FOR ONCE, something with no sex
Don't get used to it
This just... happened
Blood, gore, coarse language, heavy emotional shit, you know the drill if you've read my other stuff
This is a prequel/spinoff of Dragon(s)layer, my other Spyro story
This is part of my Portaljumper Multiverse series, which means it shares a crossover universe with most of my other Fanfictions, so if you get confused, consult my bio
❄️ Frostbite ❄️
1
Blood and Ice
"The dead don't always sleep."
(*)
Whisper whisper
Hide in your lair
Whisper Whisper
Cover your eyes
Whisper whisper
The madness is wretched
Whispers not of your own
The Red One is coming for you
(*)
- Old Hatchling Chant, The Red Dragon
She hadn't even seen the fireball coming right at her until it had been too late. This far in, it almost felt stupid to be rewinding the last five hours in her mind, picking apart the reams of knowledge, searching for everything she'd done wrong.
But Cynder couldn't help herself, and not because she felt any sort of self-imposed animosity over it: but because her thirst for vengeance always won out the many battles she mentally fought.
It wasn't her fault that she was literally born vindictive. Logic screamed that at her, as it did about how that Warfangian soldier had not only been defending himself, he had also simply been doing his job.
Cynder could respect that.
But not the glacier-caves. That ordeal couldn't be reasoned outside of just plain old crap luck. In fact, everything after the tumble was an assorted load of exactly that.
"Crap luck." –And Darkshade had absolutely refused to stop reminding them of it.
"I said you were right the first sixteen times." Reslo sneered in her uneven trot beside him. "Do you not know how to let it go? No, wait, my wing's itching."
"What does that have to do with anything?" Darkshade only sounded mildly offended.
Cynder had long decided that in addition to wishing he had been one of the casualties earlier, he resembled a goat when he was confused. His cyan eyes would widen in this caprine fashion, and his cheek-scales would scrunch, like he was struggling to pick up a phantom smell.
"My wing twitches when wyrms annoy me. What are the odds that out of all the dragons in that Wing, I crashed down here with you?" Reslo refused to humor him, turning her long neck away. "I just want you to stop talking. You're going to give us away to any beasties that may or may not live down here."
"I think not." Darkshade snorted, looking around at all the ice. "What could survive?"
Cynder smiled sourly from her place ahead of them.
Crap luck.
She'd been trapped in a glacier-cave with one of the densest Night Dragons from the entire Dark Continent, and one of the most angry. If fate wanted to push the bill just a little further, Reslo would soon go insane and Cynder would break a leg. It was the perfect setup for one of those cannibalism horror stories mountain-folk told about those who never came back from the peaks…
"This is still the same tunnel since the antechamber." Reslo observed with dread, her claws unevenly clicking against the frosted stone of the cave's floor. "We missed a turn behind that intersection, off to the left. I told you both it was there, and you didn't listen to me, now- agh-"
"Reslo." Darkshade leaned his black scaled flank into her thinner form, propping her entirely as the Night Dragoness threatened to topple over. "You're bleeding bad."
"Yes, and I am quite certain that she was proactive enough to leave a trail down every circle we made." Cynder smiled over her beautiful crimson wings at them, not pausing for them to catch up. "Maybe we'll lure out whatever calls this hideaway home and catch it before it catches us. But my doubts run high, and my patience is exhausted. I suggest the two of you collect yourselves before one or both of you become a hindrance to my movements. And by the way, Reslo, you're wrong about that turn. We've passed that intersection three times and apparently I'm the only one who noticed its limits."
When silence met her, Cynder peaked past her top joint blade and blinked her soulless, pure white eyes at them.
"If you stop walking, you will eventually die." She politely reminded.
Darkshade looked as wooden as ever. Nothing ever elicited frustration out of him it seemed. Here they were, slowly wasting away in an interlocked maze of glacial caves, and the Night Drake was fair-faced: like his peril was a common and daily occurrence.
He looked down at Reslo and saw the fury building in her violet eyes. The lithe dragoness snorted, and her painfully thin muscles contracted all down her flank.
"Get off." Reslo snarled, shoving away from Darkshade and swiping at him with one of her wicked, barb-hooked paws. She glared at Cynder's back, before baring her fangs at the drake. "I didn't ask for you to touch me."
"I did not ask for you to fall on me." Darkshade blinked simplistically. "Has the magic done nothing?"
"Why do you care?"
"I care about getting out of here."
"The magic isn't helping because there is none left! Idiot! We have no Mana! Were you there for the battle, or are you too stupid to recall?" Reslo exploded, her sharp voice bouncing down the tunnels like a rapt echo. "Dragons have never lived in the mountains, so the Mana Crystals do not grow here! Anywhere, not even beneath the ice. How are we supposed to use our magic, or our elements, if we have no fuel?"
"It was just my concern showing." He sounded bored, which amused Cynder further down the tunnel. Reslo's eyes flickered over him in the dark, looking for something else to latch onto to help feed her fury. When she was found wanting, she hissed and limped past him, thick droplets of blood pattering into the ice behind her. "What if I offer to carry you?"
"Pah."
"Do you think what I say is a jest?"
"I think your stomach, and your loins override anything from the neck up." Reslo's voice cracked as terrible pain stabbed into her eviscerated flesh. "If you want to help me, 'Shade, think about how much silence will ease my splitting headache… Do me a kindness before I meet my end."
"You are not going to meet your end." Darkshade frowned.
"Not another word." She warned, slashing the dagger-blade strapped to her tail. "I say this now."
"You were like this before we took flight. I saw it in your wings. Your scales were clammy and your eyes sunken." Darkshade drew up alongside her, a black shape to go against the deep pink making Reslo's color. "I want to hear what is wrong."
"I thought you only cared about- ah-" Reslo whined. Her shoulder was gaping down to her elbow, strips of loose flesh remaining sealed only because she kept a wingtip pressured over the wound. "-getting out yourself."
"I do." Darkshade tried to lean into her again, but the Night Dragoness was fed up. She screeched like a hawk, and Darkshade reeled when a wing crashed into his stubby snout. "How can me and the Mistress escape without every claw we have?"
"Get away from me." Reslo sounded manic. "And don't touch me! I can take an inch off your head if you do so again."
"I want-"
"Hell to your wants. Darkshade, I cannot take your insistence anymore, even at the gates of death. You leave me be this instant, or I swear I will throw myself on the nearest crag just to spite you."
Darkshade closed his mouth and silently padded beside her. Reslo winced as she dragged her useless forepaw on the ground, her eyes focusing on anything to tear her attention away from the drake.
She limped after Cynder, raising a scaly brow when she saw the black dragon feeling up a glistening wall of ice capping the tunnel ahead. "Mistress? What in the realms are you doing?"
"This wall is thin here." Cynder said studiously, her sharp talons sweeping over the ice with tiny hisses in the still, frozen air. Her eyes- white as the center blare of the sun –turned from the glacial face to Reslo for just a second. Cynder hopped back on all fours and backed away from the wall, her tail whipping. "Have you both concluded your little spat?"
"There was no spat, Mistress." Darkshade cut Reslo off the moment she opened her snout. He met her violet gaze for a second before lowering his eyes back to the floor.
"Excellent. Now stand aside."
The Night Dragons had no intention of getting any closer with or without the demolition. They watched as Cynder's buxom form swept off its heels and spun in the air. Her tailblade glinted for a millisecond before it connected with the ice, its trail marked by tiny green contrails revealing Cynder's choice of elemental augmentation.
Crash~! –the ice wall exploded, sending shards everywhere in a staccato hailstorm. Two massive chunks rolled into a deeper, snow-cuffed expanse ahead. Cynder huffed and poked her nose through the new gap as soon as the dust cleared.
"Is that it? Is that the way out?" Reslo impatiently hobbled over. "Mistress?"
"Mistress?" Darkshade mumbled.
"It is another tunnel." Cynder sounded morose, but a quick sigh cleared her tone. "I think I see light down to the west, and the ground here is dusted with snow. We must be close."
"Thank the Volcano." Darkshade grumbled. "You go first, Reslo, I might have to squeeze."
"You being a big, stupid lummox renders that unsurprising." Reslo growled, her pink tail looping into the tunnel in chase of Cynder.
Five hours.
They'd been wandering the glacial caves for that long.
This had all begun with an aerial patrol over the mountains, one that had gone poorly. Cynder and her bodyguard of Night Dragons had been ambushed by a Wing of Warfangian Dragons, those who remained loyal to the forces of order in the North.
Taken by complete surprise, Cynder had been shot down by an overeager soldier, and she had crashed through an ice shelf. Reslo had come through a second later, cast violently from the sky after foolishly attempting to grapple with a Warfangian officer. The Captain had hooked a serrated Morningstar-blade on his tail into Reslo's shoulder and had dragged the weapon down to her elbow. The coup de gra had come from him mule-kicking her from the air.
Darkshade had been the one who fled through the cracked breaches they'd made. The subsequent cave-in had sealed them in the icy catacombs thereafter, and the Warfangian flight had retreated, not willing to ensure the Cloud Ripper's death by digging through thousands of pounds of ice and stone.
Now, Cynder was the only one able to take charge. She'd been prowling for their escape until her paws had chafed.
If only a cadre of Apes were with me, I could use them to find a way out so much quicker, forgetting how many I'd leave down here once it was uncovered.
Cynder was more used to commanding hordes of her barbaric satellite armies: the tribes of the backward Apes, led by their four Chieftains, who time had transformed into her lieutenants.
Cynder had been allowed to spread a blanket of fear across the known world with her very own private army, becoming the most respected of the Dark One's generals within a period of two-and-a-half decades. That authority though was easily won over with drooling monkeys and the legions of Grublins and Orcs hailing from the Continent.
The Night Dragons were an entirely different animal.
Individually, the dragons native to the Dark Continent were terrified of her. There was no such thing as a drake or hen with the guts or stupidity to question the Terror of the Skies, lest Cynder disembowel them and leave their corpses speared on pikes across her Gothic castle in Concurrent, to serve as an example of the prideful stranglehold she maintained.
But overall, she knew of the whispers and envious mutterings that took up so many evenings for their kind. The Night Dragons had once called her a half-breed, and now could only continue to do so in private. But they still did it. Cynder knew many of her Mistress' higher officers there were hateful of taking orders from her. Even to the monsters, Cynder was an abomination.
"Mistress, Reslo's not doing well." Darkshade called the moment he squeezed through the tunnel. He had always proven apt at latching onto things and never letting go, at least according to Reslo. Cynder had barely known him for a day up until this point, and couldn't say otherwise. "You must use your magic on her again!"
"The only thing I must do is find a way out of this accursed mountain range." Cynder nonchalantly quipped over her shoulder, her eyes darting around for anything out of the ordinary.
Snow, snow, rocks, ice… More snow.
God damn it.
"Reslo will persevere, she has survived a great deal of bloody battles, each worth their own tomes. Our problem at the moment is much more complicated." Cynder stopped in a clearing dappled with ghostly snow wisps. The source of the light she had seen was above. Looking up hopefully, her eagerness dropped like a rock in her gut when she saw what it was up there.
Of course.
It was just a crack between two massive plates of frosted blackstone. The light was bouncing off all the snow, causing the whole tunnel to minutely glow.
Their exit wasn't here.
"That is just beautiful." Cynder sweetly hummed. "Anything to prolong my isolation down here with the two of you I see."
"We're never breaking through that." Reslo growled, her eel-like tail undulating weakly behind her. "That stone's easily fifty tail-lengths thick. The capillaries diverge into all different directions… we can still find a way out."
"That's optimistic of you." Cynder muttered, already searching for another path.
"The day is ending." Darkshade nodded his snout at the little crack above. The tiny sliver of sky up there- though grayed by the mountain clouds –was turning darker. "These caves are going to drown in shadow in a few minutes."
"Beautiful." Cynder growled quietly.
"You say that like it's actually a threat." Reslo grit her fangs, a shivering whine etching out of her throat as the wound on her arm pulsed. "Mountain of Malefora, it hurts~!"
"Mistress." Darkshade gave her that goat-face again. "Please."
Cynder stopped her pointless examinations, slowly glaring at Darkshade with a visage of disgust. A Night Dragon showing such weakness was as unkempt as it was disconcerting. She had served long enough in the Dark Army as its lordess to know the difference between tactical assets and becoming conservative. The latter had no place with them and it never would.
"Step back from her."
Darkshade obeyed, his meaty paws thumping quietly off to the flank. Reslo shivered, her deep pink color slowly draining from her body along with her blood.
Cynder drew closer- a gunmetal and crimson beauty in the dark –and scanned the ragged wound sloughing down the dragoness' flank. Without the damage wrought to her flesh, Reslo was an athletically pleasing 'ness. She was built like wire, and her head resembled a sort of dactyl-sculpting, but her deep pink scales and black back thorns rendered her traits desirable, at least by Night Dragon standards.
"Why are you here, I wonder." Cynder murmured. "You have all the right cards, Reslo. You could've mothered a clutch and stayed out of the military advance during the fertility seasons. Your passion, and how it drove it you to where you are? I shan't ever understand it. What say you?"
Behind them, Darkshade huffed and flexed his wings.
"Mistress." –It was all Reslo would utter. Cynder had known her for longer, as one of their mistress' many footsoldiers. Reslo would sooner die than beg, even to her for her own life.
"You deserved better." Cynder muttered, raising a paw and whispering a hushed cant. Tiny bands of red energy swam around her fingers and over Reslo's shoulder. The flesh stitched back together only minutely as the wound battled against its own sealing.
"…It's almost there." Darkshade watched. "So close!"
Cynder was shivering, and her face was scrunched in concentration. The fighting had drained her of Mana and she was already exhausted. The spell was a silk thread that risked being broken by many iron needles.
The black dragoness gasped as the magic ran dry. Reslo moaned and staggered on her heels, trickles of blood dripping from her elbow.
"The bleeding stopped." Darkshade reported. "But the damage is still there, Mistress."
"You're lucky I got as far as I did." Cynder breathed, lumbering around and towards a natural arch of ice. "Our Mana will not return without rest. We shall roost here. This chamber is defensible and entry comes only from where we stand."
Cynder cast a cautious glare over the two Night Dragons back towards the way they had come.
The wind howling down the tunnels sung eerie notes in the coming silence. Cynder narrowed her eyes and snorted, her breath materializing in front of her snout as a phantasmal gust of steam.
"Procure nesting if you wish, but move quickly and be wary."
"I can walk myself over." Reslo shrugged Darkshade away and limped inside. "At least let me retain some shred of dignity."
[❄️]
Surely, the cold was one thing, but Cynder smelled something else on the wind.
She hadn't stopped staring at the archway leading back into the maze network since they'd arrived. Her snout was angled like a cat made aware of a mouse it couldn't see. Over the howl of the tundra breeze chilling all of them through their scales, she could detect a hint of something…
Copper.
Cynder's eyes flickered to Reslo on the other side of the chamber. The deep pink dragoness had made crude nesting out of a ring of boulders. She was a shivering pile of loose limbs and wings on the ground, her eyes shut, but herself remaining fully awake. Dried blood coated her left forearm and flank, turning it into a shade of scabby red. Her normally beautiful violet eyes were dark, even under her lids.
Cynder had sealed the wound entirely over the course of several painfully draining episodes. Reslo hadn't said a word the whole time and had merely taken to sinking into a defeated heap.
There was nothing more to do. Besides, Cynder's mutations were far more effective at killing people, not healing them. Her knowledge of healing paled to her knowledge of bloodshed. The idea of mercy-killing Reslo crossed her draconic mind a clawfull of times in the recent hours, if only to shorten her suffering.
Truthfully, Cynder respected Reslo, and Reslo had always respected her. It came from a mutual sort of recognition for each of their abilities. Other Night Dragons had taken to calling her the 'Poison Whip' for her element was that of Poison, and her lithe body allowed her to quickly assault and beat down her foes in devastating hit-and-run attacks. On the plus side, Reslo was one of maybe a handful of dragons Cynder had exchanged words with outside of barked orders and battle cries. Watching her deteriorate strangely impacted the dark general.
Cynder snorted and examined her own talons to distract herself.
Weakness.
She'd sent legions of soldiers to die on a whim. Her mind was no more troubled for it. The real source of anger for her now was over how this little misadventure was going to steal away precious time.
Time she could be using to plot their next move against the Dragon Realms. Time she could fill with hours of seething hate. Her castle would have been the perfect retreat right about now.
She was slipping into one of those moods…
She tested the air again.
Copper. Cold.
But something else too…
"Mistress, might I seat myself?"
Cynder fluidly met Darkshade's gaze and held it. The brawny, black drake was standing just outside the ring of stones Cynder had appropriated for her temporary nesting. When she didn't answer him, and her white eyes impossibly glowed brighter, Darkshade took the unspoken message and backed away several pawsteps.
"I did not mean to offend." He swallowed, gaze avoiding hers. "I speak out of tone."
"You do." Cynder boredly agreed. Even sitting down, she was evenly his height. Her mutations rendered her the size of a dragoness of much older stature. She dwarfed almost every Night Dragon in the horde. "But given our circumstances, I hardly think the hierarchy of the Continent has much sway here at the moment. I'll humor you: but at a distance."
Darkshade nodded and stepped back further, plopping onto his thorned haunches and staring at her blankly.
He had only heard stories about the Terror of the Skies. He'd hardly believed what he had heard when he had been chosen as part of her entourage into the Northern Poles. Before that, life had been quiet in the dark caves of the Continent. His war record was weak. He'd only killed two dragons in his career of five years. Moles, of course, didn't count. But notwithstanding…
He didn't know why he was here even before the attack.
"Mistress, might I ask something of you?" His voice cracked, and he growled at himself to clear it up.
"Your throat functions perfectly." Cynder daggered a brow. "Speak, footman. It would do us all well to break the quiet that is so natural to this place."
"Do you dislike quiet, Mistress?"
"I loathe it. What a poor way to start a conversation with me." Cynder rumbled, examining him briefly from head to tailtip. "But, to give you credit: many of your kin are terrified to even come near me, and yet here you sit."
"I've acquiesced to your company." He blinked. "ahem-Mistress."
"Don't be so naïve." Cynder leaned over some of the rocks, chilling his bones more than the cold ever could with a very evil, toothy smile. "No one will ever get used to me. Just as no one will ever have the right to touch me."
Darkshade nodded.
"Well? Your question." Cynder snapped, making him jump.
"I-Is it true that you have Northerner blood?" He asked. "Stories circulate constantly. I hear strange things. Drakes alike all but whisper them in the Continent's halls. I… I do not ask out of hope of judgment."
"No, certainly not, I'd have to kill you if you had that in mind." Cynder chortled, folding her paws over each other and lounging. For a second, Darkshade's eyes followed the ample curve of her hip before he stealed himself and shut her out.
Cynder was regarded as one of the most beautiful dragonesses ever conceived. So many times he and his fellows had viewed her from a distance, or from the sidelines, devoid of any importance. To actually have her before him, engaging her in conversation? Such high change that was…
"My lineage is as unimportant and devoid of detail as all of this rock around us." She gestured with her tail. "It shares much with it. These stones grow old, they remain by themselves, only moved by time, and they are forever kissed by the chill touch of winter."
Darkshade listened to her intently.
"Nothing you seek to garner from me is within your right to know. That I divulge free of any expected repayment." Cynder said.
"I would never press, Mistress."
"Surely you wouldn't. Harbor insult for it or not: but I believe my observations have proven you as a very predictable dragon."
"Mistress, my offense is irrelevant."
"Males… such kiss-asses." She snorted musingly. "I tease, footman. Laugh."
He flashed a brief muzzle-grin. He was absolutely incapable of reading her.
"…And your formalities are a quaint showing." She dipped her snout, wondering at him. "Why not take the opportunity you'll never have again? Engage the Terror of the Skies on an even-to-even base of conversation? What is it you're afraid of?"
"I respectfully decline." Darkshade swallowed again, dodging the last bit of that sentence. "You are the Mistress' right claw. It isn't in my blood to refer to you as anything but, my lady."
"So you're a conformer like I thought. How original. Perhaps I should start a conversation for you before we both die from the lack of intrigue." Cynder adjusted on the stones, exposing her ample thigh. Darkshade couldn't help but glance.
As he waited for her to continue, Cynder's eyes swept over the small cavern around them. The darkness was only flavored, not banished, by a little aqua tint from reflections bouncing off the walls of impenetrable ice meshing with the gray and black stone veins. The wind howling outside the arch was haunting, but fitting for the dreadful, and shaded silence.
"Did you know, footman, that even Ice Dragons have never colonized the northern peaks? That despite the cold, and the isolation to match their chilled demeanors, they have never attempted to set claw here?" Cynder said. "They don't do so because of the altitude. They're too proud to burrow beneath the tunnels and glaciers here, and plans had been drawn up millennia ago in preparation for a dragon city in the mountains. The Ices wanted to call it Kar Tumm."
"Why would the altitude be a problem, Mistress?" Darkshade asked. "We flew our route without difficulty. At least until the North-Scum showed."
"Kar Tumm was to be built on the highest peak of these mountains. The Ice Dragons would never have been able to have done it. The pressure of such extreme heights thins the oxygen levels. The Ice Dragons wh tried to map out the foundations nearly suffocated." Cynder continued. "Kar Tumm was a dream never recognized by the Realms' most pompous minority. Have you ever met an Ice Dragon? Their attitudes are seen as foul by many."
"What do you see them as, Mistress?"
"I think they're the smartest of the Northerners." She hummed. "Aside from their hubris that saw Kar Tumm abandoned to mere fantasy. After Stormwatch slipped into the ocean, the dragons all across the Realms were so haggard by the tragedy that external colonization was viewed almost as a road taken by pariahs."
"I have never heard of the Northerners planning such a city. Built into the mountain peak itself? Here?" Darkshade looked around. "The dark is the only proper trait here, Mistress."
"Guardian Cyrila would disagree." Said Cynder.
Darkshade inadvertently sneered. The Guardians of the Elements were viewed as the prime examples of heresy and evil by the Night Dragons. They four were a corruption of what true nature should have always been. That stigma had only swelled after Darkshade's kin had failed so many times to track the Guardians down and kill them. A particularly juicy prize would have been the Guardian of Flame, the famed Ignitia. The Dark One despised her more than any of the others, and the Night Dragons had been hunting her for years.
Cyrila, however, was the Guardian of Ice, and one of the more elusive of the four. Darkshade had never seen any of them, and could only go off of secondhand eyewitness accounts. Cyrila was said to be a curvaceous hen blanketed in aqua scales and purple belly plates. Her wings were supposedly- when fully opened –to be akin to staring into a blizzard. Again, all things he'd heard from others.
"If this Kar Tumm was planned as long ago as you say, my lady, Guardian Cyrila would have to be hundreds, no, thousands of years old, which she is not." He countered.
"It wasn't her, it was her grandfather." Cynder clicked her tongue. "He was one of the planners for the city's conception. Everything I have read about Cyrila points to her deep-seated desire to restart such a project one age, done rightly, she'd no doubt argue. Having faced her in combat several times, I can say her stoic, self-assured demeanor will always make herself her own worst enemy. She will never have the satisfaction of success in her life, not even when the day of her death comes."
"Have you faced all the Guardians in battle?"
"At one point or another." She plainly glanced at him, eyes briefly flicking over his powerful, black-scaled breast. "But they're weak. I've had better-sported run-ins with green-winged paramilitary hatchling drakes behind enemy lines. They're getting old, and frankly so am I. Who has time for these kinds of considerations anymore?"
"Were any of them like Reslo?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well," Darkshade craned his neck over and peered at the dark bundle on the other side of the chamber. "sleek, I mean. Versatile and deftly fast. Someone who strikes like lightning."
Cynder closed her mouth and exhaled through her nose. Darkshade couldn't tell, but Cynder's advanced senses showed her the tiny, weak strip of violet emanating from the bottoms of Reslo's eyelids. The dragoness was listening to Darkshade aptly. Cynder glowered when she could feel Reslo's heartbeat fluctuate.
Lightning.
Her first instinct was to name Volteera.
Cynder tapped her talons, her eyes drinking in Darkshade's body for a few more moments before she spoke.
"None."
"Oh." Darkshade blinked. Like wood, he was. A blank slate, goat-faced when curious. It was too bad the stupidest drake was also the more attractive. But really, where would that have gone? Cynder couldn't stand the thought of anyone touching her, even a potential suitor. Darkshade was nothing more than agitating eye-candy.
"D-Darkshade…" Reslo's voice quietly echoed across the room.
Darkshade's breathing hitched and he immediately trotted across the chamber, leaving his Mistress to watch with half-hearted interest behind.
[❄️]
Reslo hummed in discomfort when he sat in front of her rock-nest. Darkshade's cyan gaze danced over her needle-like limbs, locking on the dried bloodstains matting her pink flank.
"…I'm here, Reslo. What is it?" He heard himself speak.
"…mmmmwhat-?" Reslo's eyes shot open, and she cringed when she noticed how close the drake was sitting to her. "Darkshade, I thought I asked you to leave me be."
"But, you called me here-"
"I d-did no such thing." Reslo weakly muttered, her wings draping over her body like shivering blankets. Her chops were turning blue, and her face white. "Why do you have to torture me like this, Darkshade? I never wanted you to harass me. Why do you always do that?"
"I do not mean to." He quietly lowered his snout. "Are you cold?"
"Pah." Reslo laughed sourly, her fangs chattering as the wind howled outside the chamber. "…You're such a blind moron."
"There must be something I can do." He glanced around the room, looking back at Cynder, and frowning when he saw that her interest had turned back to the arch and not to them. Unbeknownst to him, Cynder's hearing was perked for them. "Reslo, I am not going to sit back and watch you rot."
"Darkshade," Reslo sighed, scrunching her eyes shut as her head lolled onto the ground tiredly. "when will you see that you will never have me again?"
"I-" Darkshade swallowed a developing wash of thick mucus. "I am not speaking about that."
"…No, you live it, every day, I see it in you, that g-glint? The one I used to know." Reslo curled up on herself even tighter. "I feel empty."
"Reslo, I-"
"Literally, I literally feel empty, drained, like I've lost weight." Reslo eyed her thin forepaw and chuckled. "I've lost so much blood, the frostbite-"
Darkshade's body came over her a second later. Reslo whined as the large drake straddled her back and dipped his wings over hers, himself shivering as he felt like he was embracing an icicle.
Reslo was colder than the glacier walls.
"-Darkshade-!"
"You need to be warm." He touched his snout to the back of her short-horned, black crown, his breath washing over her scales. "Please, Reslo, let me help you."
It screamed too much volume of a life she had desperately sought to forget.
Reslo mustered the last remnants of strength she had left, and with a shrieking roar, she hauled Darkshade off of her and sent him rolling over the side of the nesting rocks.
"Don't touch me! Don't ever touch me again! I hate you! Do you hear me? You worthless bag of shed-scales and rot-meat? I HATE YOU! And I wish you were dead!"
Reslo shivered and slumped into the nest. Her face was buried under her forepaws, the howl of the wind muffling the pathetic sobs etching out from between her talons.
Darkshade trembled uncontrollably, staggering away from the nest like he'd been caught in the radius of a terrible explosion and was wandering aimlessly for safety. Wounded in his own way, the drake slouched against the cold wall, his ribs deflated, and then he didn't move, facing away from Reslo.
Cynder played with one of her wrist cuffs, her eyes darting between the two of them. After a moment of the wind howling, she sighed and sat up from her makeshift nesting, padding over to where Reslo stewed.
As she drew closer, she saw the dragoness' violet eyes flicker in her direction. Reslo twitched, and looked like she was about to scowl.
"At ease, Poison Whip, I'm not going to embrace you." Cynder muttered, sitting on the cold cave floor before the nesting to dote on the thin hen.
"Mistress." Reslo shivered, unable to even incline her snout.
"You've earned the right to drop formalities with me." Cynder softly uttered. "My magic: it… I've-"
"Y-You did all you could." Reslo smiled cheaply, though that was erased under the shivering return of a grimace. "S-So did Darkshade…"
Cynder glanced between the two of them again. She sniffed, being unable to mediate.
"Indeed." She said.
"…I tried to take your advice." Reslo said.
"What advice?"
"…H-Having a family at Darklight… d-doing something that took me off the frontlines, at least f-for a little while…"
"What happened, pray tell?"
Reslo's eyes flickered to Darkshade. Cynder's gaze narrowed, and then she snorted in surprise.
"Tch." She puffed. "Really?"
"It's an old kind of thing…" Reslo doted on the floor. "…Darkshade and I weren't meant for each other. I see that more than he is willing to."
"The female is always the more perceptive with these things." Cynder clicked her talons. "Tell me what happened."
"I-I never assumed we were this close, Mistress." Reslo painfully chuckled, her fangs chattering and cutting off her speech. "Either way, it's not important. Reliving that isn't helping me now."
"You've stayed strong in worse."
"Q-Quoting Twilight?" Reslo smirked. "No… that was a better time." She looked up at Cynder. "I've been honored to fight beside you, Mistress."
Cynder grunted and shifted on her forepaws.
"Rest well." She whispered, before slipping away. Darkshade still hadn't moved.
With a minty sigh, the Terror of the Skies set her head down on the cold rocks, her internal mutations dueling and winning against the biting cold.
Her eyes never left the archway, as if they were seeking the visual trail of the other trait of these caves that she smelled, the one besides Reslo's blood.
It was the scent of decay.
[❄️]