by Celeste Raye
If they were instinctual enough to know they needed to protect themselves, it meant they were something’s source of food. And that something might be what we were sent to study.
I walked around the cave’s opening and peeked inside. It was too dark to see how deep it went, but I could feel heat radiating from within. I went to grab my flashlight but grew startled when my sister pushed me low to the ground. She breathed out in fear and dropped low next to me, pulling the sight of the rifle close to her eye and backing up slowly, drawing us further behind the cave.
“What is it?” I demanded in a fearful whisper.
“That,” she said, nodding her head forward.
I raised my head, quiet as a mouse, and saw a large creature about the size of a rhinoceros approach in the distance.
“Shh,” my sister cautioned, keeping her weapon steadied on the beast.
The creature was a large arthropod. It was a deep maroon color and had a visible exoskeleton covering the mass of its segmented body. It had long, skinny tusks that it drove into the ground with enormous force and dug up some of the red, shivering plants before stomping them and pulling their remains to its mouth using its long, spider-like appendages.
My sister looked at me with annoyance as she saw the smile that was spreading across my face.
“You take a real joy in this, don’t you?” she scoffed in a whisper.
“Don’t you see?” I asked. “That’s it. That’s what we came here to study! We need to get close to it.”
“Wait,” she said, extending an arm in front of me.
Before I had the chance to protest, we both watched in horror as three winged creatures dove down, their wings soaring with the wind billowing beneath them, and descending violently on the creature.
And they looked like… humans.
Or… like dragons.
Chapter 2 - Tredorphen
Tredorphen
“I don’t like this,” said Aurlauc, my dear friend and fellow WereDragon. His pale skin was contrasted by deep gray and black scales that slithered across his body like splatter.
He had long braided hair that was course and raven-colored; thick sideburns crawled down the sides of his face. He was a fierce warrior, and my cousin.
I brought him along to explore nearby planets with me, along with our sometimes friend and sometimes enemy Khrelan.
We’d all been friends as children, but as competition for land and food became fiercer, so did our odd friendship. Khrelan was an outcast that I had made my father, our D’Karr, or king, take into our land. We supplied him food and sustenance, a gift I knew he never felt worthy of.
And he’d been trying to show me up ever since.
I promised my father we would find food, and as we looked down at the spindly maroon creature below, I grinned at how right I was to land here.
We perched on the beast, and I watched as Aurlauc began ripping it’s spiny arms from their sockets and lifting them to his mouth.
“Wait!” Khrelan shouted, his blue wings flapping in protest as he knocked the appendage from my friend’s hands with the meat of his tail.
“Hey!” Aurlauc pouted. His eyes followed the arm as it was flung off into the distance. He glared at the blue dragon with a hilarious frown and laid his palms bare in confusion. “What was that for? If you wanted first bite, all you had to do was ask!”
“We’re not eating this,” Khrelan insisted as he kicked the beast to the ground, all of us watching as the creature was suddenly swarmed by the red tentacles that seemed to emerge from the ground with a flurry of slick, wet sloshes.
The creatures teemed over the beast, and we watched, flying hesitantly above the massacre as they desecrated the Drog until there was nothing but a thick, maroon skin left sitting on the ground below.
The red tubes tunneled back into the ground, and we watched, astonished, as the crisp black and red char of the planet’s surface emerged, finally free of the tentacles.
I looked over at Khrelan and then to Aurlauc. The two laughed insatiably as they looked down at the skin of the Drog, but I wasn’t impressed. I crossed my arms and looked back to Khrelan.
“Why weren’t we allowed to eat it?” I said, frustration easily lacing my tone.
“It was acidic,” he said.
“It was food,” I argued.
The navy dragon sighed deeply at me, and I gave him cold eyes. Eyes that told him not to command me. Unaccepting of my defiance, Khrelan flew off from us into the molten valley and fetched the arm. He held it far from his middle section and let me watch as the acid dripped from its ripped joint and sizzled against the rock below. He tossed the arm to me, and I flew back, letting it pass me and watching the creatures emerge once more to devour it.
“Hm…” I murmured, unimpressed.
“You said there’d be food,” Aurlauc whined, flapping his wings and ascending down at a slow pace
The black dragon put a nervous foot to the ground, and we watched with baited breath to see if anything would come up to grab him, but the creatures knew better, it seemed.
I followed suit, and soon we were all on the ground.
“We’ll find food, just…” I bit my lip. “Be patient. We only just got here.”
“Tredorphen,” Khrelan began slowly: another warning. “We need to give the Weredragons of Dobromia somewhere to go. Our planet is dying.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I snapped.
“Your father is expecting us to come back with something and you’re the one who told us to come here,” he continued.
“You guys,” Aurlauc said; he was always trying to break up our fights. Khrelan thought that because he was older, he somehow knew more than the rest of us. It irked me to no end and he knew it, which only irked me further. I had explored just as much as he had during our missions. He wasn’t wrong though. Our planet, Dobromia, was running out of resources. Some Weredragons had even taken to killing one another to protect their food supply. It was becoming a nightmare.
Aurlauc, Khrelan, and I had left Dobromia some time ago now. My father was D’Karr of the dragons, and when I told him I would find us food, I knew he would expect the finest results. The hope of the planet rested on us finding somewhere new to inhabit. I thought Ceylara would be the answers to our prayers.
It wasn’t turning out that way.
“You guys,” Aurlauc repeated and slapped me on the shoulder.
My brows creased into a frown as I gave him a testing look and eventually, stubbornly, I looked in the direction he had been pointing for some time now.
In the distance, there was a large object. I cocked a brow and flushed my wings backward, propelling me several feet forward.
“What is that?” Khrelan asked, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
“It’s a ship,” I said. I walked forward, and the Weres behind me slowly followed suit. “A spaceship.”
We weren’t unfamiliar with the vessel. We’d seen several crashed on other planets near ours. Besides, technology was unfortunately not lost on me, though I never thought I would be able to see one this close.
“And… those?” the navy dragon asked, bristling at the sight of the strange creatures that swarmed the area around the spaceship.
“They’re humans,” I said quickly and excitedly.
“What is a human?” Khrelan asked, testing the word out slowly.
“Ugh!” Aurlauc waved the navy dragon off and spun on his claw, turning back to the molten caves. “Don’t ask! Don’t get him going! Seriously, unless you’re ready for Tredorphen to go on and on and on and–”
Khrelan rolled his eyes and lifted a finger in dismissal to my friend before turning to me. “Alien life forms?” he asked.
“Yes,” I nodded.
“Edible?” he asked with a cock of his brows, said more playfully than anything else.
“I’m not sure,” I laughed. “But I think they may have something else we could use.”
I began walking toward the ship
and could hear Aurlauc’s large stomps behind me.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” he asked with a snarky, cocky laugh. “D’Karr said we’re not to approach foreign life unless it’s a source of food.”
“Trust me,” I said, but it was obvious that he didn’t.
He gripped my arm and ejected his claws just enough to startle me: to draw my eyes to his with a stern glare.
“Tredorphen,” he whispered and pulled me toward him, just out of earshot of Khrelan, who politely pretended we weren’t avoiding his company. “Don’t do this just to fulfill your weird curiosity, okay? You don’t know what those things do.”
“I know enough,” I said, a smirk crawling up the sides of my lips. “Now follow me or don’t.”
The men reluctantly followed. We approached the ship like creatures in the bush: creeping low to the ground and using the slick red saliva left by the tubular life forms to help us slither closer undetected.
Upon closer inspection, humans were everything I thought they would be. Long and graceful, yet strange and loud. I peeked my head up to get a better look at some of their females and felt a strange pang of energy in my gut.
For now, I wasn’t interested in these humans. What I was after was their ship, and maybe even some of their food.
I watched from a distance as a thin woman with an angular face brushed a lock of her curly brown hair to the side and beamed as her dark, expressive eyes roamed over the red fields. She was the only one still standing by the ship. The only one still standing in the way of myself and a full stomach.
I scraped my teeth over my lip and couldn’t help but give in to the annoyance that loomed over the situation. I exchanged eye-contact with Aurlauc and he grabbed a stone from beneath us and tossed it far into the distance, alerting the girl’s attention.
“Not exactly the distraction I was hoping for,” I said through clenched teeth.
Aurlauc blinked and offered me nothing but a shrug.
The three of us looked back to the girl and, while she looked off in the direction of the rock, she didn’t leave her post.
“What is that?” Khrelan asked, pointing to the long, rectangular object that the woman had resting on her shoulder.
“It’s a weapon,” I said, my eyes dancing around the rifle. “A gun.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Khrelan said. “What do we do now? Kill her?”
“Maybe not,” I said slowly. “Fly that way,” I instructed, pointing off in the distance.
Khrelan offered a disturbed smile and scratched the back of his head unsurely. “Uh… what if she uses her weapon on me?”
“It’s a chance I’m willing to take,” I said with an ambitious, though teasing, grin.
Tired of discussing it, Khrelan rolled his eyes and took to the sky and easily caught the attention of everyone in the area. Before we knew it, dozens of humans were rushing into the field where he landed miles away.
Once they were out of sight, Aurlauc and I stood from the gloppy ground below and made our way to the ship.
I slid my hand across the stale and cold outer finish of the vessel and steered myself toward the open door. Aurlauc followed closely behind, and we both peered into the inner chambers.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
The stranger's shout was enough to send Aurlauc tumbling into me; startled and annoying. I shoved him off of me with my elbow and turned to see the source of the voice.
It was a woman. Two of them.
Aurlauc went to speak, but I hushed him with a raise of my hand. He clicked his jaw shut with an audible snap and breathed through his nose, tossing his braids behind him with annoyance.
“Who are you?” I asked, inspecting one of the girls closely.
She had a heart-shaped face and thick, arched brows, a small pixie nose, and speckled skin. The girl standing beside her looked much the same, but with darker skin.
The tan blonde walked toward me in a navy blue spacesuit and shifted her head from side to side as she looked at me with a dawning horror.
“I’m Athena,” the one said fiercely, grabbing her weapon as she spoke.
“Idiot!” the girl behind her yelled, her blonde hair rushing forward in a cascade of waves and curls she sided by the armed woman. “You’re not supposed to just shout your name out because somebody asks.”
Athena rolled her eyes and never took her hands off the firearm as she aimed it toward Aurlauc.
“Well, he wouldn’t have known it was a real name until you just told him it was,” she argued.
The other blonde set her jaw and stood behind the other woman. She looked at me curiously and was overcome with wonder. Her eyes traced my form and widened horrifyingly. With a breath, she asked, “What are you?”
Before I had the chance to answer, another interruption came.
A pair of Drogs came rushing from the west, storming toward us. The arthropods’ set their tusks toward the girls and Athena began firing her weapon. I watched with fascination as the heated stream from the weapon began sizzling against the creature’s flesh, bursting a hole in its long, bony arm.
Aurlauc widened his eyes to me as if to say, ‘Let’s go!’ and use this as an opportunity to escape, but I wasn’t afraid of these humans. Though, I wasn’t exactly fond of the idea of the weapon’s beam hitting my flesh either.
“They’re acidic,” I said too casually as the girl fired her weapon over and over. “Don’t get too close.”
“A little help would be nice since you seem to know so much about it!” The girl screamed back with frustration.
I raised and lowered my brows quickly, considering the request. Funny, how she was willing to partner up now after having aimed her weapon at us.
I twirled my finger at Aurlauc and he immediately began whipping the beast with his tail. He took to the sky, his black scales shimmering and reflecting the maroon creatures in a red hue. He dove down at the Drog and dug his thick claws into its flesh before tossing it off into the distance.
The creature wrestled against the tube worms below, but still had life in it. I dismissed it and grabbed the unnamed girl from under the arms and lifted her to the top of the spaceship.
“Stay here,” I said and flew away from her.
“I don’t really have a choice!” she shouted back from atop the tall space vessel.
I dove down toward the remaining Drog and knocked it over with my tail, dodging as quickly as I could as it sunk its tusks into the ground right next to me, trying to pin me into the worms.
I whipped it with my tail and was careful not to bite down anywhere for fear of the acid melting through me.
Gripping the creature by one of its large legs, I tossed it to the red earth below and Aurlauc and I began whipping it back and forth wildly, flying around it with taunts and then sending it careening back into the ground.
We continued this until the creature was too weak to get up. As though the earth below sensed a gift, the red tubes shot up like hungry children and covered the beast until we could only see the form of it in tube worms.
“Still not a fan of that,” Aurlauc said with some disgust as he watched the worms retreat from their feast to reveal only the skin of the Drog.
“Better it than us,” I said with a wink in my tone before turning my attention back to the women.
Chapter 3 - Tredorphen
Marina
“What the hell is going on?” my sister demanded under her breath. Before they’d attacked the maroon beast, the other… dragon man had lifted my sister high above the ground to sit on top of our spaceship with me.
She paced the unsteady roof while I merely sat, watching as the dragons made worms’ meat of the beast.
I foolishly thought that they would come back up to get us, but I was wrong. Instead of fetching us, the two made their way into our ship, and I couldn’t help the ball that formed in my throat from that moment forward.
“What are those things?” I asked to no on
e in particular.
“They’re Weredragons,” my sister said begrudgingly.
“Pardon me?” I demanded. “How is it you know something that I don’t?”
“Well, excuse me!” my sister laughed with drawn-out vowels. “Egotistical much?”
“I didn’t mean that,” I rested my hand on my forehead and sighed. “I just meant… Well, ‘Then?”
“They do teach us things when we train for space combat, you know.”
“So… what are they?” I asked.
“They’re an alien species. A WereDragon. They look like half a man and half a dragon. Wings, scales, a tail, sharp features,” she rolled her wrist as she listed off their attributes, her eyes scanning the area around the ship as she walked. “But other manly parts that are a little more human.”
I blinked. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
“I’m just saying!” my sister laughed.
“Alright, penis, I get it,” I rolled my eyes. “They were…” I trailed off, and Athena caught my eyes.
“Kinda sexy though, right?” she asked as though she were finishing my thought.
My face flushed and I looked away from her. “No, that’s disgusting.”
“Not from where I was standing,” Athena laughed. “I’d roll around with one any day. Well,” she paused and tapped her pursed lips. “Not those ones, I guess. Since, you know, they’re stealing our ship. But they were hot.”
I didn’t respond, but she wasn’t wrong, no matter how childishly she phrased it. The one with the black scales had a wild look to him that was immediately alluring. But, the other one… he was undeniably gorgeous.
He had short brown hair and broad shoulders. If there was a human example of rugged, he was it. He had a sharp jawline and deep blue eyes. Except, he wasn’t human. Not really.
“They’re not supposed to be here, as far as I know,” Athena continued hesitantly, interrupting my thoughts. She dropped her gun so it hung lazily at her side and finally stopped pacing. “They are native to Dobromia. That’s a few planets over, I think.”
