Draka Chapter 369: Spectres Of Doom (Patreon)

For a moment I was paralyzed. As the two spectres of doom dove toward me, I kept telling myself one thing: they weren’t screaming in rage. That had to mean something, right? What dragon, when faced with an invader inside their very lair, could possibly control themselves so that they might descend in silence rather than roaring out their challenge? Not me, I was sure of that much. So they probably hadn’t seen me, right? They’d just come into the dark after being outside in the full light of day. Their eyes hadn’t adapted to the darkness yet, and my scales were made to blend into the background, especially when that background was in shadow. So we were safe. At least for the moment, we were safe. Right?

But what if was wrong?

Then I remembered my cousin and I snapped out of it. Gods and Mercies, I had to get to Sandstorm before she came running, loudly crowing about how much gold she’d crammed in her craw.

I raced down the tunnel. I knew where to go; I hadn’t told Sandstorm, but I’d been in there when I was looking for the invaders. I hadn’t actually seen her hoard, but it had been easy enough to guess. The rather misplaced pile of broken stone had been obvious enough.

The sound of stone clattering on stone reached me before I arrived at the small chamber. As soon as I got there I immediately Shifted back to my solid form and hissed, “Sandstorm!” then immediately continued with, “Quiet! Quiet, quiet, quiet! They’re back!” as I saw her open her mouth to vent her outrage.

Her mouth snapped shut, and thank the Mercies for that. Then something odd happened. She didn’t look at me. Instead she moved her head this way and that, sniffing the air for a few seconds before facing the right direction.

I realized that she couldn’t see. This chamber was bone dry, which meant that there was no glow slime. And that meant that there was no light at all. I’d been using shadow sight the first time I saw it, and I was doing so now. I could see perfectly. But she’d been going by memory, touch, and scent alone.

Impressive, cousin, I thought. The obvious pile of broken stone suddenly didn’t seem quite as silly as it had moments before. Then I saw how low she held herself to the ground, and how wide open and blown her eyes were despite the absolute darkness, and I shifted my focus to getting us both out of there alive.

The poor girl was terrified.

“Do you have what you came for?” I asked, as softly as I could.

“What?” she asked breathlessly, her head swaying back and forth as though the invaders were in the chamber with her, and the only thing that kept her from seeing them in the pitch black was the angle.

Taking a few cautious steps forward, in case she sensed my movement and lunged in a moment of mindless panic, I asked, “Do you have some of your hoard?”

“Oh. Oh. Yes. I have my craw full. Where are they? How do we get out?”

“They’re in the main chamber. As for how to get out…” A straight-forward plan of action crystalized in my mind. “You’re going to stay here, alright? And you’re going to stay absolutely still, and absolutely quiet,” I told her with all the authority that experience and my Advancements let me muster. “I’ll head back to the main chamber to see what’s going on. If they’re not there we’ll sneak over to the big tunnel that leads outside. There is one, yes? The side entrance?”

“Tunnel with the cracked top,” she said with something that I unconsciously translated as desperate hope. “It leads to a crack on the side of the mountain! There is a lake in the tunnel but it’s small enough to swim.”

“Good. We’ll go out that way. Flying would make too much noise. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“What will you do?”

“Stay still. Stay quiet.”

“Good. I’ll be back as soon as I can, whether it’s safe to move or not.”

When I returned to the main chamber it was silent and empty. I cautiously glided out from the mouth of the tunnel in which I hid and checked around. Nothing. No murderous occupiers lay in hiding, waiting for me to slip up and reveal myself. I stopped and focused on my hearing, and was quickly rewarded. From the direction of the hoard chamber came muted growls and hisses, punctuated by short pauses, like I was hearing only the louder side of a conversation.

They’d gone straight to their hoards. Excellent.

I rushed back to Sandstorm and told her the news. “As quietly as you can, now,” I instructed her. “Better to go slower and make less noise than to try to get out faster. Alright?”

“Alright,” she agreed, her voice hard with fear.

“Follow me.”

We reached the main chamber. There I checked again, making sure that they hadn’t returned. They hadn’t. With agonizing slowness we followed the wall to the medium-sized tunnel with a crack running up the wall above it. There was a distinctly watery smell to it; the underground lake Sandstorm had mentioned, no doubt. There was a strong urge to run as fast as we could at that point, but thankfully Sandstorm understood to take it slowly. Making it that far didn’t mean that we could get complacent; anyone who’d ever snuck out of the house at night as a teenager knew that.

We hadn’t made it far before Sandstorm stopped and sniffed the air loudly. Her single, defeated “Oh,” told me everything I needed to know about just what her sensitive nose had picked up.

From just down the tunnel, where it bent sharply, came a sharp chuff followed by the scrape of claws on stone. “Back, back!” I hissed, and we made a valiant effort to outrun the female that even I could now smell behind us, but when we reached the exit it was too late. Ahead of us was a male, big enough that he almost filled the mouth of the tunnel. The bastards had set a trap for us, and it had just closed.

“Cousin!” Sandstorm whined, wild-eyed as she whirled in place, trying to choose between the rock and the hard place. “What do we do?”

“Get ready to run,” I growled back.

The male chuffed at us, long and loud. Then he growled and hissed, eyes narrowed in amused satisfaction as he spoke. I still didn’t know much of any dialect of Draconic, and this one was slightly unfamiliar, but I picked up smell in the negative, as well as lair and the dual form of whelp. Presumably he’d said something smugly triumphant like, “Did you think we couldn’t smell a thief in our lair, whelps?” That seemed like something a smug bastard of any species might say. Behind us the female stalked forward, a deep, satisfied growl preceding her. And it was understandable if they felt smug about the situation. Here we were, two arrogant young dragons sneaking into their home, and they’d lured us out and pinned us down in this narrow tunnel. I probably would have felt pretty assured in my victory in their place.

There was just one thing they hadn’t considered — which they couldn’t have considered. They thought they had the homefield advantage, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. I was a goddamn shadow dragon, and we were in nearly complete darkness. We may have been in their stolen lair, but the darkness belonged to me.

At my command, the darkness ahead and behind me moved. In moments it had condensed and wrapped itself around the eyes of the two invaders, and even in the extremely dim light of the glowslime and the crack so far above their heads became lumps of deepest black, a lack of light so complete that nothing else could compare. They both cried out in alarm and anger, thrashing their necks uselessly to try and dislodge whatever might have covered their faces.

Then I squeezed, and their roars and hisses turned to terrible shrieks. There were few sounds more terrible than a grown dragon screaming in terror, and that cavern, giant though it was, only amplified the sound.

Sandstorm stared at me wide-eyed for half a breath. Then she screamed, “Fly, cousin!” and scrambled forward, slamming into the male blocking the tunnel exit. Now, Sandstorm was smaller than him by several feet, but she was built like a bloody truck. She hit him hard enough to shove him aside enough that she could push past into the open chamber before launching herself into the air. He had enough presence of mind to turn and follow her blindly, and his flailing head struck her in the side before she got out of range; she tumbled but recovered and kept climbing, a trickle of blood running down her leg from where his horn had pierced her hide. I wasn’t far behind, having Shifted and slipped past him on the other side before rematerializing and leaping into the air seconds later.

Our section of the chamber erupted in yellow-white light. Heat licked at my hindquarters as one or the other unleashed their fire — in rage or terror, I couldn’t say — but I was climbing too fast and they couldn’t aim well enough for it to do anything but sting. We were—!

Well, not free. We’d escaped their trap and avoided their parting shot, but we still weren’t in the clear. I held on to the shadows incapacitating our enemies as long as I could, but my range wasn’t infinite. Soon my tendrils snapped, and the shrieking below us changed to roars of rage and humiliation. After that it only took moments for the snap of wings behind us to announce that they weren’t going to just let us leave. If we wanted to live, we’d have to outfly them. And having seen what other adults were capable of, a straight race wasn’t going to end well for us.

A few seconds ahead of me, moving with the ease of decades of habit, Sandstorm locked her wings straight out and vanished into the jagged streak of light in the ceiling. I was a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred feet behind her, preparing to do the same, just as I had before.

And then: confusion, nausea unlike anything I’d ever felt, and a grinding pain in my eyes, my ears, my lungs, hell, in my bones. I lost the coordination I needed to even beat my wings in sync, and that may well have saved my life — it meant that when I struck the rock of the ceiling, I wasn’t moving quickly enough to hurt myself. I just bounced and began to fall.

Mercifully, that took me out of the line of whatever I was getting hit with, letting me gather my wits for long enough to Shift. The nausea cleared, along with the pain; with no physical body, I had nothing to hurt or feel sick in. But I was still falling, and I wasn’t going to risk Shifting back with two murderous adults closing in on me. I flailed out desperately, stretching in every direction, but it was too late. The ceiling fell away, and I began my return to the floor, helpless to control myself.

I had no idea if the two invaders could hurt me when they caught me. I was sure that they’d try. But I was in luck. The two furious adults passed me in the air, climbing far faster than I could have ever managed. They didn’t spare me so much as a glance. Nor did they search for me; my best guess was that they thought I’d made it out, because they were both entirely focused on the crack in the ceiling. Soon then did as Sandstorm had, locking their wings and vanishing one after the other into the jagged slash of darkness above me, leaving me alone again.

For a few seconds I let the reality of what had just happened flash through my mind. If I’d been back in my body, I would have screamed, gibbered, howled, just let it all out. We’d been baited and trapped by two adults fully intending to kill us, I was sure of it. One had almost caught me with their fire; the other had caught me with… what? Infra-sound? Microwaves? Something that made me feel like I was coming apart from the inside. I’d had a legitimate brush with death. And now… now I had to go after them, because they were chasing Sandstorm, and they were faster than her.

Gods and Mercies, why couldn’t I have been a sociopath? This would be so much easier if I could have abandoned Sandstorm and lived with myself afterward.

When I rematerialized, I was shaking so bad that it was hard to get my wings under control. I had to start with locking them so I could turn my fall into an upward swooping glide. It took longer than I would have liked before I was climbing back toward the crack in the ceiling, but at the same time I impressed myself by managing it at all. As long as I stayed where I was, I was in the dark. The darkness was safe. Out there, in the light, they could see me.

But they could see Sandstorm already, and the choice between risking myself and abandoning her was no choice at all.

I plunged into the light, passing through the crack in a fraction of a second and rising swiftly above the crater. In the far distance I saw the glint of Sandstorm’s brass scales, heading straight for where we’d left Indomitable. She was far, far away, but even at that distance I could hear the faint sounds of her fear. She was a proud creature, but in that moment, pride was a luxury she couldn’t afford.

Behind her was a copper, gleaming reddish brown, and with them was their mate, shifting in tones of purple that I’d yet to see on a dragon. If the color of a dragon’s scales had any connection to their breath weapon, which I suspected it did, then the purple was the one who’d hit me with that awful, awful attack. They were still closer to me than to Sandstorm, which was… good. Was it? Did it matter? Probably not, because I was going to do what I was going to do no matter what.

Following them as quickly as I could, I filled my lungs and roared. It wasn’t the roar of a whelp trying to look big, either; it was the kind of roar I’d use to liquify the guts of armies. The kind of roar that sent veteran warriors fleeing for their lives, knowing that fighting wasn’t an option. It was a roar of challenge, demanding they turn and fight or know themselves for cowards.

At least that was how I saw it. And it was partially successful. They both looked behind them, and the purple rolled and reversed direction, heading back toward me at a combined speed of gods-only-knew per hour.

I wondered what the range of her attack was. A second later, I found out. No one should have ever have to throw up in the air.

I was fully aware and honest with myself about the fact that I was a hypocrite. I could practically vanish from the world, letting me move unseen, unheard, and unsmelled. I could see perfectly in places where not so much as a photon of visible light existed. That didn’t stop me from feeling that it was utter bullshit that this purple dragon — whom I was pretty sure wasn’t purple, but amethyst — had an attack with hundreds of feet of range that was both silent and invisible along with making me feel like crashing fatally into the sea might not be so bad, actually. The only mercy was that the beam, or whatever it was, wasn’t very wide; I’d been ready for it, and after that first hit, rolling erratically prevented the amethyst dragon from keeping it on me for more than a moment at a time.

When his attack failed — I could recognize him as the male when he got close — he tried to strike me mid-air, but I was too nimble. I unloaded my venom glands in his path then, at the last moment, dodged up and to the side, slashing down with my claws. Sorrows only knew if the venom hit, or if it had any effect if it did. My claws missed; I’d dodged too far. But I didn’t get turned into a tumbling bag of broken bones, and the scream he gave off behind me could have been either pain, frustration, or both; I didn’t care which, and counted it as a small victory either way.

And then what? I honestly hadn’t thought that far ahead. Seconds wasn’t exactly a lot of time when it came to making a plan. I’d peeled one of the pursuers off my cousin. I’d survived. I was doing better than I’d feared, not quite as well as I’d hoped. And now? Now I had a pissed off Spyro with a microwave cannon for a mouth on my tail. That wasn’t the kind of thing I could really plan for at the best of times.

The copper grew more and more distant as she closed in on Sandstorm, but every so often, my cousin did something that impressed the hell out of me. She may have been scared half out of her mind and wailing like a hatchling who’d just seen the sky for the first time — I thanked Instinct for that memory — but she wasn’t going to just let herself get run down. She probably hadn’t ever been in a fight to the death, and she could be silly at times, but she’d had at least a few decades of messing around with her napalm breath, and she knew a trick or two.

Sandstorm turned her head and let loose behind her. The fact that her breath attack was a stream of thick liquid was probably a disadvantage sometimes, but clearly not when being pursued; suddenly the copper female was thrashing in the air, diving for the sea below. I couldn’t see, but she must have been hit, and that stuff clung.

At almost the same time as the copper cut through the waves with an elegant grace that was only slightly marred by her pained flailing, her mate behind me roared in fury. My leg and then my wing seized in agony as his invisible beam clipped me, but I rolled out of the way and didn’t lose too much speed. That roar had been far too loud, though. Far too close. Soon he’d be on me, and then… well. Nothing good.

It was time to get tricky. Or rather, it was time to use one of Instinct’s tricks. My headmate was indisputably a better fighter than I was, but our trip had bored her, and she was off somewhere. But I’d watched her fight. And anything she could do, I could at least try.

The invisible beam of death clipped me again, and again. The amethyst male was close enough that I could hear the beats of his wings. That had to be close enough.

I stopped dodging. I flew in a straight line and let that horrible beam hit me. And then, in the full light of the afternoon sun, I Shifted. I remained in the darkness for just a moment, and then I Shifted back, claws out.

When Instinct did this to Behold Her, she’d rematerialized just under the malevolent ruby’s side. I ended up low on the amethyst’s back, my claws slicing down his hindquarters and along half of his tail before the rushing air sent me tumbling away. And he had no idea what had happened. He screeched in surprise and pain, head whipping around as he continued forward, not seeing me; I’d fallen behind and below him. All he knew was that I’d vanished, and now he was bleeding. His mate had dived into the sea, and I couldn't say if he saw her, but she was only now clawing her way back into the air, far behind us. And then, to top it all off, came the furious roar of Indomitable from ahead.

The copper decided that they’d made their point by running us off. He flared his wings, and I shot past below him as he was still turning. I braced myself for another bout of wracking pain, but none came, and when I looked back, the two were vanishing back toward the island.

We’d gotten away.