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[Primus] A strange artificial stone lines the tunnel, and I can’t help but stare as the platform descends. I am an earth dragon, and I’ve seen all types of stone, but this substance was outside my experience. It is a type of shaped stone, perfectly formed, its grooves determining not only the course of our platform, but the speed of its descent. The stone itself isn’t made of a single type, but of the fragments of several, pasted together with water and another substance not quite Terran, giving the grooves a faint blue sheen that flickered to life with the glow of the stone in Liaison Everly’s staff. Starfire crystal. The sand-sized pebbles are glued together with starfire crystal dust and sap. An earth dragon, with the help of a moon dragon, could possibly manage the crystal and together form a shape like this, even growing the two materials together. But there are very few earth dragons living, who have ever lived, who could have dared–myself and a drakaina on the other side of
[Primus] I hadn’t been back home since I left to chase down my mate. Carnelia had rejected me, and in a fit of rage, I went bestial, terrorizing the nearby town of Crimson, the town I protected as part of my Western realm. It had been my responsibility to keep them safe, to help them when they were in need. However, they had also been the source of Carnelia’s inner pain. They had tortured her for countless years, so long they didn’t even remember how long she’d been there. They used her for work, for sex, and for blaming all their sins on. They had broken her and made it impossible for her to love herself enough to welcome the love of others. But that wasn’t the only reason I burned this sick excuse for a town to cinders. I had also been angry at myself. How many times had I wandered through the village disguised as my attendant, Leon, and not done a damn thing about how they treated orphans like my beloved as little better than dirt beneath their feet? I may have even cross
[Carnelia] It is cold at first, not the piercing mind-numbing cold of the void, but something moist and alive, rich with the scents of machine oil, stone, and clay. It reminds me a bit of the caves beneath Ridgewood, where Primus keeps his more primal nest, his resting place when he’s in his bestial form. That space also had the feeling of eyes in every direction, as if the earth itself was watching me with eyes made of gems and crystals. As a door closed above our heads, the craft fell into absolute darkness, and I gasped, holding in the last air in my lungs, as if my body feared this might be my last breath. I have been underground before, running for my life in the tunnels beneath Imperial City, but never before have I felt so much like I was entering a tomb. A hum of energy vibrates around us just before the lights flicker to life above us. I'd never seen lights like these before, and I must have said something because Oaestr, always the teacher, placed her hand on my shoulder
[Carnelia] Oaestr’s cold laughter chases the edges of my consciousness as my vision darkens, and the cold kiss of metal between my scales as it slips from my body, leaving its powerful sedative behind. My body grows impossibly heavy as warm, strong arms catch me, easing my fall. Before I can say the word “stop,” something covers my eyes, enters my mouth, and I feel myself gasping, struggling against the grasping thing slowly entering my throat. “Give her another dose,” Oaestr’s irritated voice sounds far away, as if shouting across a large room. “Her biology is resistant. We need to make sure she won’t wake up until we arrive.” There is no response except for the sting of another needle, this time piercing the meaty flesh of my thigh. Rough hands grab my ankles as my body is twisted and placed inside warm fluid. I would struggle if I could. Gaietians seem to have even less of a moral compass than Terrans do, and Terran containment pods–with their ability to place a dragon in such a
[Carnelia]Home. Sitting on the ground, I press my face against the glass window that stretches from ceiling to floor, curving with the spherical shape of the sleeping quarters I’ve been assigned. Looking down at the planet, I press my hand to the smooth, hard wall, my eyes focused on the mass of land just below us as we orbit above. I’ve seen this view so many times before, looking down from my quarters in the Celestial Kingdom. That view is transcendent, the planet below glowing like a green-blue marble with swirling white clouds.This view is darker. The planet is gray, sick, dying. The trees, if there are any, are so thin that the green has shifted to brown and beige. The oceans are clouded by inky smears of brown. Or at least that’s what I can see around the mountains of twisted metal and plastic floating between them and us. Wherever we are, it isn’t home. That is not my Terra. This is not my Celestial Kingdom. The longer I’m away, the harder it is for me to remember what ho
[Primus]The pale drakaina on the other side of the mirror blinks slowly at Orion, her movements delayed and her image shaking, as if it were cast in sand. She’s pale, like a moon dragon with the same dark hair and eyes, with a iridescent scale pattern along her ears, eyes, and horns that looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Her features, in our more typical bipedal form, are almost human soft, with full cheeks and soft rosy lips. If it weren’t for the perfection of her more draconic features and the spark of power behind her gaze, I’d make the mistake of thinking she is weak–one of the lesser hybrids with too much humanity bred into them. But as she lifts her long nailed hands, and I see the blue arch of electricity sparking from her fingertips as she reaches for the mirror’s edge, I realize the opposite is true–she’s more powerful than the typical dragon. “Please repeat, your signal is weak,” the drakaina, who had identified herself as Everly, requests, her words undulating b
[Daax] Hearing my wife speak about her loss of trust in our daughter makes my shoulders slump as a sudden weight descends. There is so little of my family left. So few descendants of the Solarian Royal Family are still breathing. Carnelia and I are most of what is left, and our children are the onl
[Primus] “Primus!” my mate’s voice calls out to me across a vast expanse. She is standing high above me, on a platform made of clouds. “Primus! Come find me!” I can feel her fear, taste her need for me even as the distance grows between us. She is mine again, I can sense her. And as much as I ha
[Carnelia] What happened next was quick, efficient, and emotionless, so rapid and unexpected that I didn’t see it coming until it was already too late. It was my mistake, assuming that just because Nyxt, who looked and sounded so much like Primus, was being kind to me, meant that he would honor my
[Primus]And I fail. Grunting, I try again, but it’s no use. The best I can do is bite back the pain as I lean uselessly against the side of the small box, my body limply flopping over the edge as my muscles refuse to follow even the simplest of commands. “He shouldn’t be this broken,” Ursa’s tone







