

"G-Good afternoon." The Mole muttered. He sounded older than he looked. Judging by his scent, he couldn't be more than middle-aged. Cynder's predatory senses broke down the time and quality of the meat-morsel in seconds, and a primal part of her was stabbed with a tinge of hunger at the thought of eating him.

"That's quite a fishing pole." Cynder nodded at the pole discarded nearby. "Able to net the full weight of a dragoness? You don't strike me as a dragon hunter."

"N-No." The Mole pointed at the deckhouse quaintly. Inside were barrels and a table, the remains of a reef shark were laid across the top. "S-Shark fisherman."

"What's a shark fisherman doing this far out in the Frontier? Don't you know that this ocean is controlled by the Dark Army?"

"I know that." The Mole swallowed, still lying on the deck. "But I can't make no money without my catch."

"Your catch is worth your life?"

"It's my livelihood."

Cynder coughed and spit over the guard, reeling the rest of her thick tail from the surf to curl it around her ankle cuffs.

"You must know these waters poorly to be as far out as you are…"

"I know these waters like my own fur." The Mole blinked. "C-Can I… stand up? Is that… is that alright?"

"Your legs function perfectly by the looks of things." Cynder wing-shrugged as she dripped, surveying the gray horizon all around. "It's an acceptable day for fishing. The waves are calm and the sun is shy, your flocks will be just beneath the surf."

The Mole slowly righted himself, wincing as his knees cracked.

"You're in just the right zoning as well. The southern temperatures moderate the hotter northern fronts and the cooler west. I compliment your tact."

"Aye… that's… mighty kind of you." The Mole scrunched his palms together, fidgeting as he glanced at his pole. "…Did I… hurt you badly? With the hook?"

"Tch." Cynder dryly chuckled, glancing at the little trickle of blood leaking from her arm-hole. "I've suffered worse."

"…May I…?" He pointed at the pole.

Cynder grunted and slithered to face the other way on the deck, thumping the boards as she plopped back down and stared out over the guard. The Mole coughed and scooped up his rod before dropping the line back into the water.

He kept stealing little glances at her as the silence- undone only by the calm lap of the ocean against the bow –continued to drag on.

The Mole started when Cynder met his gaze briefly, eyed him from head to toe, and put her eyes back to the horizon.

She snorted again and shifted her forepaws.

"It must be very lonely out here." She said.

"It can be. But it does a man good to be in his own thoughts for a few days." The Mole fidgeted with the rod.

"Really? Why might that be?" Her piercing, white gaze bore into him. He couldn't tell if the beast looked hungry, angry, or maybe just curious. He'd never been good at reading dragons.

"It's time given to reflect." He swallowed, shivering under his coat. "You're removed from life: for a little while, anyway. Silence is a good start to knowing you don't got it as bad as others do."

Cynder froze for a moment, coughed again, and found that wonderfully full horizon, her tail twitching.

"That's assumptive. What if others don't think of it the same way?"

"Aye, that's their choice. We all got our own ships." The Mole smiled briefly. "-S-So to speak."

"Well I think silence is horrid. Silence is a corruptive bed. It doesn't remind you of the good things, it reminds you of how alone you are, and how no one cares enough to even break it for you." Cynder huffed, her chest aching. "People like to break so many things. Silence has proven impregnable."

The Mole swallowed and wiggled his pole.

"What else have you assumed to know, shark fisherman? Do you have a comforting word on gratitude and love as well?" Cynder asked sourly.

"I thought you'd be scarier."

She looked at him.

"…Oh? Is that so? Tell me, am I not awe-inspiring? Do I not live up to the expectations you have been schooled on since the beginning of your pathetic little life? Quite? What am I to you?" She was shouting by the end of that. The Mole rattled, the rod shivering noisily in his paws.

"…Y-You're terrifying." He choked, keeping an eye on her.

"So what do you mean then? How can I be what your nightmares have screamed to you I'd be, if I am not meeting your standard of terror? …Speak!"

"-Y-You are terrifying." The Mole muttered. "I've never been more afraid in my whole life."

"Then elaborate to me what you meant."

"You're supposed to be able to kill people just by lookin' at them." The Mole paused. "You're supposed to the spawn of death itself. Your skin is supposed to be covered in red fire, and your eyes are said to rip souls from those you slay."

"…That's…" Cynder crinkled her beak. "…ridiculous, hogwash, hatchling-drabble."

"I know it is." He timidly nodded at her. "You're sitting on my boat asking me if I'm afraid of you."

"….Indeed I am." Cynder broke a very long stare into his eyes by refocusing on the water. She thumbed her hook-hole and whispered a little cant under her breath, the Mole's eyes widening as the flesh began to seal back up. She opened her mouth as the waves lapped, but closed it.

"I ain't begging, if that's the next thing you'll ask me."

She glared at him.

"I'm dead either way. Least I can go doing what I do best." He jerked his rod and stared at the line's merger with the water. "Twenty-seven years on this yacht. I always thought I'd reel in one too big, and he'd nab me."

"You're certainly diminutive enough for it."

"Aye." His jaw quivered and he looked at his feet. The Mole had nothing more to say after that.

Cynder shivered and sighed. The ocean's whispering began to disturb her, making its presence known by the developing twitch daggering her brow.

"You should raise your masts and set sail for Beacon before dusk, that's when my Mistress' supply flights are most active." Cynder spread her wings with a leathery creak. "Good hunting."

The Cloud Ripper creaked the whole boat as she lifted off. Soon she was gone.

The Mole stewed in his usual silence for a long time, and then, he secured his rod, and reaffirmed his feet in his normal preparation for a catch.

He started whistling his favorite folk tune from home, softly.


{🐉}

Dead-looking fields of black rocks stuck from the rougher waters, screaming waves battering over and off them to create a white soup of liquid chaos. Lightning streaked the black clouds populating the sky, the wind howled and thunder bracketed the heavens.

Cynder kept her wings on constant checks and adjustments to deal with the wind currents as she penetrated the exterior storm. The Frontier Sea was a choppy mess below, with waves sometimes measuring several stories crashing upon the endless yards of drowned rocks.

It was said that the rocks were fingers from a many-limbed, dead god that had drowned here, clawing to get at the crystals of Concurrent and failing. The wind's howl was believed to be that god's spirit shrieking as he watched his gigantic corpse turn to coral-infested stone.

Cynder had to penetrate the black clouds looming menacingly overhead. Her hide became wet and rain daggered the air in millions of strands.

The moment the clouds receded, she flew into the eye of the storm itself, a gargantuan pocket the size of a small continent, a bubble surrounded with plushy gray walls and a dome stricken with lashing lightning veins all around.

Levitating in the heart of this swirling eye was a slowly undulating cyclone hundreds of stories tall, its tail beginning in a black whirlpool swallowing the clouds, and its head curving into a massive, shrieking funnel that capped the cloud dome.

The Blue Hurricane had pure yellow lightning. Flashes of it ripped through its sides as Cynder flapped and got closer to it. The winds became more powerful and the rain ceased.

Cynder bowed her head, her body art glowing white as she uttered a magical word. She soundlessly slipped into the blue clouds, the air screaming around her, and rocking her vision from near misses of lightning.

The Blue Hurricane always tried to batter her, but it never mattered. Her wards were beyond its ancient rage.

She breached the wall of the funnel, revealing a disorganized maze of levitating, snow-covered landmasses eerily sitting in eternal suspension. They were jagged, littered with precipices and deep, fanged caves. Forests of white crystal created mazes through blasted wastelands covered in a thin blanket of snow.

There were sixteen islands. She had mapped all of them. They were different sizes, had different subterranean cave networks, and all levitated on different levels of height from each other.

The largest of the islands she had marked on Dark Army maps as The Bleak Wrath. Sprouting from its crystalline epicenter was a cluster of black growths that clawed for the top of the hurricane spout above.

Cynder's castle was a Gothic nightmare that would instill terror in the hearts of any who were unfortunate enough to behold it. Here was where the dragoness stewed between campaigns for the Dark Continent, imprisoning herself in its dark halls, plotting, mulling, and seething with hate for everything around her.

Watchtowers dotted the wastelands leading up to the massive feet of her fortress. White furred Apes manned Zapper-Cannons and Gothic fortifications made from black stone and plated metal.

These were Apes who did not belong to any of the tribes and were bred to answer directly to her. Cynder's Cold Legion. Her elite private army. They only left in the form of kill teams with her, and on her most important missions.

The great front gate to the castle was sealed by frosted iron bars. She could feel the gaze of the gate's protector, as he sensed her energy from his home inside the archway itself.

Kylskada the Ice King. The ten-foot-tall magically animated suit of living battle armor that was the guardian of her abode. He commanded the Crystalline Golem legions roaming Concurrent by the bushel, having bullied them into Cynder's service years ago.

He made for poor conversation, in contrast to his abilities as a leader and fighter. So Cynder wasn't very inclined to go through the ground entrance. She was in a bad enough mood that she chose one of the many hidden aerial vents and landing pads she kept all across the central spires of the castle.

She weaved through black towers and the yawning stilt buttresses linking them, landing on a platform and skulking into the dark arch it led into.

Immediately, the howl of the storm was lost for an atmosphere of eerie silence. Her claws clicking on the black and white tiled floors echoed around every hallway she took and chamber she passed.

Most of the castle was a maze that she had memorized down to every corner, dead-end and curve. Multi-leveled and random, so that only a dragon could pass through with any ease. Even then, Cynder was the only one who understood it completely, even keeping it secret from her most loyal Cold Legion Commanders.

Eventually, she passed into a large cathedral-like chamber at the very heart of the fortress itself. Cynder's sigh traveled the massive space entirely. A long, crimson carpet extended from the wall across the aisle to a sprawling throne whose spine was made from chiseled crystals harvested from the wastelands. They glowed like ghosts in the dim shade here. Cynder made sure to run her pawpads off on the carpet before quaintly curling into the throne's cushioned nest to relax.

The dragoness let the entire day flow from her in a rare moment of private composure. She kneaded her talons into the cushion, rumbling at the velvety feel coursing her stomach.

The boom of the silent halls echoed around her. Cynder remembered the ocean.

So she brought her neck up and chirped.

A sharp noise that rung like a bell through the whole castle. It was so silent, that when Cynder laughed, screamed or roared her voice reached every inch of its interior.

So she had taken to a habit of chirping.

It broke the monotony.

She waited for the shrill echo to subside.

She'd missed her home. It was a comfortable environment for her, dark, warm, more silent than a grave. Cynder had spent years of her life inside this place, brooding over how she could best employ her anger to harm her enemies and expand her power.

Now, she used the castle thinktank to fantasize about Forlorn's loss, Malefora's mutations, her hatchday that never happened at the Dragon Temple, that purple nightmare Spyra…

And the Fallen.

Chirp.

Echoes…

Cynder kneaded her red cushion. A secondary throne would do, one beside her crystalline seat. It would take some adjustment, and undoubtedly, she'd have to modify the place to suit such a diverse creature's needs, however…

Chirp.

…Cynder was willing to go through with that. In fact, the very idea of sharing this throneroom, and these halls with another, a male, excited her and left her wanting.

Twenty-five years.

Chirp.

…Oh, those echoes…

…Ancestors, the garbage that little fisherman had spewed at her. How offensive.

Silence? To contemplate one's gifts? Rubbish! Bullshit. There were no gifts, and life did not improve because one thought lofty thoughts.

Chirp.

Of course, this was all the setup. Cynder needed a new plan of attack, to please Malefora and regain her favor. She needed to rally the remnants of Visigoth's tribe still serving at Daragon, combine them with Jute's tribe and assemble a skeleton legion to assault the South and retake it. She'd gather Vandal's army and hail Saxony and his brutish flotilla of longboats…

Yes, there it was, the pain from the mutations was subsiding. She was relearning her values again, she-

Cynder sniffled.

That echoed too.

She couldn't keep her jaws clamped, and so she barked and punched the arm of her throne. It sounded like a series of gunshots came down the halls.

Cynder's tail lazily slipped over the throne's edge and curled on a space right beside it. Cynder now had cried three times in her life, and her sobs repeated themselves back to her as she longed for there to be a second chair to match her own, to seat her king that she had never had.


{🐉}