Contact – Slugfest.


"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone is zero."

Drafted November 8th, 2020 – December 3rd, 2020.

Published December 6th, 2020.

A/N: this chapter has been awful to write; I have tried three different storylines for the middle section so far, and by the time it is finished I may have come up with a fourth. Yes, yes I did. And Doc Manager put the entire chapter in italics for some reason - why does it have to be like this? I blanket removed the italics, so if there's any plain text that feels weird that's because I forgot to italicize a thought. I've proofread the whole thing, but there's only so much I can do, so if you find a typo please tell me about it.

To RicoRodriguez2018: I didn't think anyone would find Thrush's death particularly interesting, but then, here you are celebrating, :D. I am definitely keeping up the good work.

And to Pt35, the winner of today's victory cookie, a tradition I'm bringing back from Stranded: (::) First reviewer gets the prize.

I went back and fixed the scene, so now it's a lot better. The Hollywood death scene is one of the tropes that annoys me way too much, and I wanted to avoid the heartfelt last words, emotional wool-gathering and flip-flap that you usually see in the movies (there is a reason I usually don't stick around to watch movies). So I did. And I think that was one of the best decisions of Second Catastrophe so far. But anyway, on to the story.


July 20th, 5,015: The Rainforest

Grievous wounds take a long time to heal, more so when new ones are constantly inflicted; an old soldier once said 'if you love your dragons, put them through hell.' The expeditionary battalion stood at hell's gates. Besides Thrush and Kettering they'd lost nine experienced soldiers and a sergeant; to a man veterans of the old war, who'd survived it only to perish in the new.

When the fight was over and his soldiers loaded up with as much stuff as they could carry, the lieutenant ordered the enemy camp burned; barracks, storehouses, ditch and all. The foreign building material dried easily, and then it burned white-hot, down to the foundations. The flames leaped high in the air, and the smoke rose even higher, drifting west on the prevailing wind, noxious and black like the ash that covered the ground, and the coals that escaped the destruction.

After the attack they patrolled for the rest of the day, rounding up escaped wasps and taking in refugees, then headed back to the rainforest, taking no wasp prisoners but one; a gangly, underfed dragon who fidgeted all the time. He had every right to be anxious: both former slaves and Skywing soldiers fingered their spears whenever he was near.

The rest of the Hivewings they put to the sword. Against the captain's death they'd freed some thirty Pyrrhians, Mudwings mostly, and two scores of the invaders' four-winged slaves, who the lieutenant didn't know what to do with. Also they'd taken nine tons of enemy rations and eight crates of munitions, including enemy blowpipes, darts, spears, and long ceramic cylinders of something. They kept those closed for now.

In the meantime, his men had taken to calling him 'Lou'.

He shrugged off the nickname. More important things had to be done. They'd been out of two-way contact with home since the day of their departure, so once he reached the rainforest he shot off a 'to whom it may concern' letter encapsulating their situation and asking for further orders. The Rainwings graciously offered to carry it, which was odd – no other tribe was allowed to carry Skywing mail because of protocol, and the risk it would fall into unfriendly hands.

Still, he allowed it, just because he wanted all his dragons here, where it counted. Given the hectic state of things he'd be pleasantly surprised if word got back from headquarters within a fortnight. Who knew what was going on in the north?

There was one more speck of good news in all this; Sergeant Rudd got back on the 17th, which was the day before yesterday.

He'd overshot Deathbringer in the night, then run his interception mission at dawn – two hours too late to make a difference to whether Maple Driftwood succeeded or not. An experienced navigator, he'd planned out a return by the evening stars, and beat Lou back to the rainforest by four hours.

Closer to the rainforest, he had two other factions to deal with besides the hostiles; the Seawing-Mudwing forces and the Rainwings, both of them mostly benevolent, although he'd be a fool to think they didn't have their own ends. General Arrow had a detachment of fifty near Camp Rainburrow, set up to undertake coordinated missions with his battalion, while the Rainwings provided victuals whenever his soldiers couldn't take more of those awful ration bars.

And it was the Rainwings who concerned him most. Unbeknownst to him, Thrush had agreed to help Glory build an army, and while the battalion had been away on Maple Driftwood she had scraped together two hundred dragons, ready for the Skywings and Seawings to train them, pretty please. Something about 'offensive operations boot camp'.

Why they were asking him after Driftwood had failed spectacularly he could only just fathom. Glory was desperate, and yet she had little skin in the game. In the three weeks of war the Hivewings had shown no interest in the Rainforest; they'd barely scouted its edges, even though it was a massive roadblock in the conquest of the lands to the west. It was as if the enemy was afraid of the trees.

Maybe she had that strong of a bleeding heart.

All this was why he currently had to attend a conference, one that was the first of many conferences, some purposeful, others more pointless. Also in attendance was Sergeant Stonecrop, newly promoted and brought back from the capital because of the emergency, as well as Lieutenant Crab, who was in command of Arrow's nearby company.

Liana joined them too, that blue-gold Rainwing who served as the Rainwing guide and liaison with Glory. Thrush had taken a disliking to her by the time he got back, one which Lou shared. Out of the four dragons standing on the newly-erected platform beneath the canopy, she was the only non-military personnel.

"Afternoon," said the lieutenant.

"A hot one," said Liana.

"With the niceties out of the way, let's get down to tacks," said Crab. "Arrow tasked us with supporting your battalion in operations." He nodded to Liana. "Obviously our Rainwing friends are helpful in logistics. We are equipped with a new weapon which we want to share with you."

A new melee weapon? Bows? Something to deal with Joe Stinger at range would be much appreciated.

"Like what?" asked Lou.

"Liquid fire, burns like hell when it's lit."

"Continue."

"You could destroy a whole complex, just by pouring hellfire over it and tossing down a torch. Our only problem is ignition – we can't do that reliably mid-air."

The lieutenant knew what he meant with the first part. "If we can't have a piece of land, they can't either…"

"Scorched earth taken to its logical conclusion," said Crab. "We've got specially made-up crates for it and we know how to use it. Mostly it's Mudwings that carry it. They can carry more than we can, and they have fire."

"But not at night," said the lieutenant. "Liana, any intelligence to report?"

The middle-aged Rainwing stepped away from the wall where she'd been standing, half-camouflaged, like a statue where only the chest and wings are painted and the legs are still made of wood. "We're attempting to make contact with Mudwing resistance groups: a few Mudwings borrowed from Crab would be useful for that purpose."

"Anything else?" asked Lou.

"Nothing in particular. The 'Hivewings' have deployed a reactionary force to the site you attacked, presumably while they build another one. We don't have enough eyes on the site to discern more; our courier system is stretched thin just trying to deliver mail."

"Understandable," said Crab. "Arrow has Seawings running around here and Mudwings running around there, and the mixed command structure doesn't help."

"Moving on, roughly a hundred Rainwings are beginning basic training at Fort Gill, with ten of them singled out as possible cadets. Another hundred with a more martial background are ready to begin advanced training at Rainburrow at your discretion."

As many Rainwings as he had Skywings and Mudwings willing to fight for him, Lou thought. Wouldn't that be a hoot. He had to find a way to put them through the wringer. Liana hadn't told him anything about this before-talon, either.

It was all moving so quickly, like whole meat pressed through the grinder and turned suddenly into sausage.

"What kind of martial background?" asked Crab.

"They all know how to effectively use camouflage, and theoretically how to kill. Many of them served as border guards during the time we were an isolated tribe, or during the Nightwing skirmishes," said Liana.

A.k.a, that one time when five dragonets led the most pacifistic group in existence to a flaming volcano and won, somehow, without taking a single casualty. The Nightwings had gotten out of shape, believing themselves secure in their isolation. That complacence invited defeat.

"What about the Nightwings?" said the lieutenant.

"We're working with them."

Stonewalling.

"Are you looking to have the Skywings do officer training, or cohesion training, or what?" asked Crab.

"Cohesion and tactical awareness. We're hoping for the units to be temporarily mixed."

Just what he needed; lance corporals in command of companies, with his own battalion reduced to a skeleton crew. Moons this was a waste of time.

"We'll take them on missions if they're as good as they say they are," said Lou. He turned to Crab. "I'd like you to give my soldiers on this Hellfire stuff; what it is and how much it can do. The last CAP shift comes in at nine, so you'd have to do it twice or late in the evening."

"Late in the evening," said Crab. "Our stocks are limited."

"Okay. You do that and then I'm taking the battalion on a wide patrol for intel and interdiction tomorrow. Do you have a cartographer?"

"One."

"Can we borrow him?"

Crab hesitated. "Yes… but take good care of him."

"He'll be our VIP," said the lieutenant.

There was parchment and a quill on the wooden shelf, so he took those, scrawled on the parchment, then frowned when the tip scratched but no writing went on the page. "Got an inkwell?"

"Bottom shelf," said Crab.

Lou took the inkwell, spilling a little on his talons from the suddenness of his movement. That didn't matter; he had black claws already, so this wouldn't change a whit. He wrote down a series of instructions on the small table, then passed them to Liana.

"A physical training regimen for the duration," he said, smiling with no humor. "Consider it a Skywing gift."

Liana eyed the paper. She had only a vague of what a Carnelian crunch was, but two-hundred of them sounded like a lot. "Thank you," she said. She folded the parchment and put it in a small, brown-skinned pouch. "You'll probably be attending your duties now."

"Yes, I will," said Lou. Why did that feel like a dismissal?

"This meeting is adjourned," said Crab. Liana stared at him. "Because I said so."

He had more important things to do; things like talking with the prisoners, or planning the next operation. While his contemporaries bickered, Lou glided away from the treehouse, simmering. The new weapons from the Seawings sounded good, and so did the promise of Rainwing help, but those things were nominal at best, not helping him with the ground war.

The enemy wouldn't take attacks like this lying down; they'd chase the Skywings back to the source, and that meant an invasion of Little Rainburrow, and the rainforest at large. Blood demanded blood, and Thrush's death required retribution, even if he'd died at Skywing talons. The rest of the world wouldn't hear that disgraceful demise; they'd learn that the captain had been 'killed in action' and 'died a noble death'.

Honor and nobility are all fine ideals in peacetime, but in reality they meant squat when the future of Pyrrhia was on the line: Lou recalled that time-worn saying that had always permeated war, but had been best given voice to by Burn. 'The goal of a soldier is not to die for one's tribe, but to make the enemy soldier die for his'.

That meant exterminating every wasp on the continent.

"Crescent for your thoughts, sir?" asked Stonecrop, who'd sidled out of the meeting when the lieutenant left.

"No thanks. How's it going with the prisoner?"

"He's uncooperative. I think killing his fellows scared him silly," said the corporal.

The two trotted along the forest floor, Lou leading with a determined pace, while Stonecrop lagged a half-step behind, walking on beaten ground. The undergrowth had been trodden down during the week, and where dark jungle-grass once coated the ground, bare earth now appeared in scratches and scrapes.

"Where is he?"

"Just this way, sir."

They strode past a pair of saplings and into another glade, where a Mudwing and Skywing stood guard over a wasp lashed to a tree.


Allele was afraid.

The tang of fear filled his nostrils; the scent was his own, wafting from his scales like an oozing stink. His fellows were dead, all dead, burned or spiked in front of his eyes, left to rot, but the enemy had spared him and brought him here to this jungle at none too kind a pace. A bug whined by his ear, perhaps the size of his forefinger.

Someone spoke in an unfamiliar dialect. If they talked slowly enough, and Allele listened to every syllable, he could get an idea of what they were saying. This one was bumpy, and grated on the deeper tones.

"OK, Butch, rough him up."

A strong claw gripped him by the shoulder, tightly enough to bruise the skin under the scale, while the other loosened the knots around Allele's hocks. The dragon facing him was the color of rubies, eyes simmering with bale, and muscles rippling when he moved, arms often caught by dappled rays of sunlight.

He was untied, he was free to move, but not to go. A hard knock from the dragon in front of him pushed him against a tree trunk, and he stifled a cry.

Now another dragon came into view, bigger than the other red dragons, jaw set and eyes even more hateful than the brown-colored one, if that was possible. He had big wings and red scales, and his nostrils emitted tendrils of smoke and the crisp, acrid scent of burning things, burning everything. Burning flesh. Behind him dragons moved, their forms blurry because of the pain; blue dragons, brown dragons, red dragons, even gold and purple dragons, and yet among the splashes of color there was no orange, no reassuring black stripes.

They'd probably kill him once they got what they wanted out of him, then leave him to rot. It was what sub-dragons would do… not real dragons, just imitation ones with half the intelligence. A voice nagged at him. If his tribe was so superior, why had they gotten their tails kicked?

"Name?"

Allele said nothing, but the strangely intense leader lifted his chin with a talon until they were eye-to-eye.

"Name?"

He extended his middle talon.

"Great, a smart-alec," said the leader, spreading wide wings until they filled Allele's vision. "We ask, you answer, you live longer. Get it?"

They'd kill him before they got anything useful out of him: he knew how they worked, watched as they slew his friends after they'd surrendered or run away. Now the only one left was him, and his life expectancy didn't look too good either.

"Get it?"

He held the leader's gaze, but not for long; it was too intense, and he had to drop his eyes before they burned.

"What are the four-winged dragons, the blue and green that you treat like chattel?"

Oh, anyone knew that.

"Silkwings," said Allele.

"Silkwings," repeated their leader. In the rough enemy accent it sounded more like 'Shilkwingeds'. "We already knew about your kind. What do Silkwings do?"

"Be lazy," he said. "Mope. Eat."

"Yet you use them for something."

"They're worthless," said Allele. Strike me down, pig. "Just like you. We'll come and kill you and take your dragonets, and then you will be nothing."

The leader stared into his eyes.

"Fat chance. Any military information you're willing to share, o' gratefulness?"

Allele spat on the dragon's nose.

They lashed him to the tree after that, the red toady of their leader's running a loop around his legs and pulling it tight enough so it stung around his calves, but with a quarter-inch or so of give so that the ropes chafed. Opportunity!

"Don' forget the tail," said one of the brown guards.

"Damn right," said the bright-scaled one. He grabbed Allele's tail at the widest part and pulled, then tied down both base and tip, leaving it aching at the root, like the time his horn got yanked and felt like it was anchored to a different place afterwards. He turned his head, looking at the toady through his left eye while keeping tabs on the other guards with his right, which was just enough movement to make the burly guy punch him in the guts.

"Go on, double over – oh wait, you can't."

The sentries laughed; Allele didn't. They were monsters, all of them; blackguards taunting vagabonds with stupid insults, stupid, stupid everything. Including the toady who'd forgotten to rein in his chains.

He spread his talons apart, but pressed his wrists together so he could use them as a lever, putting more tension on it and gritting his teeth, his eyes to the ground. He already knew what the laughing soldiers looked like, because he'd glanced in a mirror once and seen it in himself. While the enemy leader conversed with subordinates, Allele focused on loosening his bonds.

After a while the bones in his wrists rubbed against his scales, making a burning sensation on the underside of his skin, but he kept at it, breathing shallow breaths despite what his training taught him about calming himself. Deep breaths meant his chest would expand, and the ropes tighten over his average, unimposing frame. Shallow breaths – one, two, pain. The throbbing ache in his hindquarters was nothing compared to his upset stomach now.

The ropes slipped, then caught again, probably on a knot he hadn't seen, but that was alright, because it had moved, and it was possible to stretch the rope, or fray the fibers until his bonds were so loose they wouldn't hold him anymore. He needed to go. He didn't know where, just away, out of the present.

Endangered soldiers, as a rule, do not think about the future: it is a great effort to sway a dragon's thoughts from death when he has witnessed his comrades killed, his compound destroyed, and been brought into an enemy stronghold where strange dragons and scents abound. His body may even shift away from survival, and actively begin to destroy itself.

Things change with he can think past the next five seconds, or five minutes, or time until the next meal – then mentally he is saved, even if he dies anyway.

Allele didn't know this, or didn't care to learn. Eventually he stopped tensing against the cord, tired and frustrated that he hadn't gotten himself out yet. That was okay, he reminded himself. They hadn't retied his bonds; his work still counted for something, he was going to make it out, or die trying… just so he could go back.

One of the guards was drifting off into space, clenching his long-handled spear in his right talon: unasleep but unaware of his surroundings, focused on something only he could of Allele's imprisonment was getting to observe things about his captors that they didn't notice about themselves, or tried not to think about. This was not your standard, coolly-grill-your-captive-over-coals interrogation, with carefully calculated torture inflicted on a POW; it was hot and angry and most importantly informal, which meant a lot of things, none of which he could grasp at the moment, without a lot of time to think and observe.

Well, time was something he had plenty of now, and while he'd never thought he would miss the 'hurry' in hurry up and wait, now he did, and badly. Maybe if he escaped successfully he could bring back information on enemy interrogation methods, force concentrations, order of battle, etc.

A cavalcade of sea dragons glided past, blue and green and one of them silver, a color he hadn't seen on their scales before, but knew about now. They had shorter spears than the brown delta-dwelling dragons, but the heads glinted strongly whenever they caught dappled sunlight, bound strongly to supple wooden shafts with thin, stretched cord. These dragons wore a curious garment, too; a round, iron-banded shield attached to their left armstwo or three inches above the place where a Hivewing might wear greaves.

Aloof to Allele's problems, they did not pay attention to him much.

Next were the muddy dragons, and these differed; from the well-fed, sleek giants with weapons like the one who'd tied him up, to the shabby, skinnier civilian-types in the corner not far from him; obviously freemen, but with their heads low and their faces drawn like his (and boy was this train of thought getting uncomfortably close to comparing him with slaves). A few wielded long spears with a short spear tucked underneath their wings on a harness of some sort; more (but still relatively few) used the mid-length weapons that the sea dragons did, and walked around with the same bucklers.

They were different from the wide-winged dragons, the red dragons, the ones with the angry, dismissive leader, and he saw this in the way they walkedand talked. True, one or two of them did share the anger that the soots did at nothing in particular, but most of them trotted around with nonchalance while the red-scaled soldiers shot suspicious glances at the ones with bucklers, or stood close-winged in thought, or looked at him with disinterest, or worse, hatred.

His enemy could look at him all they wanted; they hadn't killed him yet, and if he had his way they wouldn't kill him at all. Allele started working on his ties again, eyes flicking up from time to time to see if any of his guards had taken a renewed interest in destroying his health. None did.

Suddenly, a light, merry voice distracted him from his work and he looked up; a sprightly dragoness had appeared from nowhere, with bright yellow and green scales and odd fans beneath its chin.

"Quit sneaking around, little missy," said one of the soldiers, who stirred, but did not move.

"I'm not sneaking around if you know I'm here," said the dragon. Allele did not catch all of the conversation, but he knew what it meant.

The dragoness turned back to him. "Hello!"

Allele gave her the middle talon; she frowned, and then she disappeared in front of his eyes.

Wait, what?

He still felt like a dragon was moving nearby, breathing in his ear, but it could only be him and his imagination. I must be dreaming. They must've given me some drug to get the truth out of me, and now I'm babbling out my secrets while I wonder if I'm still sane.

Well, his talons still chafed, and his chain of thought was probably working alright, and the guards still seemed as disinterested as before, if a little annoyed, so it was probably real. So much for the idea that I'm dreaming. A bug landed on his snout and buzzed away when he snorted, then returned to his nose and stayed there, cleaning each of its six legs in turn.

His interrogators would be back, he was sure of it. Until then, he'd spend his time loosening the knots.

It was late afternoon when they came for him, nearing evening; an unpleasant sort of evening, wet and soggy and hot and itchy instead of crisp and warm like a good sunset should be. One of the soots came over and talked to his guards, and then the brown toady untied him from the tree and gave him a scraping for good measure.

They left his hobbles on, but even with those he could still take off and escape, given an opening. The soots were faster than him, but in these tight, enclosed spaces with brush weaving through the canopy in a dense thicket, their big wings would turn into a liability, and he could make his escape. That was the idea in principle, anyway.

Besides, his guards had come with him, all of them; both soots and toads, though the eccentric, invisible and probably imaginary yellow-blue dragon was nowhere to be found. He'd fallen asleep, dreamed, then startled himself awake, nothing more.

Someone had assembled a stage here, its joints flush and its wood fresh and vibrant, as if newly cut, with four pillars holding it up from the bottom, skirted by long, wide planks painted black, or at least very, very dark blue. There was a deck on top of the structure, perhaps fifteen feet wide by fifty long, enough space for three dragons to stand abreast facing the audience. The enemy did not use stairs, and if they wanted to get from point A to some higher point B they simply flew, as his captors did suddenly, yanking him up by the shoulders and carrying him to the platform.

Hundreds of foreign eyes stared at him, yellow and hazel and black, peering from faces with wide skulls or boxy snouts, with the pinions of their wings jutting out on either side of them, or tucked neatly behind their forelegs.

A turquoise dragon landed on the platform. "The name's Lieutenant Crab, though you can shorten it to el-tee, and the first thing I have to do on stage is apologize. Sorry folks, no blood sport today," he said. "We're not killing this guy -" (a pause) "no matter how much he deserves it."

Laughter rang out from the spectators.

"Damn right, splasher!"

"Not so dangerous now, huh?"

A shout wafted up from the back of the horde.

"Pull his claws out!"

The sea dragon waited for the applause to subside. "As much as I'd like to keep him as a scrollweight, we can't have a flight hazard listening in on classified information, even if we all know he won't get very far."

"Boooo hiss," said the crowd. They didn't mean it, and that was the worst part. Even after the voices subsided chuckles filled the glade, all meanspirited laughing at him, who two weeks ago had been part of the headiest, most powerful army in all of Hivewing closed his eyes and dropped his head.

"Don't worry, we'll crack him yet… and a few of his ribs. Twink."

That got the best reaction of all.

"Alright, wheel him out of here. He's got to get used to the chair before we make him a paraplegic, and damn right they deserve it. These dragons – these Hivewings invaded your land, desecrated your pastures, enslaved your dragonesses and took your dragonets. Like hell you're going to stand for that, like he'll we're going to stand for that."

The voice went on, but Allele didn't get to hear any more of the dangerous, inflammatory rhetoric; the guards pulled him away from the speech, grumbling that they wouldn't get to hear it themselves, so that he only got to hear a few more words before the forest swallowed them and turned them to inarticulate cheering.

"- have a solution. With me today is a sergeant who's been volunteered to help me with this presentation -"

"Pity we can't drop him right 'ere," said the soot. "Or burn him."

"Like I care," said the brown one. "Sergeant!"

The two saluted to someone ahead of them but outside Allele's field of view.

"Bring the prisoner to storage, it's less classified. El-tee's orders."

"Yessir."

"Crab will do a second briefing for the CAP coming in, so you'll have a chance to see him talk without the theatrics," said the sergeant, trotting where Allele could see him. Broad-shouldered for a soot, he had a tapered chin, yellow eyes, and horns that curved back in-line with his head instead of curling outwards, unlike other soldiers he'd seen at this base.

"C'mon you skinny son, let's get moving."

The enemy's rough talons grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him along, dragging his feet on the ground because he couldn't move on his own. Not until he loosened his bonds and slipped away like the coward he was: 14th brigade needed the intel, but he wanted to get out of here with his skin.

If he escaped but didn't go back to 14th, he would never be free. Deserters got murdered, that was the rule; they'd come for him and make him kill himself with his mind.

Moons, he wouldn't believe it himself, if he hadn't seen it done, hadn't stood at the base the enemy had attacked the day before they came, watched a friend's eyes go black and her claws slit her black-barred throat.

They dumped her in the marsh, along with all her paraphernalia and loot. The generals gave, but they also took away.

More of the rainbow-splash colored dragons appeared, fading in and out of view at the edges of his vision; unlike the others, these types carried no weapons, had no insignia patches pinned into their scales. The brown dragon hustling him along had no badges at all; the red one had a metal sign sewn into his scales, and their sergeant wore three of those signs in copper, connected at the sides by metal bars.

It wasn't overly flashy, but it got the job done. One wide v means private, or something. Three vees with connecting bars is sergeant. What's two vees?

He didn't know yet. Why were the soldiers tolerating non-military personnel around their base; were the bright-scaled jungle dragons servants or something? Could be. His captors brought him beneath a low-hanging tarp made of a thick, coarse fiber that smelled funny, like burned oil, and obviously wasn't up to Hivewing standards back home.

Maybe their cloths caught water when it rained, so they wouldn't catch fire as easily, which could definitely happen when half his guards snorted smoke out their noses whenever they were grumpy.

The enemy sergeant strode ahead, clipping Allele's nose with his wingtip, then moving on. "Nonam, you here yet? We need you for the orientation before we start full training in three days."

A voice rang out from the other side of a row of boxes – captured Hivewing boxes, he realized, not made of wood. "I'm here."

"Help me move these crates, we need a standing area."

"OK."

A yellow talon shoved one of the boxes aside, and a light tan, scarred dragon poked his head through. "I was thinking we'd put them all on the west edge, that way we'll have more space and we can stash material on the other side before we bring it out." He looked at Allele, then frowned. "You got one."

"Alive but not well," said the sergeant.

The soot seized a box and started dragging it along the green; it was as wide as he was, perhaps six feet tall with five hundred pounds of weight behind it, enough to give Allele pause. Their sergeant pulled it with a grunt.

"He doesn't look threatening enough," said Nonam. "He's not defiant."

"Not the kind of looter who burned down your city, huh?"

The two lifted a crate onto another crate and set it down with a bang.

"Not exactly repentant either."

"We can't have him listening to classified stuff, can we?"

"Sure, put me in charge of the civilian briefing," said Nonam.

"Liana said you persuaded Glory into letting you out here. That's some kind of people skills."

Nonam shrugged. "Yeah. Talking to Glory is weird. Sometimes I feel like there's a person in there, sometimes it's like I'm chatting to an animus construct."

"But can you use him in the presentation?"

"Certainly."

"Could you help interrogate him?"

A pause, broken by the bang of a box settling on another's lid. "Not sure I could talk to him without ripping his guts out. They killed people."

"We'd like you to try."

"Fine. But we need to set up for those Rainwings."

That fly which had landed on Allele's snout earlier now decided his nostrils were a perfect place to take a nap, and there was exactly zilch he could do about it. The sergeant spoke in a low voice. "We need the help."

"Huh, never thought I'd hear that from a swooper."

"We're not Icewings," said the sergeant. "We admit that we're wrong in less than two millennia."

Aren't like who? And how much time?

And the sand-colored dragon laughed. "Damn right. How many are we taking?"

"Just twenty or so; they got curious so we're giving them an orientation briefing."

"Before five hours of grueling exercises?" asked Nonam. "That's like flying before learning to walk."

Several of the flashy, over-the-top dragons dropped in at that point, appearing out of the corners of his eyes or stepping out of shadows, their scales as mild as a peacock is humble. Which it isn't. The colorful bastards materialized out of shadows – it must be magic, a solemn magic like the magic in Clearsight's book, only focused on a dragon instead of an object. But if they were magic, who had enchanted them? Were they like the automata in the hive city museum, but infinitely more advanced?

Well, it was easy to jump to conclusions. They didn't move jerkily, like the flamesilk-powered automata did, and their scales had an oily sheen to them, unlike the hard glint of metal – and Nonam mentioned training, so they probably weren't machines.

Probably.

More of them gathered together; tan dragon and red dragon ran around corralling them into the right spots and assuring them that while refreshments were not served at military briefings, there'd be food to eat afterwards. The assembled newcomers gathered together and settled down with smiles on their faces and jitters shaking their wings, excited.

Allele shivered too, but for a different reason. They dragged him up to the front of the tent, before dozens of searching, interested eyes, and had him lean against a container while Nonam did the talking.

"This is one of the enemy," he began… and so started the second-worst briefing of Allele's life. "Together with his compatriots he raped, pillaged, murdered, and ravaged his way through the Mudwing kingdom, burning towns like Abalone, Fairfield, Sunfield, and Allister, paused for supplies, then desecrated millions of acres of rural territory and killed thousands of innocents. He is not to be trifled with."

Though he had no platform, his voice carried through the tent, audible without bombast, firm and serious.

"Many of you are here because you are interested in what we are doing. You want to know the jargon we speak, and own the patches we wear, because it's 'cool'. It's not. There are times when a soldier wants nothing more than to drop his insignia and disappear. I would know, because I was one of them. I was tired of endless combat and meaningless suffering. But this war does not exist because of petty politics, it is here because the enemy is at our doorstep, and they are here to enslave us."

The assembled dragons stiffened, and Nonam paused to catch his breath. He favored his near side, Allele noticed; never did he let his weight rest on more than two feet. "I hope I put it into clear enough words, didn't bumble it up," he said. He cleared his throat. "This is what we're dealing with. There are ways to help – and better ways than rushing off into the Mudwing kingdom to save people and getting killed."

A green-tinted dragon in the audience winced, as if he'd been thinking of just that.

"The Skywings and Seawings have begun a training program to create the tools, the organization and the know-how to be an effective fighting force. It looks tough. You don't want to kill, I get that. But once you're out there and you're knee-deep in the mud and your buddy is dead because of an ambush the enemy set up as you were trying to rescue civilians with the limited supplies you had, you may find yourself changing your mind. Formal training begins in three days; until then, it's physical conditioning to get yourselves in shape. All those interested, step forward."

Half a second passed as dragons looked around for someone else to go first. Then one in the front row took a pace, and the dam broke; the room lined up for Nonam, front to back. They were bleeding heart people. They wanted to help.

And as the sergeant went along the rows collecting names, the defiance in Allele's heart turned to dread. How many dragons were out there that they didn't know about? There were Skywings and Seawings and Mudwings and Rainwings at least, and then whatever the speaker was, and past that – who knew?

He didn't.

So his head sunk to his chest and his tail to his legs, and all while the debriefing lasted he moped and felt sorry for himself. Wasp would win, but how many soldiers would be sacrificed in the process? The extra-continentals paled in comparison to the unbroken columns of Hivewings mustering on the Seagulls, but what would happen if the two armies just kept coming and coming and coming?

His heart knew. Massacre.


July 26th, 5,015: Somewhere next to the middle of Nowhere.

The 305th didn't get to run, or choose their battles like other brigades did; in fact, they weren't much of a brigade at all, not in these evil days with the palace compromised and the leadership AWOL since June and their sturdy LOCs ripped to shreds by the enemy overrunning the delta.

But their brigade was a veteran unit, and they'd seen this sort of catastrophe back in '94 and '96, in the early days of the war between the periodic infusions of personnel from Coral. They knew the enemy could be beaten, and that he was not as strong as he seemed, nor were his soldiers as experienced or well provisioned or well led. He held the advantage in a tight grip, but the harder he cracked down the more power slipped and fell to the resisting Mudwings, low on supplies as they were, and morale, and everything else except gumption.

Things changed when good news came.

Why, just three days ago word had come from the west that an enemy encampment was found burned to the ground and enemy corpses lay strewn about with bloody wounds in their backs, as if executed, and their very own spies in the other enemy camps reported consternation in enemy ranks, comings-and-goings between the movers and shakers. Then word arrived on new's heals saying the Seawings had arrived in the Rainforest and there was much activity inside it, and rumors of hundreds of Skywings patrolling from mountains to sea plagued the underground intelligence outfits, though whether they were true or false no one could tell; many refugees streamed into the jungle, but all were loathe to come out again.

All this Somers heard from his fellows, for though they were old soldiers and hardened and wary they still gossiped like children. Soldiers talk, especially when all there is to do otherwise is lie in the mud and wait.

Now, when many people think of mud and wet their mind immediately jumps to a mucky, deep ditch, with a culvert perhaps, and two or three inches of scummy water standing in the bottom, but this was not the case for Somers. Where he lay there was no ditch, because there was no road, just a giant flat of soft earth between him and the bulging cypress trees on the other side of a foggy brook.

Even small amounts of wet play hell with equipment, and constant exposure to mist and muck is worse still: all soldiers know this. Most of his battle-brothers didn't bother to carry weapons, and the few that did bore crude stone spears or even sharpened sticks hardened in the fire, just to kill from a distance where the enemy could not kill them. Iron rusted, and even wood rotted, and leather softened and fell away. The only constant was stone, though it chipped in everyday use, and vanished into the mud if left standing for a while.

"Think that patrol's gonna hit us?" asked a Mudwing; Griff, stereotypically strong for one of his kind, immersed in mud up to his back so only his head and the tops of his wings stood out, and those blended with the wet, grungy earth. He was taller than other Mudwings, if only just, with dos and does mixed up in his mind like drawslips in a hat, so badly that no one ever bothered to correct him.

A fly alighted on his ear, flew off when he flicked it, then came back, settling on sensitive pink flesh. He twitched again; such was the nature of things.

"Naw, not unless they find our informant," said Somers. "You know how they are, blind."

"Well what if the guy misses us?"

"He might, he might not," said Somers. "Look at those wasps, buzzing around with no clue."

"Stableflies."

"What're those?"

A soft breeze stirred the distant treeline; the wasp patrol swung around, continuing their fruitless search, and Griff sighed.

"Lil flies that zip around in buildings for cows."

Somers grunted. Buildings for cows, what a funny thought; might as well build a villa for horses and goats and sheep. "What does it do, keep them out of the cold?"

"Keep what?"

"Cows out of the cold."

Griff settled deeper into the mud, air and water gurgling and mixing as more of him stirred under the surface. "Moreso the wind," he said.

"Wish there'd be a better breeze… then they'd smell us and there'd be a fight."

"So no breeze," said Griff.

One side of the wedge-shaped wasp formation flew ahead, the other slowed and merged right, falling into line formation. Together they broke their orbit around a shallow knoll and headed eastward, passing over the north-south line of trees a mile away from the 305th and Somers.

"Like I said," he remarked, "blind."

Griff watched them fly away, spaced less than a dragon-length from each other, then dropped his head when they passed behind the treeline and out of sight. "Not far to that ranch-house of theirs," he said.

"Grandpa would roll in his grave if he knew," said Somers. He moved a thick arm under his belly, scratching an itch.

Scritch.

"They don't care, but we does," said Griff. "Maybe our informant's gonna tell us how we hit 'em."

"And then exfil with reinforcements hot on our tails, having lost half our numbers in a futile assault on a fortified location, I assume."

Both of them knew more tactics by now than an average officer did when he got out of cadet school; still, it didn't take a genius to figger the dangers of attacking the enemy on their newly-conquered turf.

"Shuddup bothofyou," said a voice behind them; another Mudwing half-hidden by a mound of dirt.

"You isn't king to me," said Griff over his shoulder. He turned back to Somers. "With friends like Squirrel, who needs enemies? Gets to my nerves."

"You do like to talk," said Somers.

"Yeah, but when he talks the only thing comes out is sour lemon."

The two lay their heads down again, letting their necks smush the moist, wondrous earth. Jumping in a mudhole was like enjoying a sauna, and he pitied the other tribes who didn't think that way: they didn't know what they were missing, that was what.

"Eidh – Wish we was actually a brigade," said Griff. "Hivewings scared off our messenger I bet."

Altogether he wasn't the worst brother to have – even if he mixed his are and is.

Morning blended smoothly with afternoon; a warm, humid, quiet one, just the sort of day to spend with sibs and sons over a hearty working-dragon's meal, not laying here and waiting for boredom to rot his heart out of his chest or brain to peel from skull. The air became oddly still, and he saw a shadow moving about between the tall, thick clumps of quackgrass in a copse about ten yards distant, though there was no dragon to make it. A corporeal shadow, too – it disturbed the grassblades.

"Rainwing alert!" he shouted; heads poked up from the mud and bodies rippled underneath the deceptively firm-looking surface.

"No need to be so rude," said thin air. "Salutations."

"And to you," said Somers. He'd been tracking the rainforest dragon for a good ten seconds before his mind put two and two together to make four. "Don't sneak up like that."

"Moons-damnit Somers, you can't keep a watch," yelled Squirrel.

"Perfectly well," said Somers, ignoring Griff's cry of 'salu-what now?'. "State your business."

The Rainwing dropped camouflage and emerged like a toad poking its head cautiously out of the mud; slowly instead of all at once. She was not bad-looking for a Rainwing, with her chin-flaps tucked neatly against her throat and the whole circus of normally colorful scales tinted with a brown and green flavor that broke up her silhouette without making her invisible.

"Intelligence on enemy encampments; here to see your second lieutenant."

"He's a full el-tee and he's that way," said Somers, jerking his thumb to his left, parallel with yon treeline.

She nodded and passed onwards, whistling a little tune.

"You didn't get here name, loser," said Squirrel after she'd gone. "You meet a woman and you don't get her name?"

"What can he say? Rainwings is a little spindly."

"You two ever talk about something other than dragonesses?" asked Griff.

"No," said Squirrel.

Griff lay down in the ditch again, laziness overtaking him now that the immediate action had passed. "The army are my hobby, womanizing is a full-time job."

"And that's why your wife left you," said Squirrel. "Not hard to figure out."

Griff had had a girl once – though no one ever talked much about his success with the ladies except to mention the lack of it – and what happened to his children during the new war he didn't know.

"More like she didn't agree with my skunk collection hobby."

That was the most articulate he usually got; it required true intestinal fortitude for him to get anything right, and Somers should've been proud. As it was, the jokes only seemed to obscure the grim reality; the messenger was here with intel that el-tee would act on, which meant today he would go out and fight and maybe get killed, which was an inauspicious end to any life when compared to dying peaceably among children and grandchildren and dozens of second cousins.

Anyone who talked about 'noble death' or 'brave demise' was so full of it their eyes ought to be brown. He was no fool. He'd seen dragons die, pour their life-blood onto everything from slick manure to cold, unfeeling tundra, and the sands in-between, and he'd killed too; at first in self-defense, then to end those dumb fucks who'd ended so many of his sibs, and eventually because he'd done it for years and it was his life.

But now the years had caught up to him, and he was getting old, tired, stiff in the bones at night and stiffer in the muscles. So many ways to kill with his claws… eventually a man got bored of the variety.

And his 305th, they were a sorry state too, never actually a real brigade, except maybe on paper when some colonel created the unit at some ass-end boot-camp in the middle of nowhere. Since then their numbers had plummeted, paused in their descent or even briefly rebounded when reinforcements arrived, then gone into free-fall again. Maybe a hundred combat-worthy dragons remained in spring of '015, and less than sixty were available when the enemy came knocking in summer. Where the actual CO was no one knew, and they were dangerously close to having a NCOIC in the form of Lieutenant Starling.

El-tee came over, his flanks drenched in earth, something no Mudwing minded. One of his kind would pay more attention to a stuck cockleburr weighing less than an ounce than to a hundred pounds of manure.

"OK, our informant has given us the intel," said Lt. Starling, "so we have a plan. The objective rally point is where we are now; you know how we're set up as companies so might as well not even bother. There's an enemy fortification approximately six miles east of us situated on terrain slightly above ground level – call it ten feet, with a patch of trees on the south-eastern side, two hundred yards off, maybe fifty acres of grazing land in the general area. There are eighty of them and sixty of us; twenty of them in the air at all times, the rest on the ground as guards. They're unalert; we can close the range without much trouble."

Somers nodded along; Griff looked like he might fall asleep. Damned unprofessional, but what did he expect when the mission plan was always 'go in and smash'?

"You know the risks," said Starling, turning his head to look them in the eyes. "If you want to back out now is your chance."

A moment passed, and no one raised a wing.

"Alright then. We won't pull interdiction, because we can't, so we're going in direct. Don't engage their CAP, get in the courtyard where there's cover and we can close for CQC. Fly low on the inbound, use concealment, don't skyline, OK?"

"Yes sir, sir," the soldiers chorused.

Somers liked the plan, insofar as a soldier can approve of an offensive operation when he is attacking with a numerical disadvantage instead of three to one superiority. Mudwings are too bulky and slow to chase enemy convoys, so they need to bust open enemy LOCs at their bases, something they excel at doing.

"We'll break off at night if we haven't captured it," said el-tee. "Hopefully we'll be inside the ranch grounds and secure the enemy rations by then. Counter-attack will not be long coming, so keep your eyes on the sky, understood?"

The nodded their heads as a way of saying yes, then the sergeants and second lieutenant repeated everything back to the leader. Mudwings can have corporals, but not always; the role of Bigwing often fills the position for them.

"Stuff in order, set compasses, form up on your sergeants," said el-tee. "Tails in gear, we leave on my mark."

Somers ambled to his sergeant, then shuffled his feet, tapping away nervous pre-battle jitters while his pals tried to chat up the Rainwing in the background.

"So uh, were d'you come from?" asked Squirrel.

The scoundrel didn't get the no-interspecies memo, or he was so attention-starved he was ignoring it anyway.

"Courier service," said the Rainwing. She cast a disapproving eye at Squirrel: real good pickup line bud.

"So you snoop around down here?"

An extra second passed when she wiped away spittle. "Perfunctorily." To his confused look she added, "Yes."

"Mark!" yelled the el-tee, and 305th rose into the air – not far from the ground, mind, just enough to kick up a storm of spray and swamp gas into his nostrils, the smell being the one part of delta living that Mudwings dislike. Their informant came with them, taking to the sky more gracefully than the Mudwings did.

Intel is great and all, but it would've been a whole lot better if the Rainwings had sent an army of spears rather than a coterie of spies. He glanced at the dragoness beside him, then wondered what she had to gain from sticking her neck out for them; an examination of Mudwing tactics, mayhap. He nudged his younger brother's slipstream with an outstretched wing.

"Huh?"

"Squirrel didn't get her name either."

In a world where good fought a losing war on all fronts, one had to savor the small victories. Somers crossed his talons and mumbled 'enemy patrol go home' to the tune of 'gory gory', a litany to pass the time before the inbound phase ended and the combat phase began, a period of time that could last anywhere from hours to days. He wasn't praying for things to go well in battle; he was praying for nothing to go wrong on the way there, because once the fight started there was no savior except wits, muscles and luck.

The situation went sideways immediately. Two miles in, the Rainwing disappeared, head, tail and all; he looked over to his right where she had been flying a moment ago and there was nothing but thin air, and no sound of wingbeats except the weighty fwooshes coming off his Mudwing brethren.

"Abandoned us on the eve of battle, what a hoot," said Squirrel, who would've said more if he'd had the chance.

But there was no time to trash talk their eloquent ally.

"Contacts north, high," said the sergeant, "one score."

Somers checked his left, saw the enemy trailing in line behind their leader, their wings blurry to his sight, there but not there as they powered the wasp-like dragons on a mid-level cruise above the dark brown ground, and the air that wavered and broiled with the mid-afternoon heat.

The dragons ahead of him dipped their wings and turned north, skimming the trunks of a tall cypress grove that protected them, momentarily, from the enemy's line of sight. Ahead of them a long stretch of open ground loomed, bare mud and quackgrass and clumps of a plant that looked like rye if rye-like plants happened to grow on knolls in wet swamps.

His scales warmed when he burst out of the shadows, sunlight spearing him with its torrid heat on the one side, and his eyes boring holes in the enemy patrol on the other, catching the glint off their wicked spears, white sparks of burning intensity.

One spark blazed hotter than the rest, swinging from the leader's harness to his head, then swiveling left to right until its full weight collapsed on Somers: the glare of a spyglass.

"They see us!" he yelled, even before the line formation twisted and headed straight for them with a wasp at its head, the rest falling in behind it as if it were the head of a venomous snake.

"Pick up the pace," said his sergeant. "Hustle!"

Somers poured on the coals; a copse of brush ahead of him burgeoned and then suddenly appeared at his side and then faded away in the corner of his eye, he was traveling so fast; his wings thrusting him forwards and the thick, stubborn air holding him back while his heavy, muscular body skidded on the back of the ground effect.

The enemy closed; their formation traveled from right to left in his eye until it was behind him on his left flank and still coming nearer, fueled by the altitude they burned to catch up. Dragons hustled around him in loose formation, one buffeted by the echo of each-other's wingbeats and hazarded by fear, yet still intact.

"Call!?" shouted the sergeant. "Call?!"

Somers didn't hear el-tee's response directly, but he did when the sergeant yelled it to his ears.

"Stand, wheel, fire point-blank!"

Now he knew what to do, and he kept flying, eyes rammed as far left in their sockets as they would go, watching the approaching enemy as a deer desperately gauges the distance to the pursuing cougar. But Somers was not a deer; he fought back.

And as the enemy spread into a crescent, and a wasp's ugly mug and outstretched claws filled his vision, his body tensed for the call.

"Wheel!"

He dipped right and Griff dipped left, wings scraping the earth and talons digging into it, drag gripping his body and wrenching him sideways till he faced what had been behind him two seconds ago, his head aching from the sudden throw of his brain and yet hurting less than what the enemy was about to experience; body-encompassing pain.

Fire bloomed from his maw and spread in a wide cloud, nasty and orange with a smell like tar: the enemy plunged into it and other fires like it from his battle-brothers, bursting through in a plume of smoke -

Because they were the smoke; trailing it from wingtips and tails and eyes, screaming with burnscarred lungs that would never breathe right again and soon would not breathe at all, as Somers burst the chest of the nearest one with a savage right hook that made the gore fly.

And still the enemy came on, the second wave closing with spears outstretched and yet another group swinging around from his right and his left, orange and black scales glinting with a healthy, iridescent film from the sun's light, hot but not as hot as fire and Somers's will to live.

A well-fed enemy dragon rushed him with a short spear reaching for his chest and his heart, before he mustered another blast of fire and torched them all, almost before his arm snapped up and diverted the killing blow – almost.

The sturdy spearshaft met his arm on his side, flexed, bent, then rebounded with a jerk away from the enemy's talons: Somers caught the smaller dragons' arm with his left and hauled him in, snarling, beast among beasts that he was, taking part in the bloodbath as the wasp's face shifted from arrogance to fear to self-soiling terror in half an instant.

Before Somers got inside the other guy's guard and bit his neck open, anyway.

The wasp flew past like a runaway wagon and hit the dirt, clutching for air, to keep from spilling its lifeblood, to prolong its life a minute longer, an effort that'd be futile in the end. Somers kicked away its twitching tail with his back leg, then beat his wings forward and fell back a pace in keeping with the rest of his formation.

Those enemies at his flanks fell back, then broke ranks and flew east towards their base. Somers harrumphed, turned, then, checking his surroundings, jump-beat and rose into the air.

305th survived its fiery trial with flying colors; out of that experienced company there were few injured and none so seriously as Squirrel, the big dragon with a torrent of blood cascading from his lower chest. Somers looked at him in time to see his battle-brother rip the spear from his scales, cracking the shaft in the process. He detached the iron head though, and stuck it in his vest-pocket before he took off and they moved on.

Weapons of such good quality don't come cheap in the delta; moreover, the injury was bloody but probably fine, as the area where the chest sloped back to the belly was notoriously tough. And it was Squirrel. Nobody cared about Squirrel.

"Stuck-up no-good weaklings managed to put a pin in me and I -"

Especially because of his complaining.

Somers fell in with Griff, looking over his brother for injuries as his brother looked for his, stuff that escaped soldiers' notice in the heat of battle. Griff frowned.

"Bad scrape you got," he said. "Arm."

Somers raised his right arm and bit his lip; a sharp tear parted the scales on its side, weeping blood and heckling his nerves with needle pains. Both left and right talons were covered in somebody else's sticky gore, and his throat was fairly singed, as always happened with firebreathing, but otherwise it was fine; a night spent in the mud would ensure a good scab formed over the wounds, and after that it'd be less than a week until they stopped bothering him entirely.

Mud healed surface wounds and deeper contusions, but it could only dull the pain when it came to the serious stuff: it was a long flight to recovery from a broken bone, for example.

"How many did you kill?" asked Somers. "Nothin'?"

"Pfft. Got one in the socket."

Somers nodded… a talon wrecking the gelatinous eyeballs and turning them into so much spatter on the way to the brain was always a sure way to kill. Hard to pull off, but 100% effective if Griff had the full weight of the enemy crashing down to aid him.

"How many did you pulp?"

"Oh mighty older brother, you mean."

"No," said Griff.

They flew another two hundred yards before Somers deigned to answer. "Two."

His younger brother wolf-whistled. "Their bodies 'll lie."

"Probably. They'll rot first, or sink."

Once or twice he'd encountered petrified corpses in a bog as a dragonet; the acrid water protected bodies if it claimed them in time to keep them from the flies. Then he wound up in the war on foreign tours, and when he came back there wasn't a field without a dead body in it; bodies piled upon bodies atop skeletons of dragons even farther back.

Mudwings came from the earth, and the earth was their tomb whether they liked it or not.

Somers just didn't want his death to come for a few years yet.

He'd done well for himself this enga – not even that, it was a tiny skirmish compared to the colossal slog he was heading for; what, sixty dragons holed up in a fortified position against a force their size? And the survivors heading there to warn them.

They'd killed at least half of that patrol, so – only seventy against them now. Where the odds had been impossible before, they were now merely implausible, which neatly summed up a day in the life of 305th brigade.

And he knew the place they were going to; his mother's father's ranch, built in the days before the worst of the war when dragon bred with dragoness in the brothels and fathers did not know their sons, when daughters grew up motherless and had to fend for themselves, and the Bigwings of a clutch became more than an heir to the family wealth, and less at the same time, for during a brief period families dissolved.

The old order was upended, so badly that when the Dragonets of Destiny wrote down their experiences they described the Mudwings as tribal practitioners of free love – why, older dragons snorted when they heard of it. But the young ones took it in and they spoke of it and believed it as true.

During his thinking he'd kept his eye out on the country, looking for enemy reinforcements and fortunately seeing none. It was jarring to look on the raised fields of his boyhood empty of livestock, the ancestral tree felled to a stump, the stream on the side of the property stinking of entrails and blood and dead dragons and other foul materials.

Ahead of him the dwelling stood magnificently against the swamps in the background and the raised ground before it, its courtyard walled with six feet of granite – luxury, and the house made of mud brick but kept up by solid rock supports and protected from rain by wooden rafters and slate roofing – beautiful.

And then there were the ugly wasps in it – Hivewings, he knew, but he didn't want to honor dragon-shaped pond scum by suffixing the 'wing' – it was just wasps or hivies or Joe Stinger, if he was feeling particularly formal.

Twenty or thirty of them rose into the air and kited towards him, alerted, ready to fight.

"Call!?" yelled the sergeant.

Again the NCO received an inaudible response from the lieutenant at the fore, and then relayed his response to the privates in the van. "Spearhead!"

They were going through!

305th tightened their breadth and depth, flying wing-to-wing as they flew up the mild slope, still hugging the ground after all. Somers caught a distortion in the air ahead of him, a trick of the heat perhaps, yet moving perpendicularly to the rising, wavy columns punching through the torrid atmosphere.

But he lost it – darts whizzed and ricocheted from friendly backs and went careening off into the dirt, one volley, two, no time for a third – and the wasps in front falling back from the ferocity of the attack -

"Breach!"

CRASH

The first of their number caught the stone wall with the nighttime furniture-finding devices known as shins, then tumbled to the ground and rolled, out of commission, though that didn't matter; the tip of the spear plunged into the enemy formation and shoved it to the side.

"Watch left!" someone shouted.

Somers leaped left and drove his brother before him, a pair Mudwings diverging from the expanding whole of roiling brown scales and gore-covered fists, reaching for two of the wasps who stood frightened, their spears broken, their sides scored and welling up blood, a paltry amount compared to the gallons that gushed when the sergeant reached out and raked his mark, covering the peaceable ground in viscera – and that was far from a killing blow.

It was the heat of the moment, pushing him to rip and tear with singular focus, tunnel-vision that he pushed away, electing to stay with Griff as they pushed through the courtyard in the direction of their breach.

"Watch those roofs!" he shouted, galloping under one of the open outbuildings at the corner of the large courtyard, nothing more than a roof with wooden supports and a truss holding it up, shielding them from the venomous rain pouring down from three flights of wasps who'd worked off the surprise and now worked in tandem.

Sarge ducked beneath the rafters of the house and so did most of the unit, busting through walls when the door became too crowded and killing the defenders on the other side. Dying dragons from both sides lay strewn on the courtyard; the one who'd hit the wall had broken his knees and the enemy had focused their fire on him until his scales looked like a pincushion: too far gone.

And Somers and Griff were isolated from the rest, stuck outside with the enemy who hadn't had the foresight to get in the house before el-tee Starling broke down the door.

"When one comes down – fire," he said. And a flight of them did come down next to the house, and he breathed fire at them – too far away to deal any real damage at twenty yards, but enough to startle them and let the two brothers drop past the trapdoor underneath and into the basement.

He knew this place; he expected to face enemies down here, but the wasps down here didn't: footsteps sounded ahead, dragons fumbling in the hallways, and he plunged forwards, trusting his nose to ID friend or foe.

The foul scent of venom and poisons and vile enemy blood met his nose and he slashed, hard talons crashing into tough scales, slowing, then ripping through firm muscle instead of soft belly-flesh; an arm probably.

The wasp roared -

Griff surged in the dark and delivered the coup-de-grace, and the spatter coated their bodies in blood, thick layers of it, drying and sticking like coarse mud beneath noonday sun, and still he pushed on, shoving the newly-killed corpse to the side as he would displace a clawful of dirt.

"More?" he asked, his voice louder than he meant it to be, echoing through the above-water basement.

His brother tapped him twice on the shoulder; yes, following him as he trotted through the passageway with a ducked head: once grand and cavernous to dragonet eyes, the tunnels were cramped for his adult form to fit through.

He wiped his nostrils on the wall, then ran on, flicking his ears every few seconds to shake off the dirt falling from the ceiling after every booming footstep above, war-cry and roar of pain. One door on the right, two on the right – one on the left, which he whirled and entered, following his nose to the up ramp into the house and towards more enemy.

Another dragon burst out of the corridors and cried something in the enemy's foul tongue, too far back for Somers to catch with a talon, yet perfectly situated for Griff to snap its neck. They kept moving – sixty of us against seventy of them, sixty to seventy, sixty-seventy.

Light leaked from the corridor ahead of them, blessed light that stung his eyes but let him make out shadowy forms ahead, four-winged dragons retreating step by step into the basement, where they might hold out for days – indeed, that was the place's purpose.

He charged, slashing the hindmost and shoving it up the ramp, shoving all of the enemy towards the opening and causing the one at the fore to fall over like a domino. That was the end of it, for the Mudwing up top put a spear into its neck and the rest followed shortly.

"Privates Somers and Griff reporting," said Somers, before he came up; he'd seen too many dragons stabbed because of battle jitters to let it happen to him.

"Lieutenant Starling," said a voice from above. "I thought you dead."

"You know me, I couldn't sit this one out," said Somers.

"Any more down there?"

"Don't know sir."

"Clear it."

A cheerful voice from behind interrupted the grim military dialogue. "No enemies left in the tunnels, sirs, but lots of acid."

Ah, so that was where the Rainwing got to – sabotaging the wasps from inside, not bad.

"Stay out of there until it alkalizes," said the courier who wasn't a courier – a well-trained operative more like. "And let me up please."

"Oh," said Somers. He and Griff scrambled out of the tunnel and helped the dragoness out of the bind, then let the trapdoor shut with a boom.

She brushed down her scales with a claw – active camo worked better when a Rainwing was clean instead of grimy, then looked around, taking in Somers's battle-brothers crowded into the room over the dead bodies of half a dozen enemy soldiers. Darts whizzed through the paper windows, punching holes in the translucent material; inaccurate blind shots.

Somers stood near the walls, just in case. Another shower peppered the sconces on the far side of the room; both brothers started to wonder if armor would be a good investment.

But it would rust, so that was that.

A rustling noise from outside made him lean closer to the wall, ears swiveling as they listened for talons against stone or knocked over pots. "Someone on the other side," he said. "Can they bust in?"

El-tee shook his head no, then made eye contact with Somers. "We can handle it. Privates, make contact with the other rooms."

"Yes sir, sir," said Somers.

He waited for the next volley of spikes to punch through the windows so he could make a run for it, but instead of the usual whizz-bang of the darts hitting paper and stonework he heard a tearing sound; a black-striped hand reached in from outside and tore the window into shreds, giving the enemy sightlines to the inner sanctum.

Another private stabbed the arm with his spear, but the damage was already done; the expected volley whistled in and smacked the young Mudwing in the chest before Griff dived in and manhandled the injured battle-brother into cover.

The dragons in the room wavered; more windows started to tear and that decided it.

"Down the hallway boys," said Lt. Starling, "they have to get low on ammo sometime."

Somers went first, ducking down the hallway with brother in tow and a hail of spikes following him, though none hit: fifteen dragons occupied the next room, where the only rays of sunlight came from the south side and the enemy hadn't thought to blindfire yet.

"Sitrep," ordered the friendly sergeant, and of course Somers had to explain about the underground and the enemy flights outside pumping volley after volley of spikes into the house, and how el-tee's wing were coming this way – of course, by the time he was done the CO was already there and so were most of his dragons, 40 men crammed into a mid-sized space not much larger than an average storeroom (for this was what it was), with a big open space on the floor where the corpsman laid the stricken soldier.

"Starfruit," said el-tee, "can you hit the enemy shooters?"

There was no chance of getting the living room back while the crossfire lasted, and under cover of their artillery the enemy could easily gain the indoors and the advantage.

"Yes," said the Rainwing. "I need a distraction – or…" her voice trailed off.

Somers raised an eyebrow.

"Open up these boxes," she said, undoing the top of a crate herself.

Somers slid the cover off another, a brown one made of that strange other-material that the enemy used, neither wood nor stone nor clay, but oddly smooth, light, and flammable. The box was full of ammunition; two-inch spikes made of the same brownish stuff as the box, with a serrated iron tip to give the dart weight and piercing power.

"You can shoot those?" asked Squirrel.

Oh Squirrel. Always that Squirrel.

"Yes," said Starfruit.

She pressed two tubular pieces of the foreign weapon together at their ends and they joined with a click, yielding a straight rod as long as Griff was tall and half again in length, with a flare at one end for the wielder and two grips spaced two or three feet down the shaft.

"Can I touch these?" asked a private, looking in the ammo box.

"If you don't pick your nose afterward," said Starfruit.

She picked out seven or eight rounds; the private wrinkled his snout as if it was poisoned already.

"Thanks for the cover," said el-tee. "We can't let them pull the same thing here."

"Mhmm."

Griff leaned to Somers and whispered, "I think we're stuck."

"Eyes peeled and ears peeled," said Somers. "They'll run out of ammo sometime."

More worrying was the possibility that the enemy could keep them pinned until reinforcements arrived, in which case 305th would be screwed; sixty dragons against a hundred or two hundred is a grossly unfair fight, even if the defenders are competent and their enemies aren't.

Presently the rustling of a dragging tail drifted in from outside; Somers yawned, tongue lolling in the awful heat, which wasn't getting any better simply because they were inside. This nice southern view was going to be the death of him someday.

Griff gave voice to his thoughts. "Pity the mudbath's in the other room."

"Crawling with scum I bet," said Somers.

A minute or two minutes later an enemy nose peeked in from the room down the hall: some private threw a board down the corridor with such good aim that it smashed the enemy on the nose and it withdrew with a yelp.

"Good aim," said el-tee. "Robin, take ten and find out what the rest of us are up to."

"Yes sir, sir," said one of the sergeants; he trotted out an adjacent door to the rest of the house, and Somers slipped out with him, willing to root out more wasp scum if the opportunity presented itself.

"Contact! Ahead right," said the sergeant.

A voice echoed down the hall from in front of the little group. "Relax, it's friendlies."

Good news, then; the house was only one level, two if he counted the basement. If they had the rooms cleared they were safe for now.

"Sitrep?"

"We're two less, sir. Got five or six enemies behind this door we can't handle; we don't want to knock down the walls or come in one by one."

They were worried about the building's structural integrity. Somers looked at the gritty rooms, figuring, remembering how the east walls had blown down once and dad had had to help with repairs. "This place can handle a few more blows," he said.

"Ok," said the voice from ahead, "c'mon guys let's punch it. On mark."

Dragons shuffled into position ahead of them; Somers took up a spot near the north-facing wall on this corner of the house, where a wasp might sneak in: his brother took the south, guarding the flanks.

"Mark!"

A great crash sounded and a boom and then the rattle of falling dirt and pots crashing all over the place, and roars and squeals and more roaring, this time high-pitched in pain instead of satisfaction, and after all that a victory whoop from ahead.

"That's right, run! Get outta here!"

Then the Mudwings behind cackled and entered the room their brethren had just cleared. Somers cracked the top of another crate and saw enemy ration bars, wrapped in rough linen or even leaves and smelling like brown locust juice.

"Found another of their crates, moonsdammit," said Griff. "Moons, their stuff isn't worth a good moons-damn."

And Somers laughed, and then seriously spoke up and said, "It's food."

"Barely," said Griff, his tone more like Squirrel's than anything else.

Then the Rainwing appeared, stepping up the corridor with the blowgun slung on her side by a newly attached strap, lugging a heavy ammunition pouch as well, which judging by her frowning facial expression she didn't want to do. It interfered with her camouflage, because of being a sensible dark brown half the pack was tinted orange.

Darts showered through one of the windows and shattered or spiked the walls on the far side; Somers ducked low, almost to his knees, shrinking his profile so he was less likely to get nailed by a shot. "How much ammo do they have?" he asked.

Robin grunted. "Just wait."

The Rainwing came up to the window, paused when a spike whistled through and whacked the dirt, then raised her weapon and took a shot of her own with a noise kind of like foo, the sort that came whenever he whistled down a long pipe.

But another volley of darts came through and she decided it would be a better idea to get away from the windows. "Is there a door to the outside I can use?" she asked.

"In the next room," said Somers.

They all looked at him.

"You been here before?" asked the sergeant.

"Yes sir."

"Then get out there and give us a good firing position!"

Somers nodded. "Yes sir, sir."

He scuttled towards yet another doorway, passed it and got directly into a wide open space that smelled of blood and old manure and decomposing guts and all sorts of nasty things. Actually, he enjoyed it, but that was just him; the Rainwing frowned when she stepped in after him, followed by Griff.

But there was a firing position, at any rate; the muddy interior floor gave way to muddier outside ground to the north; there was no wall on that side, as it was an open butcher shop under a roof, held up by half-rotted wooden support beams. She camouflaged and crept up there with the weapon at her side, then uncamoed to reveal part of her face.

"More ammo," she said.

Somers was a Mudwing, but not stupid. He turned around and said, "Griff, more ammo."

"Fuck."

Which sent Griff scuttling down the corridor to find some puke dumb enough to run his errand, his steps tuned to the foo of the Rainwing's successive shots from camouflage – camouflage towards the east side. She was doing that odd blending thing where she turned invisible to one direction only, and looking at her gave Somers a headache.

Which is something that had never happened while looking at women before. Somers moved to the west side of the room, concealed from the firing squad to his east by the wall, but in position to kill any wasp sneaking up on the Rainwing from the west, should that become necessary.

Footsteps sounded behind him and he whirled with his claws out, then recognized the tall, sinewy form of his brother with two more pouches slung over his shoulders.

"I got it," he said.

"Toss," said Starfruit (which his brother did). Somers and Griff ribbed each other for a second and then he rubbed his eyes and when he looked again the Rainwing had vanished, save for a now oddly-stone colored form scrambling over the wall, and the tip of the blowgun sticking up over the embankment after it had done so.

"Lone wolves," said Somers, speaking loudly to overcome the outside noise of buzzing wings. "They never come to any good."

But most of the lone wolves he'd known during the Great War had been Mudwings, not skinny lanky chameleon dragons with magical deathspit and impossible battlefield eloquence. Without further orders, the two held their positions, guarding the flanks against possible incursion, joined shortly by three or four sibs from Robin's group.

"Where'd the Rainwing go?" a private asked.

"Beats me," said Somers.

He ripped open his pouch and started chewing a piece of old, moldy jerky which would likely send his digestive system into fits, if he hadn't already emptied his bowels two days after the start of the war. Now there was nothing left to flush.

The battle had settled into a sort of lull, with the enemy stuck outside and 305th trapped inside by the showers of darts, which grew sparser and rarer as time went on; obviously someone had decided to conserve their ammunition.

"Think they's flanking?" asked Griff.

One of the privates stuck his nose out into the open-air butcher-shop, and got an ill-aimed dart for his troubles: it whizzed through the air, past the house and hit the stone-masonry with a crack.

"Nope, still there," he said. He looked out again. "It's not all incoming mail."

"I hope that Rainwing can shoot," said Somers.

The buzzing outside shifted to a higher tempo, then became erratic; harsh enemy shouts split the air, and more spikes whizzed and cracked or just plain whizzed, flying past the wall and arcing towards the raised grass-land beyond.

"Bet she can," said Griff.

"Bet she can't," said a private.

The argument wasn't worth Somers's time.

He poked his head out and saw chaos; of the twenty enemy dragons forty or fifty yards away, none paid attention to his position; they were all occupied with shooting at an apparently empty piece of wall, or hauling stricken comrades towards the external well.

Which made him panic about their drinking supply until he remembered there was a rainwater cistern in the basement.

Griff took a look too, and his lips curled up. "You've got mail," he said.

They all laughed, but Somers shouted back, "Sergeant, they're occupied!"

Rob tore open a window and looked outside.

"Group up!" he yelled, and would've said more if the ceiling hadn't come down with a crash and ten or twelve or more wasps landed on his head and disappeared him from view in a shower of dust.

Shit.

"Behind, behind!" yelled Somers; he turned and galloped for the commotion, the others following him with a second of lag.

No time to be tardy: he surged through the gap and into the dust storm, trusting his nose and his eyes and his claws, striking every enemy he encountered, killing one and maiming most. A shout rang out from inside the room: "Corpsman!"

"He's fucking dead!"

Another wasp appeared in front of him, limping on three legs because of a gaping chest wound; Somers bit down on its neck, missed his grip because of the slippery iron blood and latched onto an arm instead – it squealed.

He roared and punched a fist into its guts and it squealed no more. Slowly the dust settled; the fighting here was mostly over, save for that in the corner, where the 2iC fought a big wasp his size, trading blow for blow.

It was a sporting fight -

But 305th were experienced and sank a spear into the enemy's back because they didn't give the enemy even a sporting chance.

"Clear out this rubble," ordered Robin's second. More shouting and roaring reached his ears. "Ten of you, get down that corridor!"

So about an infantry squad's worth of dragons headed for el-tee's last position, while behind them dragons took up guard near the walls or looked nervously at the gaping hole in the roof, one more break to add to the smashed walls and torn windows and shattered tables.

El-tee's room was one big mess; dust flying in clouds thick to where visibility was less than three feet and that meant he could look down and not see his arms hitting the ground as he galloped, or the wall until it was right in front of his nose.

But they made it there okay and Somers caught a glancing hit on the nose from moons-knew-what and cut from who-knows-where and by the time the dust settled he hadn't done anything particularly useful.

Moral support. He already had enough blood on his talons.

"El-tee, you alright?" asked a dragon, and coughed; the grime was still thick in the air.

The lieutenant grunted. "Fine. Cas – casualty report."

Somers counted heads: if there had been thirty dragons in the room before, there were twenty standing now. He checked the bodies lying on the floor, if they were Mudwing.

Wasps got a talon to the brain, which was advanced triage, really; it made sure they were dead.

Then the second lieutenant made his rounds and got word back to Starling. "We're three less; eight more wounded but fine."

Somers spoke up.

"Rob needs a corpsman."

"Okay," said Starling; he named the medical officer and soon a dragon headed off to the other part of the building with supplies in tow. "What's it look like outside?"

"The Rainwing had them off balance on the east side, sir, I don't know how it is now."

"We've killed most of them," said el-tee, "if her report is correct."

Somers nodded. No intelligence is 100% reliable, or even to be taken as credulous, but Starfruit's information had proved more trustworthy than most.

"Sergeant, take your command and head out to reinforce the Rainwing."

"Aye sir," said Somers's sergeant.

Then about fifteen dragons busted out the side-door to the courtyard, fire cooking in their maws. The south part was empty, but Somers still heard the buzzing of enemy wings.

"Corner left, jump the roof!" yelled the sergeant;

They flew up with a loud huzzah, twin wingbeats bringing them over the low-built structure and the hole in the roof and his teammates' startled heads, above the wasps crouching by the walls and down on the wellhouse with a crash, the sergeant smashing the winch to smithereens with his bulk and an enemy dragon and two legs and one arm.

And Somers lashed, a weighty dragon fighting as if his limbs weighed nothing, raking the side of a wasp who'd turned halfway towards him, and whose face hadn't made the transition from concentration to fear.

It ended in pain; Somers struck first and his brother ended it, and he looked for targets on the left while Griff scanned right. A tail brushed against his leg and Somers followed his brother to another brawl of Mudwing against wasp, with the Mudwing gutted with the wasp's stinger and then an oddly surprised look on the enemy's face when the brothers bashed in his ribcage, then skull, then everything else.

Somers eyed the injury in his compatriot, a deep, messy hole near the heart, oozing nasty purple-tinged blood, stinking with rot every time the dragoness wheezed for breath -

"Sucking wound," he said, "cover me."

While Griff stood by he rolled the casualty on her side, wiped his talon on his flanks and then used it to pull away bits of grit and manure and mushy, rotting tissue. This was not Sandwing venom; if it was, he would be working over a corpse, but the life of the soldier still hung in the balance. Chest cuts are bad, poisoned ones are worse.

"Speak to me," he ordered. This wasn't bedside manner, it was occupying his patients so they'd worry about him and not their mortal injuries.

She spat blood. A lung puncture. Bad.

And the most complex thing in his bag was a tourniquet, unsuited to treating a bloody wash like this.

"Short breaths," he said. "Think about Squirrel."

The dragoness's tail thumped the cobblestones and he knew he'd hit his mark. It dawned on him that the fighting noises had ended; a look out the corner of his eye revealed dragons running around without exchanging blows, and more enemy corpses lying around than friendly ones. And a pale-looking Starfruit picking two darts out of her flanks.

Sometimes not even Rainwing operatives could avoid getting hurt.

A dragon bumped him on the shoulder. "How is she?"

"Venomous lung puncture," said Somers.

The corspman whistled. "Get water, quick."

He turned to his brother.

"Griff, get water, quick."

"No you."

He cursed, got up and strode to the well – which was broken, conveniently, so it took a minute to unsnarl the winch with another two dragons helping and then another minute to let down and pull up the weighted bucket talon-over-talon, and more time to get a dipper and bring it to the corpsman by hand -

But by then the medic had poured water from his canteen and didn't need his help, too busy applying salve to say anything other than "That was fast," to Somers while he worked.

Which was an insult to everyone involved. The two brothers retired to the corner of the courtyard, keeping watch while the corspmen triaged everybody and gave them water, and flight-sized expeditions ferreted the rest of the complex, poking around for the enemy in a shed in the south-west corner of the courtyard, about fifty yards right from where they first came in.

"We'll bury a good warrior this evening," said Squirrel in his nasally voice. He sidled over while Somers had an eye on the sky. "Too bad he broke his knees."

"Bad way to go," said Somers. "But we have to move on."

Squirrel raised a talon, then lowered it again. He knew what joke the wing sourkraut was going to make, and he was glad the guy hadn't made it.

"At least we have supplies," said Griff. "I want sleep after my watch."

"Wouldn't be a night in the delta without Joe Stinger attacking and stealing my shut-eye," said Squirrel.

"Oh, your precious sleep, can't function without twelve hours a day -" said Griff.

"Please, you nap more than she does," said Squirrel, nodding at the Rainwing.

But where normally the two soldiers would've literally butted heads, they now fell into a sort of quiet, a moratorium on noise that extended to the rest of the brigade as well, accustomed to being rowdy, now goose-stepping like mice. Somers looked to his battle-brothers' corpses lying on the dirt and stone, and the hole in the once-pretty roof of his grandfather's house, and for a moment he wondered, is it worth it?

No – and yes. It was the enemy's fault for invading here, and forcing his talons to kill and kill and slice until he was dead or there were no foes left to slay.

Sergeant Rob wandered over, outside of his direct chain of command with the three soldiers standing in the corner. Perhaps that was why he was here.

"Hey," he said.

"You look like shit," said Squirrel.

And it was true. Another inch of Rob's horns had cracked, his ears drooped with dust, and bits of straw caught in his wings and a shingle had caught in his scales somehow; he looked every foot like the war-torn soldiers in his command. Rob laughed.

"Guess so," he said. "You too."

"Not great," said Griff. "Presentable."

And Somers could only wearily chuckle, before his sergeant dropped by. "Help gather the enemy bodies," said sarge, "we're burning them tonight."

Enlisted and slightly-superior enlisted stood up straight, stretched their wings in spasms, then moseyed to the battlefield, looking for corpses – and they weren't hard to find or smell, with black stripes layered on orange undercoats, covering well-defined muscles and perhaps half an inch of fat.

"Good condition," said Squirrel. "Think they'd taste better than the one we ate last week?"

"Fuck you," said Griff.

Because they had eaten an enemy combatant nine or ten days ago, and it ended up tasting terrible. Desperate times, desperate measures.

"Better than Skywing."

Somers grabbed the shoulder of one of the dead; unexpectedly, the dead dragon grabbed his – and then let go when two punches, and one tail swipe hit it in quick succession, sending it spinning away on the ground with a clatter of its dropped spear.

He brushed himself off. "Close. Thanks guys."

Griff snorted. "Didn't know you know that word."

"It's in my vocabulary."

"Smartasses," said Squirrel. "C'mon, let's make sure it's really dead."

"Dibs on the spear," said Griff.

He picked it up, strode two paces towards the corpse, and stabbed it with a squelch. It was another lesson in military life's tough curriculum – always make sure the bodies are actually dead.

Rob picked up the body, and the three privates went off in search of more soon-to-be-dead people, although there were a few dragons who were obviously fucked – corpses with their heads ripped off, for example, or gaping wounds in their chests with ribs poking out the sides. Somers spat on the bodies. Squirrel did something far worse.

"Man," said Griff. "Just no."

To Squirrel, it didn't matter that he was defiling an enemy corpse; they hadn't mattered to him in the first place. These dragons didn't deserve life after what they'd done, after Abalone, Sunfield, Alsine… the palace.

Somers stomped on the chest of one of the dead.

"Whoa buddy, the guy's double-checked, no need for a triple-check," said Squirrel.

"Says the guy who was doing THAT on somebody's corpse."

And that was that. Eventually the bodies were all gathered into a pile, and the surrounding Mudwings brought bits of wood and charcoal from the hearth that kept the house warm at wet season nights, and el-tee arrived to give the dead last rights, if any.

Starling gazed at the Mudwing dead, then to those still living, gathered in a circle around the pile of deceased wasps in the heap, twisted and broken and mockeries of themselves, monsters of blood-drenched limbs and torn open heads with oozing brains exposed.

These monstrosities were nothing compared to the monstrosities the dead had been in their former lives. El-tee spit on the pile. "We've got 'em all together, you know what to do. Burn them."

Fire bloomed from Mudwing maws, found the kindling and caught with the uncanny aptitude that dragonfire had, as if it were a more mundane sort of magic, hungering and gorging and feeding on feedstock till it ate too much and starved itself in the midst of cleansing flame.

And as the smoke climbed into the heavens, Somers thought of the comrades who'd fallen by his side, who'd fought through hundreds of skirmishes and dozens of battles, and survived to see the peace they'd always dreamed of – only to be murdered by the brutes burning in front of him.

So fuck 'em all.


Afterword.

Skywings believe that one's soul can reach the afterlife when the body is wrapped in the trappings of war, then burned, so that the heart is liberated from its mortal vessel and departs to the sky and the stars. It is an old tradition, embedded into the core of the tribe itself.

It's also rubbish.

Every Mudwing knows that release comes only when the body is buried, for dragons come from the earth and to the earth they shall return. Seventeen soldiers fell that day, of those, five did not get back up, and out of the remaining twelve, one was not likely to survive the night. Somers was busy in the house when the corpsman came out of the hastily-curtained operating room, his face grim even as he stumbled on tired talons, grime, and blood – moons, the blood. Was there anything in this place that was free from its iron taint?

"How is she?" asked Rob.

The corpsman shook his head. "Choked on her own foam."

"Another gravestone," said the sergeant. He looked around the sullen, moody room, lit only by starlight and the solitary candle glimmering on a table in the center. "One of you boys get a good rock."

"Of course sir," said one. He got up and strode into the hallway, tail dragging behind him.

"Mm not done carving this one yet," said Somers. "It'll take a while."

Keen eyes looked at him from all corners of the room, turned to baleful orbs by the darkness mixing with the candlelight. Then they nodded in succession. These things should not be hurried. Somers could take his time.

Wind blew in from the east and the torn paper breathed, rustling as if disturbed by an invisible talon, a claw that darted from here to there, flickering the candle and brushing his ears with the cool nocturne breeze. His mind fell towards slumber, then rebounded when he remembered his terrible purpose.

The stone.

A knife etched it, a talon-tip felt it, a clinking blow with chisel and hammer deepened the groove. He scooted closer to the light, then resumed his work, working away layers of rock until the crease was an inch deep, deep enough to stand the test of time for hundreds, no, thousands of years. His grandson's grandson's grandson might come to this place and read the dragon's name, birth, death, and words from his comrades.

A good friend.

He moved on, to the next stone, the second-to-last counting the latest death. This dragon was in his wing, and he'd known him well. Birth, July 26th, 4,996, death – the same day, 5,015. What a world, when a dragon of 19 years was old, and a seven-year old was no longer too young.

"Somers," said Rob. "Somers."

"Huh?"

"We found another headstone. It's been waiting for you."

He looked up. "Oh. I didn't notice."

"Well, it's there alright."

The soldier sighed as he picked it up. "Name…"

And so it went. The dragoness would be buried in the field, like everyone else; indeed, she had already been sealed fifteen feet under, where no animal could reach, and the nip of cold would never come. Now a shallow trench and overturned earth marked where she lay.

At last Somers was done. His watch was not till morning, his time today had ended. Till tomorrow then.

He leaned forward, then blew out the light.