Chapter 7.

The cold winter crosswind blew heavily against his wings, but Lohengrin used it to help gain as much altitude as possible. He nostalgically remembered all those flying lessons Elder Zorhen gave him many years ago, and now they became extremely useful. When one has to fly above dangerous areas, altitude can mean the difference between life and death. The higher he is, the more speed he can gain to dodge risky situations, thus the more chance he has to survive. Not to mention, when one's only a barely visible tiny black dot in the sky, it's quite a hard target to hit.

He headed southwest, deep into the continent. He decided to fly in the most energy-conserving way he could, so when he reached his travelling height, he barely moved his wings, just glided with the wind's support and occasionally altered his course with his tailfins. Still, he knew how great a danger he is in. Because he couldn't keep himself around rivers all the time, finding something to eat was an issue. Every hour he spent on hunting meant less flying time before his next stop. Finding a relatively safe sleeping spot was also an issue, the vast plains in front of him offered little to no shelter.

But even when he was relatively well rested and fed, he still had to avoid the bigger human population centres, which was probably the toughest thing of all.

Back during his training years, he learned that humans are quite numerous, and they have a tendency to gather and live in huge, self-made settlements. According to Elder Zorhen, the sizes of these settlements varied between a few dozen to hundreds of thousands or even more souls. Lohengrin couldn't even imagine the dragon analogue of a place like that, where thousands of his own kind would live together. But now as he saw these with his own eyes, he was both mesmerized and confused. How can the humans even feed such a mass of population? What do they eat in the first place? He seriously doubted they would eat dragons; the needed effort to catch one is not in line with the reward. Do they have herbivorous tendencies, then? That would offer a solution to the feeding issues, but who had ever heard about herbivores with such a level aggression and weaponry that would put some predators to shame? That doesn't make sense.

Even the landscape was weird. So far, Lohengrin lived his whole life in a place which was grown and shaped by nature entirely. The biggest outside influence was weather. Since he began to move the clan, he heard reports about his scouts sighting strange or unexplainable things, but seeing them closely was a whole other thing.

The humans seemed to dig, build, destroy and rearrange everything they encountered. The first strange things Lohengrin noticed were gray lines on the ground. During one night, he landed on one of those gray lines, in an effort to try figuring out its purpose. He used his own wingspan to measure how wide it was, and he was just able to touch both edges of this hardened gray path. So it was relatively wide, although later he saw even wider artificial paths. Why would the humans need all these? They don't even feel good to walk on! And why do they need so many?

Seeing the human-made paths was only the beginning, the landscape was full of indescribable, unnatural objects, and he had no clue what are they for. He saw series of pillars in varying size and shape, only connected by something long, thin and black. The artificial paths continued above rivers and under mountains, forming something that reminded Lohen of a spider's web from high above. The gray lines connected certain spots, and they met each other at other spots, seemingly without too many obvious reasons. Sometimes he saw a few of those rectangular-shaped weird contraptions the humans used to travel with, but those were much smaller and less dangerous than the ones that attacked Toemnir valley. Lohengrin even found one deserted in a ditch right beside the gray path. He touched down, and examined it closely, sniffing and poking it from different directions. But he couldn't figure out much, what made the thing move forward for example, was way beyond him. The contraption looked interesting, with its boxy appearance, and it even had coverable holes to enter, and when the entrances were open, the covers stuck out of the body like a dragon's open wing. He carefully peeked inside, and became a bit braver after he made sure that the thing was completely empty. There were a few strange shaped objects inside of the contraption, some of them were soft and easy to tear, others were harder but definitely not rock or even wood levels of solidity. There were a multitude of scents inside, foreign scents of unknown materials, fading traces of humans, and a stronger, sweeter scent which came from a tiny, hanging thing which had the shape of a stylized pine tree. Lohengrin decided to examine the smelly thing better, so while he raised his head, he stepped on the middle of the round thing next to him...

When suddenly the contraption made a whiny sound.

It was so surprising; his alarmed reflexes dragged him out quickly, smashing his head into the thing's roof and tumbling backwards.

The high-pitched noise died away almost immediately. Lohengrin got up on all fours again, and let out a surprised huff as he rubbed his aching head with a foreleg. Then he approached the interior of the contraption again, and carefully placed a forepaw to the middle of the round thing inside. Nothing. Then he gently applied some pressure: the sound flared up again.

"Unbelievable." Lohengrin mumbled with narrowed eyes, and stepped off the round thing to cease the sound "Controllable sound emission from a thing that's not even alive... Maybe it's a mean of communication...?"

Eventually, he decided not to waste any more time, and took off again. Distractions like this seemed unnecessary, but he needed information about what is he's up against. One cannot fight an enemy effectively if one has little to no knowledge about it.

There were also quite a few things which marvelled Lohengrin, like the humans' ability to create light without fire. That was a concept he couldn't wrap his head around. Those vast population centres were all like bright, gigantic anthills in the night, there were pillars emitting light beside the gray paths, even those moving contraptions emitted light, and these all looked like tiny suns. Except that they only worked in the night, and seemingly went to sleep in the daytime.

After a few days, he saw something that was not only inexplicably flabbergasting, but it also disproved each and every theory he previously had about why the humans attacked his kin.

It was late afternoon, when he discovered faint traces of fire and smoke in the air, mixed with the bitter smell which he first sensed during the attack on Toemnir valley every time the crawling contraptions fired. He immediately changed his course towards the source, and after a short while, he spotted thin trails of smoke coming from the ground. He decided to do a wide circle around the area, and only investigate from the cover of the clouds, at least until nightfall.

After the sun settled, he used the darkness to approach the area, and dived into the small forest which was next to the source of the smoke trails. Immediately as he landed, a putrid scent hit his nostrils: the smell of dried blood, death and decaying flesh. Following the scent, he carefully sneaked through the forest, until he arrived to a clearing.

The clearing was full of human bodies.

He quickly counted them; there were at least a hundred corpses lying on the ground. He began to examine the remains, which looked and smelled several days old. They were all humans, but Lohengrin had no ideas how to determine their genders or affiliations. They all wore similarly fashioned green and brown outer skins, which they used to cover their bodies. Another disturbing thing was that their forepaws were all tied together behind their backs, effectively rendering them unable to fight. He tried to figure out what killed them, and he soon discovered that they all had bloody holes in their napes. As if they have been shot from behind...

Realization struck him like a lightning. The humans are killing each other! But this one conclusion immediately spawned dozens of new questions. Why? What does his clan have to do with all of this? Could it be possible that they had been caught in the crossfire between two feuding groups? No, then they wouldn't have kidnapped anyone...

He had to sit down to think this over. This whole thing suddenly seemed to make even less sense than before, but it was definitely useful information. Human society is not united. Which means there is a chance that not all of humanity is hostile towards dragons. There's proof here that those who hate dragons have human enemies. And if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then...

Lohengrin shook his head. The idea of friendly humans seemed like a long shot, but after this massacre here he couldn't rule it out entirely anymore. Curious to see if he could figure out a few more things, he headed out from the forest, towards the smoke trails he saw earlier. And now that he saw the remains, he had a pretty good idea of what happened.

The field in front of him was full of destroyed contraptions and the remains of their dead users. After taking a closer look, he could determine that despite the fact that the things looked roughly the same, they had different colours and markings, indicating at least two different group's presence in the battle. This further supported his theory about humans fighting humans. Seeing the disposition of the wrecks, the bodies and the tracks of other vehicles, he could relatively easily figure out what happened in this area a few days ago.

The two groups of humans fought here with their deadly tools. The winners probably caught the fleeing survivors of the other group, gathered them together and wiped them out.

But the reason for all of this proved elusive to Lohengrin, and he decided to let the new knowledge sink in, and continue his flight. The picture is still not entirely clear yet, but he's definitely making progress at figuring out what exactly happened.

And determining what happened, who did and why, is the first step on the long road of getting the missing Night Furies back.

During the weeks of continuous flight westwards, uncertainty and doubt began to wiggle inside Lohengrin more and more. He knew he has to go somewhere generally west from Toemnir valley. But the landscape under him seemed endlessly huge, and Lohengrin started to feel like he's trying to find one certain ant in a forest.

But he never even thought about calling off the search. He suspected that it will be quite hard, and he knew that if he turns back now, he'll never see his daughter again. Every time he reached this thought, his wings started to pump harder as the anger swelled inside him. He used this anger to fuel his aching and fatigued muscles. As a smaller side-objective he decided to check out one of the larger human population centres, to see if he can find any more useful information. As he flew, sometimes he saw flashes of light on the horizon, accompanied by growling thunder which he now knew were the sounds of explosions blunted by the distance, and once he flew across another field filled with the remains of some kind of battle. Occasionally, he saw those human-made flying things again, similar to the one which paralysed his clan at Toemnir valley. The sight made him wonder if there are other dragon clans in danger, but the flying thing was too far a way and too fast for him to intervene.

Heading a bit towards north, he eventually saw the sea. Seeing water stretching for as far the eye can see was another completely new thing for him; so far he only knew the sea from the tales of the Elders. As the seabed curled, creating a gulf, there was a relatively big human hive there, which looked interesting enough to warrant investigation, so Lohengrin searched for a spot in the forests which was not too far to the south of the hive, and landed there. Unfortunately, the best thing he could find for food was a flimsy rabbit, but it was better than nothing. After "dinner" he still had a few hours until sunset, so he decided to find a comfortable-looking tree, and threw his tail around a lower but stronger branch of it to hang upside down, covered himself tightly with his wings and dozed off.

The night was cloudy, and cold wind howled from the see. Lohengrin cautiously sneaked into the hive, always sticking to the shadows, using the uncountable number of angular buildings to remain out of sight. According to his observation, humans loved straight lines and symmetry when they evolved places like this. He saw a few humans walking along the gray paths, but they all carried lights and those shooting sticks. Judging from the second hides and the tools they wore, Lohengrin assumed that they belong to the same group which attacked Toemnir valley. Once, he saw a patrol of two humans and a four-legged creature which looked like a tame wolf; he immediately retreaded and did a huge circle around them to avoid the wolf catching his scent and alerting anyone to his presence. The lack of unarmed people bugged Lohengrin inside; this hive seemed far too huge for the few humans he saw. Maybe most of them are hiding inside their self-made caves? It is possible; the whole area of the hive positively reeked of restlessness and fear.

Around the middle of the hive, he found a man-made island. That alone was impressive, but the activity on the island amazed him more. He assumed that humans cannot or have limited ability to see in the dark, so the whole area was lighted pretty well. He saw giant, floating contraptions, and an army of men working around them. He discovered a long metal log, which stuck its head into the open belly of the floating thing, and lifted up one of those crawling metal shooting-things he knew quite well now. It put thing down the thing to the ground, humans crawled inside of it and took it away while the metal log restarted the whole procedure.

The sight of a well-organized work of that magnitude would have marvelled Lohengrin, should the circumstances have been different. Instead of that, he'd found human ingenuity frightening. If they can invent and craft such huge and complicated tools for a simple task of taking things from one place to another, what can they come up with when they really want to kill someone?

He decided that he'd had enough. Looking for a way outside of the dangerous area, he decided to creep into the water, and swim out. As a dragon, he didn't have any problems with holding his breath back for a longer time, and his wings and tailfins took him forward at a great speed. He went as deep as he could, only occasionally coming to the surface to see which direction to go. Getting out of the city was relatively easy that way, but the water was disgustingly dirty, filled with oily and smelly things that really shouldn't have been there. But as he went further and further outside of the human hive, the water became gradually clearer, much to his relief. After he deemed that he's far enough from the humans, he kicked himself into the air, and began to fly again. For the next hour or so, he flew above the see to get even farther from unwanted company before turning towards the land again.

The lack of success dissatisfied him. What he saw in the human hive was interesting, but it didn't bring him any closer towards finding Nyssie. At least he found out that humans are even more divided than he thought, if they have to contain the unarmed ones with armed ones. For a more accurate source of information, he would need someone to talk with. He doubted that humans would be able to understand him; he concluded that he needs to find dragons somewhere.

For days of flight, Lohengrin couldn't spot any dragon, only more humans. But these humans were different than the ones he saw previously. They were mostly unarmed, the hides they wore were a lot more colourful, and they all seemed to be in disarray. Lohengrin saw many of them sitting in their contraptions, shouting and whining with each other as they couldn't move on the gray path because it was already full. Others were running, certain ones beat or shot other ones... the whole situation was a mess. Sometimes he could barely avoid the violence, and it really made it a lot harder to find dragons in the area.

Then, one day, luck finally smiled at him.

He was in a forest when he heard distant whiffs of talk. His ears perked as he rushed towards the direction the voices came from. But as he saw that he's close to a clearing, he slowed down, and approached silently, for the sake of safety. He sneaked in parallel with the clearing, until the wind was from the exact opposite direction. Then, he slowly approached the clearing, and soon, the voices were loud enough to understand. Now that he listened to it, he could make out several draconic voices, but they were too varied in tone to belong to one specific kind of dragons. Not that he had extensive knowledge about other dragon kinds; he only saw a few carved silhouettes in the Cave of Enlightenment many years ago.

Hoping for the best, he swallowed, took a deep breath, and walked forward, out of the bushes.

"Greetings."

The crowd of various dragons in front of him ceased their chatter immediately, and turned towards him. He saw two-headed Zipplebacks, sturdy Gronckles, spiky-tailed Deadly Nadders, Changewings, Monstrous Nightmares and Terrible Terrors to name a few. A Nightmare spoke up:

"Oh look, we have a new friend here! Where are you from?"

The lack of suspicion or caution surprised Lohengrin.

"From far away." he answered "I have to ask, what kind of clan is this?"

Now the other dragons looked surprised, even uncomprehending. As much as Lohengrin could tell, they all looked relatively young.

"What are you talking about?"

"You all live here together?" Lohengrin asked again.

"No, of course not." a Nadder explained "Our humans put us here to hide, we don't know why. We all used to live in the city."

Lohengrin blinked as parts of the previous sentences echoed inside his head. 'Our humans?' 'Hide?' 'In the city?'

"What's a city and why would anyone choose to live with humans?"

Now all the dragons looked at Lohengrin as if they doubted his mental health. In exchanges, Lohengrin also doubted theirs, so he wasn't offended.

"A city is a place where a bunch of humans live together." the previous Nadder said.

"Why would anyone not choose to live with humans?" a Gronckle asked from Lohengrin, giving him a clueless expression.

"Guys!" the Nadder looked around "I think he's one of them wild ones."

The dragons all let out a suddenly understanding coo.

Now Lohengrin was getting angry.

"Keep insulting me and I'll show you how wild am I!" he growled.

"Hey, hey, we didn't mean to offend you!" a Nightmare tried to calm him "Maybe one of your kind could explain this to you more, could it?"

Seeing the other dragons nodding, she continued:

"Then maybe Aurek could help you out."

"Great idea!"

"Yeah!"

They all began to call out, and in a short while, a young Night Fury came rushing from the forest.

"Hey guys, what's up... oh WOW!"

The young, golden-eyed Night Fury's face turned from curious to joyous as he noticed Lohengrin. He gleefully rushed over him, bumped his head into the older dragon's shoulder and bounced around happily.

"You're like me, this is so awesome!"

Lohengrin dropped his jaw in shock, he was unable to say a thing. Noticing his helpless expression, one of the Gronckles chuckled and spoke up:

"Calm down Aurie, you're shocking our guest." then he looked at Lohengrin "His name is Aurek. Aurek, let me introduce our friend who lives in the wilderness, his name is... ehm..."

"Lohengrin." Lohen mumbled.

"What a cool name!" Aurek exclaimed.

Lohengrin took an examining look at the youngling. Aurek looked only a couple years older than Lenhardt, but compared to his son, he was incomparably immature and hatchling-ish. Lohengrin strongly suspected that he had never seen a fellow Night Fury before. Nevertheless, he decided to play along.

"Hi, Aurek, nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too!" came the excited response. The rest of the dragons chuckled at the young Fury's jumpiness, and the Gronckle came up with a proposition:

"Why don't you two take a walk and tell about eachother?"

"Great idea!" Aurek exclaimed "C'mon, I know a brook nearby, let me show it to you!"

"Lead the way." Lohengrin sighed, and followed the youngling, who continued to bounce around him, blabbering continuously.

"You're the first Night Fury I've ever seen, and you look so strong and cool! Are you going to live with us? Where are you from? You surely flew a lot! Do you know other dragons who are like us? I lived in the city since I was born! The others are nice but it's so great to meet you! I bet you're full of interesting stories about your travels, and..."

And it went on without a pause. During the long minutes of their walk, Lohengrin tried to figure out a way to ask about the things he wanted to know, without ruining the youngling's mood.

"Look... Aurek."

"Call me Aurie like everyone else!" the youngling smiled.

"Okay. Umm... I'm just passing through here, and I accidentally bumped into you and your friends. I'm seeing a lot of things I don't understand, and I'm hoping you could help me out."

"Sure thing, fire away!" Aurek nodded eagerly.

"Thanks." Lohengrin smiled at him "So, how did you guys got together in the first place?"

"We all used to live in the city with our humans."

Lohengrin narrowed his eyes.

"What do you mean by 'our humans'?"

"Y'know, it's common for them to accept us into their homes and live like a family. Sometimes they accept dogs and cats, but they love us dragons, too. They give us shelter, feed us and really treat us like family... you okay?"

As he heard all this, a variety of feelings swirled inside Lohengrin. He couldn't decide if this was bizarre, wrong, or harmless; arguments and counter-arguments battled inside his head and his puzzled state draw a weird expression on his face.

"Yeah... sure, I'm fine." he murmured "What is a city?"

"It's how humans call those places they live in large numbers. It's filled with houses, roads, cars-"

At this point, Lohengrin knew that this exchange isn't going anywhere. There were too many unknowns, and as the youngling answered one question, the explanation drew up two more. So Lohengrin decided to try mining out the knowledge from Aurek in a different way.

He stared deeply into the youngling's eyes and reached out with his mind, gently, not to startle him. As the youngling blabbered on, Lohengrin's mind established a connection with his, and began to scan through his memories. Thousands of images, impressions, definitions, feelings and scents flooded Lohengrin and he struggled to keep up his concentration and not to disturb Aurek.

Gaining information like this was a serious violation to privacy, and under any other circumstances, Lohengrin wouldn't even consider doing it. But desperate times need desperate measures, even if they are frowned upon for being unethical in the very least.

He also saw the boy's whole life: Aurek had no memories about his parents, after he hatched he was in an institution the humans had for housing orphaned dragons. There were a number of caretakers around, feeding him, keeping him clean and generally showed care towards him. At one day, a male and a female human came by with two of their younglings, and after a short while, they took Aurek home and named him. Their home was a spacious building at the outskirts of the city, with a huge fenced field behind it. Aurek spent most of his life there, raised by humans.

It really surprised Lohengrin that the youngling hadn't exaggerated when he called the humans his family: there really was a connection between them, one which Lohengrin thought as impossible before. The humans shared most of their lives with a dragon, relevant and irrelevant aspects alike. Lohengrin had mixed feelings towards Aurek now: part of him pitied him for having no idea what it means to be a Night Fury, having no idea how to hunt, fly properly, or behave like a dragon. But he still was happy this way, his adoptive family gave him everything he needed, and he never missed what he never experienced.

He carefully retreated from Aurek's mind, and asked another question. He had to force himself to remain calm despite the intense headache he had from mind-connection. Luckily, the youngling had no idea what happened.

Their chat went on but Lohengrin barely listened to what Aurek said, as his mind was still busy comprehending what he experienced earlier.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea." Lohengrin growled tensely.

"Oh calm down, I told you they're cool!" Aurek said to him.

Lohengrin rolled his eyes. The berating attitude of a Night Fury half of his size and quarter of his age was hard to endure, and the thought of approaching humans didn't help him to stay calm either.

He spent the night with the group of dragons in the forest. None of them knew why were they asked to hide, but it was their humans' wish to stay somewhere safe, so they naturally complied. Lohengrin suspected that this was a safety measure by the dragon-loving humans to protect them from the dragon-hating humans. While he felt some appreciation towards the effort, he had no idea how to tell these dragons that a large number of their beloved humans are massacring both their own kind and dragons as well.

When he asked the dragons that what they eat if they can't really hunt, they offered him to spend the night with them and see it in the morning. So now Lohengrin was standing beside the excited group while they seemingly awaited something to happen.

"How long do we-"

Lohengrin became silent as a familiar sound reached his ears. Turning his head towards the direction of the growling sound, soon he saw trucks incoming as Aurek called them. It felt strange to relate definitions to things he didn't know by himself. The huge vehicles rolled on six wheels and they stopped at the edge of the forest. Humans jumped off from the plateaus, and began to load off barrels. Suddenly, Lohengrin realized what's going on.

"Are they feeding you?" he asked.

"Yeah! Nice from them, eh?" Aurek grinned at him.

Lohengrin shifted uncomfortably. The thought of humans feeding dragons which are unable to provide for themselves was disturbing and shameful from one side, and unselfishly kind from the other. Similarly disturbing was the fact that certain humans can kill your friends and destroy the place you lived while others may love you and treat you as family.

He was unable to form an exact opinion about humans anymore. Every time he saw them, they were all behaving differently. These dragons all seemed to trust these ones, as they put down their barrels and knocked them over to spill their contents of fish to the ground, the dragons all walked over to them, exchanged a few nuzzles and pats with the humans and started to eat undisturbedly. Meanwhile the humans were laughing and talking to eachother as they watched the dragons. After some time, the humans approached their scaly friends again for another friendly exchange, like a farewell, then got inside the trucks and leaved.

When everyone finished eating and began to filter back into the forest, Aurek walked to Lohengrin again.

"Why didn't you eat?" he asked.

"I'm not hungry." Lohengrin lied. "Listen, Aurie, I'd like to tell you a few things before I leave."

"You have to leave so soon?" Aurek cried out "Why can't you stay with us?"

Lohengrin sighed wearily.

"I have a family to take care of. I have to tell you that you must not trust every human you meet."

"But... why?" he asked confusedly.

"Because every human you meet is different. So far, you only met nice ones because you were lucky. But not all of them are like the ones you know already. The ones I met killed a lot of my friends, kidnapped my daughter and destroyed my home."

Aurek backtracked away from him with jaws dropped until he tripped and fell on his haunches.

"Is this... true? It can't be! They are not the monsters you claim them to be!" he cried out a high-pitched voice.

"I have no reason to lie to you." Lohengrin stated "I was forced to leave my family and everyone I care for behind because of their actions. My clan never crossed the path of any human. But still, one day they attacked the valley we used to live in, murdered one-fourth of my clan, and took away my daughter who's around your age, and just as innocent as you are!"

"Currently there's a war going on between humans, and some of them kill or abducts dragons too. I don't know why. But the life you had previously is over, and you, as well as the rest of your friends have to adapt to the changing world around you.

While he heard this, Aurek was still gasping for air.

"I... you..."

"Listen to me, Aurek." Lohengrin said softly "I know you don't know me, but I would never want anything bad happen to you, or your friends. No warning came for my clan, and I want you to avoid what I went through by saying be extremely careful with any new human you meet. And it would be high time to learn to provide for yourself."

Aurek opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and shook his head. After a few moments with a tone still shaky, he managed to muster up a desperate question:

"O-okay, but how? I don't know anything about hunting!"

"Your instincts are there, Aurek." Lohengrin tried to comfort him "You and the others may not know how to behave like dragons, but when you start relying on your instincts instead of the things you already know, you can and will be successful. Practice, and the reward will come eventually."

"Are you sure you can't stay for a little bit to teach me something?"

The desperation in Aurek's voice made Lohengrin falter. He has to find Laranys as soon as possible. But can he, should he leave this youngling and his friends to their fate? After a long minute of reasoning himself, he found a compromise:

"Alright." he sighed "I'll stay for one day, and teach you how to begin things. Then you have to practice, and after you've had some success, you can teach your friends too. Deal?"

The young Night Fury rushed up to him to rub his nose into his neck.

In the end, Aurek proved to be a talented apprentice, all those years of playing gave him good reflexes. Lohengrin was content with his progress, and he was relatively sure that he'll be able to survive alone after some practice. But the day quickly went away, and he did not dare to stay more. He gathered all of the dragons to describe the situation to them gave a few helpful bits of advice, and then left towards the direction of the setting sun.

The venture into Aurek's mind gave him a somewhat better understanding towards the humans, but it was nothing more than a philosophical detour compared to the mystery of the missing Night Furies. He still had no idea how dragons are connected to this whole war-thing. He was still missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.

He spent days alone in his continuous flight westwards, up until one night, he arrived at a rather wooded region, and found a nice looking lake after crossing a river. He decided to rest his wings a bit at the eastern side of the lake, and stay there for a short sleep. And preferably have a quick snack of fish before it.

The touch of the water was clean pleasant, unlike the seawater at the docks he was at few weeks earlier. After leisurely catching a few fat carp, he was just about to curl up and rest a bit when he heard the exact thing he hoped not to hear for a long while.

Gunfire shattered the silence of the forest.

He immediately rocketed to his feet and took off. He heard the sharp sounds again, and this time, slightly different ones seemed to answer. After a minute of flight, he found the source of danger.

He saw a patrol of humans and an eight-wheeled vehicle cornering and trying to shoot another human, who hid behind the rocks in front of a cliff. The man had nowhere to go, he threw a few apple-sized objects towards his attackers which blew up in a way bigger explosion than its size should have allowed.

But the black uniform of the attackers told him what he needed. The enemy humans were trying to kill someone who's not from their ranks, and after some hesitation, Lohengrin decided to intervene. He did a half-roll and began to dive towards the armoured vehicle. As the wind began to whistle around his wings, he let loose a fireball, and pulled up to disappear above the forest.

The fireball coming from above blew the vehicle into pieces, splattering flaming scraps everywhere. This put the humans into disarray, as they began to shout. Lohengrin counted twelve of them as he came back for a second round, this time; he shot them from horizontal flight. A few scattered shots came in response, as the flaming wreck of the vehicle illuminated his outline, but Lohengrin knew exactly how to disappear quickly. By tempting the humans to stay near the fire to see, they completely ruined their own night vision, getting blind to their surroundings.

And they forgot about the human they were chasing before too.

With single, accurate shots, he began to take them out one by one, and since the rest gathered relatively close to each other, a well-placed fireball made short work of them.

The human quickly ran to the wreck to check the condition of his enemies. Meanwhile, Lohengrin silently touched down a few steps beside him. Taking a look at the back of the human, he was a bit unsure what to do. Establish contact? But how? They won't understand each other. Maybe if...

"Alright here goes nothing." Lohengrin growled to himself.

The human, who was still edgy from the previous gunfight, swirled around as he heard the growl and pointed his weapon at him.

Lohengrin's instinctual response to the perceived threat was to gather up gas in his throat to launch a fireball...

Both of them stared at the other, ready to shoot and take life if necessary.

A/N: Ooh, so much tenshun! :)It was high time to speed up things a little bit, was it?

Oh, and I'm still waiting of somebody notices the LotR quote in the last chapter... Felt appropriate there. :)

As always, tell me what you think. Opinions and suggestions are always welcome.

I

I

I

V