Silent Scorching
I came up with the title WAY after I created this so that's why it's not the name of this pagethis is by LunaStar77, and its weird ig. Everyone has names that are kind of random illusion or mind words, or random things that their parents reminded them of. Most eggs were killed by humans at that stage because they ruled the land, before a group of nine dragons, each looking completely different from each other, stopped them. Aparently there was one who was an Animus, before 5,000 yrs later Jerboa banned animus magic and all the animi went "NOOOOO! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY POWERRRRRR!" So thats that
The Tribe list:
Queen: Queen Azalea
Royals: Pricess Starsylk (sister of the Queen (adult)), Prince Quix (brother of the Queen (dragonet))
Adults: Spectral, Sasha, June, Poppy, Spirit, Gloe, Cada, Cadence, Jade, Ginger, Uzula, Robynne, Zivioh, Xilmys, Oracle, Shallow, Hither, Wilt, Syvy, Mildrest, Avanda, Myran, Explynt, Yava, Laurdrys, Readra, Droctra, Droxy, Kittah, Lazuli, Viyvyn, Nayari, Kaygloe, Quixy, Quira, Jandys, Aloeh,
Chapter one: Out of the Dark. Spectral
As the sun went down in the distance, a dragon held his breath in anticipation. His odd red-green-bown six wings shivered together, and his Icebreath chilled the air ahead of him. He didn't know which queen to follow. He was made up of so many different kinds of dragon; he was part Snow Dragon, part Tree Dragon, part Rainforest Dragon, part Mountain Dragon, part Four-Wing and part Marsh Dragon. The queens hadn't decided on an official term for their tribes, but they were mostly made up of odd-looking dragons that mostly resembled their queen. Spectral, however, didn't seem to look mostly like one or the other. He rubbed his wrists together, his antennae waving anxiously.
He listened to the soft pitter-patter of rain as he slogged through marshland territories, bracing himself if there were any humans nearby. It was not uncommon for humans to kill and eat dragons, even if their scales were as thick as a mountain. His brown scales were laced through with green and red, well fortified because of the different layers. As his amber eyes scanned the marsh, he breathed a sigh of relief; he didn't hear nor smell the small creatures with shaggy fur atop their heads running around the boggy swamp.
Just as he was about to march up a hill, he heard a whisper near by, and it nearly made him leap out of his scales. "Pssst," hissed a voice from the shadows, and suddenly a brilliant blue dragon with four wings and glowing patterns across her deep aqua scales lept out of a bush, Her amber eyes glowing brightly.
"Why did you do that?!" Spectral snapped in annoyance, his tail tracing angry ripples across the mud.
"Because I thought it would be funny!" the turquoise dragon said playfully, jumping from talon to talon. Two silver scales shone by her eyes, and she bonked the side of his neck with her graceful snout.
"We're not supposed to joke around in times like these!" he hissed in a low voice, pulling her behind a thick tree. There were always dragons about these days, killing off dragonets like himself and eating them. There wasn't as much prey as normal; that was for sure. The marsh was strangely quiet apart from the two dragonets and the sounds of raindrops dancing onto the dirt. "How did you even find me?" he questioned. "I thought you were leaving with Azalea!"
"I was," she said hesitantly, "But Azalea's gathering up more dragons first. There are a lot of us you know, even if our numbers are slim." She glanced down and Spectral put one wing around her.
"It's okay, Sasha," he said quietly. "We all loved your sister. We're sorry she lived for such a short time."
"You could always bring her back," she said quietly, wrapping her tail around her forearms and tipping her snout down. she looked up again and met his eyes, a confrontation that Spectral was used to seeing in her bouncy self but not in this sad, sincere way.
"My power doesn't work like that," he reminded her softly, hugging her in. In the air in front of him, opals and diamonds and citrines and rubies and emeralds and azures materialized in the air, fat raindrops sliding off their smooth, unpolished edges. Sasha watched as they danced around his talons for a moment, before spinning around her head and falling into the mud. With a swish of his tail over the gemstones, they were gone, dissapating into thin air. The green-brown-red multi-brid pulled Sasha in closer, incasing her in a dome of scales, and they sat there for a while, in silent humility, thinking about Sasha's older sister. She was named Kaladryys, an odd name with different hisses and growls that often confused other dragons. She was killed by a Marsh Dragon in search for his daughter. Kaladryys had stumbled into his den and was trapped there, before the Marsh Dragon decided to eat her as food was getting scarcer and scarcer.
Kaladryys didn't have any natural weapons -- no mind reading or prophecy like her younger sister, no fire-thread like other Four-wings. Not even fire-breath like most black dragons. But she didn't care. In that way, she was braver than anyone else, because she stood up for what she believed in even with little or no powerful backup.
"I'm sorry," Sasha said, rearing up on her back talons and wiping away her tears. But she had nothing to be sorry for. She must have read this from Spectral's mind, because her expression softened, and she touched his chin with one blunt claw. "I know that you think it wasn't my fault, but it is. If i hadn't split up with her at Dylthrohck Capital then she would still be here."
"If you hadn't split up with her we'd all be dead," Spectral reasoned, shaking off talonfuls of mud and splatering it everywhere. The mud was reddened by the blood of dragons; these were particularly deadly days to live in. If it weren't for the new queen's impressive survival skills, they'd all be dead, with no place to go but be thrown into the sea, where Water Dragons would just eat them up.
Sasha sighed, her tail swishing across the muddy earth below her. Her power was like his -- universally seen as a threat, but full of excitement. Spectral's claws tingled with what he imagined was hope. After all, he could save everyone, if that was his wish. He remembered standing in front of Queen Azalea, enchanting a watermelon to depict their planet. There had been another continent, covered in vast forests and teeming with some odd plant that Spectral couldn't name. He knew the trees, though, which really shouldn't surprise him; they were pine and cedar forests that swathed the whole other continent, apart from a small paninsula with a rioting, dangerous jungle where no dragon could possibly live. Even Rainforest Dragons couldn't live there, even if they knew how to deal with poisonous berries and quicksand and mosquitoes the size of a dragon's ear.
"Sasha," he said, getting up, "we'd better find June and Starsylk. Let's head back to camp." They made their way through the marshes into the rainforest, where they were somewhat sheltered from the rain by the enormous trees that populated the biome. He could feel Sasha getting smaller, pressing herself to the curve of Spectral's wing.
"Poppy, don't do that!" roared a loud, brash voice. "You're spoiling the beets! Now what will we eat? A wild boar? I'm sure we'd love to starve to death, won't we?"
"Oh please," scoffed the dragon, presumably named Poppy. "We can just eat Star's Maine Coon!"
"No!!!" yelped a small voice as Spectral and Sasha got closer. "Don't hurt Periwinkle!"
Spectral walked into a large clearing with a thick, dense canopy of leaves overhead, blocking out the rain that fell down from the skies above. In front of him was a small, silvery-purple-turquoise Four-Wing -- Starsylk -- with long, unfurling anntenaes and turquoise eyes with gray-blue stripes glowing in the near-dark pattering her wings, snout, under eyes, and tail. She wore a silver chain with a circular moonstone on it, with several silver bands around them, and golden patterns all around her eyes. Periwinkle, her Maine Coon cat, snugly fit into the curve of her wing. She was quite tiny, and didn't really fight much, if you didn't count the battle she'd had with a flower the other day.
"Hey, Star," Spectral said, walking past Starsylk and picking up a banana from a pile. He peeled it and began munching. "Where's Azalea?"
"I don't know," she said, twisting her talons nervously. "She hasn't returned from her hunting party. Should we be worried? She's our queen... I'm sure she couldn't be gone this long..."
"WE'RE BAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!" crowed a loud, morbidly joyful voice. A large, lithe dragon hopped into the clearing, her anntenae flowing freely through the air like little bouncy wing membranes. She was white with streatches of pink, an ombre affect that spanned from the tips of her wings to the points of her talons. She had turquoise eyes and silver horns, and was absolutely majestic and sleek, and would be shinier if she wasn't coated in mud all over her. She dropped a net of fruit in front of them and grinned at them, her horns entwined with magenta and lavender blossoms on vines like elegant crowns.
"Ha, ha," Poppy, the dragon who suggested to eat Periwinkle, said flatly.
"That isn't nice," the pink dragon said in her know-it-all voice. Starsylk bounced up to meet her and stopped a talonstep away, probably wondering if it was the proper thing to hug the queen. "Come here, lil' sis," said Queen Azalea, the pink dragon, hugging her.
"We should go back to camp," Sasha suggested out of the blue. They gathered their stuff and made their way to camp, where a great old dragon with creaking bones was sitting, inspecting them with glee as she licked her claws. She was Mistress Iohyn, one of the oldest dragons Spectral had ever met. She also tended to be a grumpy old bat sometimes, but was fairly nice.
Okay -- halfway nice.
No.
Not nice at all.
Spectral half expected her to snap at him or deliver a snide comment. Aparently Iohyn didn't have very many friends, and was now taking it our on younger dragons as a result. Actually, Spectral was mostly the victim of her rudeness. Iohyn mostly snapped at him because his mother had an addiction for a type of flower close to the Moon Rose, and after that had nearly gone crazy before laying his egg. She died after that for some unknown reason, but he could still hear the whispers.
"That's the dragonet whose mother enchanted the mountain to crumble."
"That's the dragonet with the weird abilities."
"That's the dragonet whose mother went insane."
"That's the dragonet whose mother threw that dragon and her eggs into the sea."
He'd heard about the last one a lot. Aparently his mother had gotten mad at a dragon who'd stolen the little prey she'd found after the Humans began killing off hundreds upon thousands of dragons. She'd taken revenge by following the dragon back to their nesting cave and made her pay, and then threw her and her unhatched eggs into the sea. Dragons would say things like, "it wasn't your fault", and "What she did was unthinkable, but you're surely not the same". But his mother had died of insanity after using too much of her abilities. That had left his father to take care of him. But it's not like his father lasted long, anyway.
He'd succumed to a horrible lung disease a few years ago.
Spectral felt dark emotions bubbling up inside him, buried bitterness rising to the surface, and, most of all, hate and rage at his mother for leaving him alone with a father too kind for his own good. He'd trusted the strange vendor from way out where and drunk the remedy to cure what turned out to just be a family gene. But really the vendor had been lying, and gave him the poisoned water for the little meat they'd been saving. Finally, Spectral was taken in by Azalea, the only mother he'd ever really known. If he had a choice, he'd make his mother pay for the life she'd given him. For these times where you didn't know if you'd live the next day, where it was always a struggle to survive, where you'd always wonder, where am I going to go next, where the fight to live was even harsher than his father had told him--
"Spectral, you're zooming out again," Sasha whispered, pulling him out of his Dark Place. She pulled him into focus, her mind brushing on the edges of his. He could feel it, and he shivered. It felt so right yet so... wrong.