by Martha Woods
His gaze intensified. He studied me appraisingly, his eyes cutting deep into my soul, scouring for signs of weakness. Honestly, at that moment, I wasn't entirely sure what he might find there– and that scared me just a little bit.
I had always been so certain of things. I'd always known exactly what I'd signed up for, the role into which life had so forcibly strong-armed me all those years ago.
But now? Now I just wasn't sure.
I did my best not to wither under his gaze. I blinked, very quickly– just a flash of movement. Then I composed myself. Regaining my senses, and my footing.
“I am not a fucking Wrecker,” I said unequivocally, intending for those words to settle the matter beyond a doubt. “But I'm not fucking reckless, either,” I snarled. “You seem to be forgetting the teachings of our dear leader Ryl,” I continued sardonically. “You know... Maintaining our secrecy from the humans. Isolating ourselves from them for the sake of our own preservation. Waiting until our numbers were regained, until we were adequately numbered to properly resist them.”
“And where the hell did that get him?” snapped Mordeos. “Where the hell did that get any of us?! Now we are weaker than ever! Diminished to an nth of our already moribund strength! Our days of waiting are over! Of playing safely, by lukewarm rules that we somehow believe will save us! I'm tired of waiting! I shall not vanish into the night as so many of our kind! Not until my thirst for vengeance is satisfied!”
Here, at last, I found my opening. An angle to all of this that he wouldn't be able to finagle his way around.
“Mordeos, don't you see? It is because of our diminishment that we cannot afford to take such risks! What will happen when this man escapes, and tells the other humans what he saw? About who did this to him? Surely he will lead them all to us!”
Mordeos snarled, clearly unconvinced even before he'd spoken a word.
“And who, pray tell, said anything about letting him live once we're done with him?”
I rolled my eyes. “And you think killing him will be any better for us? That the humans won't come out looking for him, and stumble across our path in the process? And that's nothing compared to the Protec– I mean, the Wreckers... Say the news of a human immolation in the forest reaches their ears. And then what? They'll know exactly who was responsible! They'll come straight for us, walk right up to our door and exterminate what little remains of us. And that will be the end. The end of the resistance. The end of justice. With us fall the remnants of Ryl's great dream. The legacy of the Dark Ones, gone up in smoke and ash. All so that you might have your fun in torturing a single wretched soul, not even worth your time of day...”
I could see, at last, that I was getting to him. He was far from happy about this fact. His features winced. He was frowning intensely, his eyes darting sharply across the middle distance, as though in REM sleep, trying to discover a hole, some manner of shortcoming in my argument.
I could think of many– not least of which was the notion that the human in their grip could be given a memory potion once freed, and convinced that the attack that had left him so mangled and incapacitated had been the doing of a wolf or a bear.
Before Mordeos could give voice to his dissatisfaction with my argument, however, I quickly added, “Please, my love. You think I don't thirst for their blood every bit as much as you do? After what they did to me? After all that they have taken from me? But we need to be smart about this. Right now, more than anything, we need to survive. Only then, if we survive, and manage to regroup, can we ever truly hope to live again. And in the end, isn't that our common goal? The thing that matters above all else, and certainly far more than any temporary appetites for violence that might tend to possess us?”
Still his eyes flashed, darting, considering. Now, he seemed to study me closely. Peering deep into my features. Looking for any crack, any weakening of my resolve, or of my logic. But I remained as strong as I could. Not willing to let him see my weakness. Not willing to let even myself believe that such weakness even really existed.
And it was only by this thorough erasure, I truly believe, that I managed to succeed.
Mordeos' mouth twitched. His brow furrowed deeper than I had ever seen it do, and his mean red eyes seemed to burn just a little bit hotter. Then, at last, he turned from me, and spat to his buddies in the clearing, “Drop him!”
Kos and Uzyss froze in mid-action, the latter holding the tattered bloody human by a limp arm in the grip of his teeth. Then, all at once, the man fell from his jaws, and I winced as his body crumpled to the ground, so still, so lifeless, that he might already have been dead.
“Come on, let's go,” Mordeos added. “We've fucked him up enough...”
Nonplussed, but obedient, Kos and Uzyss shifted down, and moved swiftly across the undergrowth toward their leader. Though smaller in their dragon forms, beta males compared to Mordeos the alpha, they were larger and bulkier than him in their human bodies– and with about half of Mordeos' intelligence or less between the two of them.
Mordeos stepped into the woods, initially avoiding me with his eyes, and Koz and Uzyss followed after him, seemingly having forgotten all about their little game with the human, in their hurry to follow the leader. Mordeos stopped however, just short of disappearing into the trees. He gave me a last, long look, his vermillion eyes seeming to glow like lasers from the shadows.
“You've changed,” he said sourly, just as, deep down, I found myself thinking the exact same thing.
He turned, finally, and left, and the moment he was gone, I found myself breathing an immense sigh of relief. This seemed to happen more and more often lately, though with a brave face I had resolved not to analyze too closely the implications of such relief...
Focusing on the matter at hand, I hurried over to where the broken man lay in a heap upon the ground. His limbs twisted and contorted, blood still spilling liberally from a number of open wounds, but the rising and falling of his chest, and the steady wheezing of his breath, letting me know that he was still, at the very least, clinging to the remnants of his life.
I reached into the pouch I carried strung around my neck, full of tiny glass vials full of liquid I kept with me at all times, just for such occasions. The Earthdragons, a tribe of dragonshifters known for their alchemical skills, had provided our little faction of Dark Ones with a number of useful potions– though officially in allegiance with the Protectors, a number of Earthdragons who shared our anti-human sentiments still lingered on after the battle between King Ryl and his successor, Ynder, and had vowed to do what they could in the service of returning the Dark Ones to their former prominence.
I first pulled out a small glass vial of liquid designed for the alteration of memories. Time sensitive, and thus the most important task at hand, I unstoppered the vial and knelt down beside the injured man. Understandably panicked, he began to scream and to thrash at my approach, making the task at hand immediately more difficult for me.
“No! Stop it! Stop it! Get away! Don't kill me! Don't fucking kill me!”
Thankfully, he was too injured at this point to struggle quite furiously enough to free himself from my grip. I managed to tilt the vile between his lips, and feared for a moment that his teeth would clamp down and bite through the glass, putting him in even worse shape than he already was. I drained the vial down his throat and tucked it back into my pouch, and he continued to struggle for a moment, at one point puffing his cheeks and blowing hard to try and rid himself of the liquid, spraying me with a fine, feeble mist of the stuff.
And then, all at once, the whole of his being began to slow. His eyes widened. His limbs settled to the ground. A dreamy look came over him, and I could actually feel his heartbeat growing stable beneath me.
For a moment, he appeared utterly bewildered, unsure of how he'd gotten here. Then, looking down at his tattered, bloody body, at the bite marks, at the blackened patches of flesh where Mordeos and the others had spat fire at him, he let out a sudden, wild moan of agony–
as though seeing the state of his broken body, and suddenly not understanding where all the damage had come from, ad reminded him of the immense pain he was in.
Here, a second vial came into play. I pulled it out, and lifted it up to him, urging “Shh, shh, shh,” as I tilted it toward his lips, and poured it back. A healing potion. Designed both to ease his pain, and to speed the recovery of his many, but non-life-threatening injuries.
He did not resist this time once the liquid had made it past his lips. By the time the bottle was empty, he had totally relaxed beneath me, is eyes closing, his breathing returning to normalcy, and even some of his uglier, bloodier injuries seeming to close up a little bit, the flow of blood beginning to abate.
He let out a low, exhausted groan. I stepped back, and surveyed him, thinking that I'd done an adequate enough job. It would take a few hours for the full extent of the medicine to kick in, for him to be able to get up and walk, and to find his way back out of the forest once more. But I saw that there was a tattered backpack of supplies lying on the ground nearby him, and knew that this was a safe enough area of the forest– free of predators, of the non-dragon variety, anyway– that he would be able to make it back out of the woods intact.
I hesitated for a moment after replacing the potions in the bag around my neck. I needed to hurry and follow Mordeos, to catch up with him and reassure him that I was still with him– that my concern for this man was really only concern for the group, and that I would therefore spend as little time tending to his well-being as possible.
Was that completely true, however?
Mordeos' words continued to circle around in my head– “You've changed.”
And for the life of me, I couldn't decide, or maybe couldn't let myself decide, just how accurate they were...
I stepped over to where the man lay. Peacefully, for the moment, but still pitiably.
I did feel a pang of emotion for him. Something like tenderness. Something like sympathy. I identified with him. I mourned for his pain. I did not want to see him suffer.
But then I thought of some more of Mordeos's words... I thought about how things would have gone had the roles been reversed– and indeed, the roles had once been reversed, and I knew exactly how things had gone then.
Anger suddenly bubbled up inside me, furious and irrational. Hatred, not to just this very man, but to his entire race, his entire species. The quality of my mercy only extended so far. Though I had just been the one to save his life, my head was awash with indecent images of bringing my foot down, stomping on his throat, stamping that very same life out of him, as easily as one might stamp out an insect.
Horrified with myself, yet still high on the notion of vengeance– as though killing this one broken man might somehow compensate me for so many years of pain– I instead settled on, what at that moment, I had to convince myself was middle ground.
Standing over him, I spat into the unconscious man's face, loving the bullet-like SPLAT of the saliva's collision with his cheek. It was immediately, viscerally satisfying, but became gradually less so as the spit travelled slowly along his cheek, zigzagging across his features, across the lines and planes of his identity.
Vindication gave way to hollowness, which gave way to such a conflicted swirl of emotions that I felt entirely too weak to try and reckon with it.
Needing to be free of him, to be free of all of this, I hurried back from his body, kicking him in the leg as I stormed past him. I was eager to catch up with Mordeos, to leave this man behind and never see him again, never think about him again.
I told myself that I didn't care whether he lived or died. That while I'd done my part to ensure the former, I secretly hoped for, longed for the latter.
But as I ventured on beneath the cover of the trees, the involuntary heat of the single tear slipping from the corner of my eye, and spilling along the bridge of my nose, betrayed a level of uncertainty I found myself facing more and more often these days, and from which I could not seem to free myself, no matter how hard I tried...
Iammarth
I'd been walking for days, winding my way deeper and deeper into forests which, I had to believe, had been cut off from the otherwise ubiquitous encroachment of civilization since the dawn of time itself.
I was far from unused to so much time spent in wilderness. Hell, my entire life had been spent beneath the cover of the forest. And, judging at least from the few occasions I had had to venture outside its protective canopy into the broader outside world, I preferred its coverage, its relative safety, to the dauntingly boundless scope of the world beyond.
But this– this was uncharted territory. Alien woods, to me as well to most other sentient life, as far as I could tell. I was now living in true isolation, beyond the reach of anyone and everyone. It was like a kind of solitary confinement. Every step I took only seemed to take me deeper and deeper into the maze, and it remained to be seen when or if I would emerge.
Or what I might find on the other side if I ever managed to get there...
I'd started heading out southwest, in the direction of one of the locations circled on the map, given to me by the King. For several days I had labored under the mindset that this might all well turn out to have been little more than a wild goose chase. That my quest for redemption might prove to be nothing more than a waste of time.
It had occurred to me, early on, that I might cover a hell of a lot more ground, a hell of a lot faster, flying above the treetops in my dragon form. It sounded so appealing, yet I also knew that it would be a dead giveaway as to my double agency. The Dark Ones I sought, after all, would not be engaging their dragon forms at present, for fear of giving themselves away to the Protectors. And therefore, if I wished to appear one of them, I should remain similarly hidden– trudging slowly, patiently through the wilderness, telling myself that every sorry footstep was like some small act of penance. Wondering whether a million vain footsteps could possibly add up anything faintly resembling redemption.
I soon became thankful, however, that I had so wisely chosen to remain near to the ground, instead of indulging in the shortcuts that had come to seem so appealing to me. For as I wound my way into the forest, signs began to appear– indications that, in spite of my doubts, I did indeed appear to be making my way in the right direction.
It was small things at first. Broken branches. Charred logs, in areas so deep within the forest that no human camper would have been likely to appear there. Later on, I discovered further remnants of campsites. Then footprints– both human shaped and clawed, reptilian. And though I couldn't say for certain whose trail I was on, I knew beyond a doubt that I had indeed struck upon a trail. That, whatever happened from here, whether I succeeded or failed, I would at least have the opportunity to try and confront my past. To atone for it in the only way I knew how.
And if I died, at the very least I would die a martyr...
But that had been over a week and a half ago. First discovering the signs of life, I mean. The indications of living presences still appeared now, but as close as the Dark Ones seemed, as imminent as their appearance should reasonably have been, I never could quite seem to catch up with them. It was like they moved constantly, at exactly the same pace as myself, making it all but impossible for me to overtake them.
I'd gone one night without sleep, hoping that the few extra hours of walking might finally close the gap between myself and then. Instead, I'd stumbled upon a foraging grizzly bear in the darkness, and was promptly attacked by it. I'd tried to outrun it in my human form, not wanting to seriously hurt the poor thing– it was only acting on its instincts, after all. But following a painful, merciless bite on the shoulder from the creature's vicious jaws, I decided to hell with it, transformed, and made short work of finishing what the bear had started.
And still I felt no closer to the Dark Ones than when I had set out. There had been one odd day, sometime after the bear attack, when I'd discovered, in addition to the bare footprints of humans and dragons, a set
of prints that looked as though they'd been left by boots– as well as shredded strips of cloth, lying strewn threw about through the nearby bushes and trees.
Dark Ones, strictly speaking, did not tend to wear clothes, or shoes. Few dragonshifters made a habit of it, for that matter– they would only be torn to pieces in the act of shifting, and certain items (such as shoes,) hurt like the dickens as they squeezed tight around your flesh during the process of transformation.
A shudder had run through me at the possible implications of this discovery. I pictured some wayward human hiker, lost deep in the woods, and just so happening to stumble across the Dark Ones on their journey across the countryside.
I knew exactly what the Dark Ones' response to such an encounter would have been, having once been one of them myself, however unwittingly, and I moved on from the spot, thinking there was no point in trying to search for such an unlucky soul throughout the nearby area, and help him out as much as possible.
Surely, by this point there would be nothing left to help...
On and on my days seemed to go. I had no room to complain, I knew. To feel like this monotony was anything less than I deserved. But in truth, I was beginning to grow weary of all of this. This fruitless searching. This wondering, even as I saw clear cut signs of the Dark Ones' presence, whether I might never manage to catch up with them. Whether, somehow, they'd never actually been in these woods at all, and there was some sort of bizarre, alternative explanation for why exactly I had ever believed otherwise.
If only I could cut through all this endless searching. If only my penance could take the form of direct, immediate action. Of jumping in, kicking the Dark Ones' asses. Taking no prisoners. Wiping them from the face of the earth, in one fell swoop.
But no. Even if I could find them, that wasn't the job. Ynder wanted information, not heads on a silver platter. To know what they were planning. To know how many of them there were, and whether they were in league together. How big of a potential threat they might still pose.
