007: Moon Shadow

[Primus]

I wake with a start, forced from the dream of my mate beneath me by a cold hand pulling me back, grasping my flesh, and yanking me into the darkness. As I blink awake, the shadows seem deeper somehow.

When I squint, I can almost make out a silhouette.

Someone is watching me. Someone who doesn’t think I can see them based on the brazen way they stand in the center of the room, shadows seeming to stem away from him in every direction as if crafted from these very same shadows.

My eyes trace the edges of darker shapes within the swirling vortex of night in my room. I can feel Carnelia’s despair through the link in our rings, faint but still reaching me across continents. I want so badly to close my eyes and rejoin her, to ignore this intruder and go back to sleep. But to rejoin her would mean leaving myself vulnerable. Whomever this is, they can mold the shadows around themselves like a cloak.

I have only ever seen one other person do something similar, and he was the king of the elves, the ruler of the Moon Dragons.

My gaze pauses, resting on the space where I believe his eyes must be. “Who are you,” I hiss, inhaling sharply, hoping to capture his scent. “And why are you here.”

The shadow becomes very still.

“There’s no use pretending,” I stand, stalking forward. “I know you are there.”

Circling wide, I fight not to blink just before I dash forward, grabbing at the space where I assume the creature’s neck must be.

My hand burns with cold as it passes through the deepest part of the shadows, the shape flickering away before I can grab hold of whoever, or whatever, was watching my rest. Like my darkest nightmare, only the sting in my hand where I almost grasped it lets me know it was anything other than a dream.  Looking at my blistering flesh, I hiss as small sores blossom along the tips of my fingers as they turn white with cold. 

A cold so complete that it burns--like the void itself.

As I watch the last of the shadow creature fade, the darkness of the room seems less complete but it is still oppressive after my latest encounter. Walking across the room, I find the newly installed switch and flick it upwards.

The room blossoms into blue light. The innkeeper, Samael, had me install these lights in the tavern after the False Queen offered free lights to any business willing to install them. At the center of each light is an all too familiar blue crystal, like the ones used to shadow walk by the moon drakes.

Since soulfire is no longer an option for our cities to light and warm their houses, “crystalic flame” has replaced it. With Eleanora pushing this tech on the humans with so much enthusiasm, I watched the warm glow of the gaslight replaced with the eerie blue glow that reminded me of my time underground in the Moon Kingdom.

I don’t trust it. No matter how much Eleanora calls this new energy “a gift of friendship between our two kingdoms,” I know that the Elf King never does anything without a purpose that benefits him in the long run.

Including befriending and helping my wife, only to kidnap and enslave her.

Clenching my fist, I wince, as a blister pops on my hand, and my joints begin to ache. Under the blue light, my fresh wound looks even worse than it feels.

A quick shift into my natural form would help my wound heal, but it is too close to dawn for me to take that risk. Soon the humans will be milling about and I’ll be expected at the docks for my morning shift.

I sigh, grimacing as I look at my oozing hand, focusing on changing just the hand itself without changing any other part of me. A few scales start to form as my talons extend.

A cut slowly starts to seal itself as fresh skin sprouts over my palm.

“LEON!” A voice screeches through the door followed by a loud, persistent knock. “I know you’re in there!”

Taking a deep breath, I stare at my hand until it returns to completely human flesh. The blisters are gone, but the hand is still red and tingling with the pain of a fresh burn.

The knocking on the door grows more persistent.

“Leeeeeon,” her voice grows sickly sweet as she tries one more time, “Open right now or I’ll scream!”

Making one last check of my appearance my eyes widen.

In the spot where the shadows had yanked me out of my dream, there’s a hole in my shirt the size and shape of a large, clawed hand that is unmistakably dragonish.

Whoever it was that separated us must have been a very powerful moon drake to enter my dreams uninvited, causing harm reflected onto my physical body.

“One moment,” I call out as I throw off my shirt and grab another from the drawer, kicking the discarded garment under my bed as a key rattles in the door.

I barely make it to the doorway in time before my door pushes open.

“Melis,” I muse as I block her path, her pale of soapy water sloshing around her feet as she runs into my chest, “Why are you here before dawn?”

A mousy young woman with blonde hair to her waist blinks up at me, her cheeks rosy with embarrassment as she looks over my barely clothed form. “I’m so sorry to bother you so early,” Melis, the innkeeper’s daughter apologizes, looking down at her leather-clad toes as pink colors her freckled cheeks. “I was cleaning the empty rooms when I heard someone moving around and I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Rocking back and forth on her feet, she waits for my response. This human child and her father have been very generous with me since I came to this city two months ago, trying to find entry into the Solar Revolution. In exchange for singing every night, they lent me this room and even helped me find connections in town with known revolution sympathizers. I couldn’t have gotten as far as I have without their help.

This is why I have been as kind and careful as I can with his daughter, even though she keeps crossing boundaries. This isn’t the first time she’s entered my room uninvited and unannounced. There was a night about a month ago I found her oddly underclothed, waiting for me near my bed.

Melis can’t be more than 18 summers and yet she continues to try her best to bring my attention to her young, lithe form. If I were a human man as I pretend to be, or a dragon with such proclivities, I might find her soft, rounded body tempting--except that I’m not a man, I’m a dragon, and dragons are faithful. Or at least, this dragon is. I’d never betray Carnelia.

My heart, body, and soul belong to my queen--my beautiful, shining mate.

The human peers around me, pressing her front into my hard chest, her sweet-musky scent filling my nostrils as her nipples harden to pebbles through her thin blouse. “I thought I heard voices,” she looks around curiously, her tone crisp with jealousy. “And moans. Are you alone?”

The way she huffs at me, you’d think she was my girlfriend, not the child of the man showing me generosity. “I was having a dream,” I relay honestly. “A dream I’d like to get back to.” Gently, I push her back off of my chest using my uninjured hand. “Melis, go to bed.”

With her hip cocked to one side, Melis stands a little taller as she lifts her chin, her green eyes sparkling with anger as she responds hotly. “I’m not leaving until you tell me who she is.”

I’m tempted to let my teeth elongate and drop a bit of fang to intimidate her, to flash my eyes just once and exert my greater strength to get this child to leave me alone.

But that would be petty and dangerous. No matter how much this child annoys me, I can’t risk my mission. Taking a deep breath, I close my eyes, calming my racing heart. I hope it is enough to keep my inner beast at bay. The smallest slip-up could mean losing everything.

And I’m so close to finding my way in.

“There is no she,” I assure this sad little girl, giving her a shove as I close the door with as much force as feels safe. “Now leave, Melis, before I tell your father you’ve been snooping around my room.”

There’s an indignant shout as I give the door one final push and the young human female falls backward.

Shutting the door firmly, I latch and bolt it.

“Damn you Leon, you…you…bard!” She throws something against the door right before storming off, her stomping footsteps echoing down the stairs to the tavern below.

I need to be more careful. If I forget to bolt the door, she has keys to every room. What if she catches me relaxing for the night, my wings unfurled, as I rush to meet my mate in our dreams? Worse, what if I mistook her for the shadow drake that had been hiding in my room? If it had been her, I could have accidentally eviscerated her where she stood.

And then what would I tell Samael about his daughter as I presented him with his daughter’s corpse?

Opening the curtains I invite the predawn light into the room, using it to remove the last of the shadows as the first rays of dawn shine through the large glass panes. Using the nearby basin, I rinse my wounds and wrap them with a clean cloth before heading back to bed.

My have barely fluttered closed when the void welcomes me into its cold embrace and I fall into its spiraling blackness. Everywhere I had touched or been touched by the shadows earlier this evening burns and stings, the spectral outline on the flesh of my shoulder glimmering around the edges outlining the clear shape of a large, taloned hand.

This is the mark of a larger drake--one about the same size as me in my true form.

Thalan. It has to be. No other shadowdrake has the power to pull me from a dream with so much force.

Carnelia needs to know. If the Elf King found me, that means her sisters likely know about our nightly meetings as well, which means they could be listening to everything we say during our sessions.

“Carnelia,” I call out into the darkness only to have the sound swallowed by the nothingness before me.

“Carnelia,” I try again.

LISTEN the darkness around me responds. AND WATCH.

The air around me sizzles, popping in my ears as it ignites. Screaming, I feel light pour into me, while in the distance, a beam burns through the darkness somewhere far from here.

Two heartbeats flutter within me. Mine and my mate’s.

Screaming into the dark, I see a gilded room. I’m on my knees as cold metal warms to hot on my brow. My body convulses as wave after wave of power floods my body, crisping the eggs within.

Our children are dying.

This isn’t my body.

My mate.

“PRIMUS!” She screams with her last breath.