Interlude XXV: Escort Duty (part 1/2)
[Gray Dragon Ash] Year 5, Day 205 (far-away continent)
Ash circled slow and high above the valley, riding the cold air on lazy wings.
The Dragon King had come home a while back — with two new pets, the story went. Wolfgirl twins, pulled from some Syndicate tribute. [Wouldn't mind a pair of pretty wolf-twins myself. Ones who'd worship me by choice.] Though "by choice" was a funny thing to want. She was a true dragon; she could simply go and take whoever caught her eye, and if she couldn't be bothered with that, there were whole armies of dragon-worshippers down among the ants, every one of them certain they were special to their gods.
That pulled a real laugh out of her, rumbling deep in her chest. Special. As if any of them mattered past their usefulness. A slave was worth exactly what it could do and not a scale more.
Still. She'd be off this guard shift soon enough — and then maybe she'd take a human shape and drift down to the Syndicate's home, the Republic, the ants called it. Play some rich heiress for a season. Buy a few loyal servants. Or better: rescue a handful of cute little orphans off the street, all gratitude and big wet eyes, then hand them straight to one of the training houses to be scrubbed hollow and rebuilt into something properly devoted.
Her fantasies were running loose now, and she let them. She still had the holder artifact, didn't she — the one that idiot suitor had gifted her, back when he'd thought presents might win her. [Didn't save the horny fool from losing his manhood over it afterward. One has to hold the line. Let the flood in once and it never stops.] And it healed anyway, eventually. Months, maybe years. Almost nothing hurt a true dragon for good.
She fished the artifact out of her spatial storage and turned it over in one claw. Five little human-shaped icons etched along its face, all of them gray. Empty. [Don't need five anyway. Two, three ants would do for a nice quiet play-house somewhere.]
Stop.
Ash caught herself hard. [Damn it. Doing the dragon thing again, Ash. That's greed talking, and greed is how they slip a hook in you. Put it away. Someone always finds a way to turn these little wants against you.]
She glanced left, and her mood curdled.
The biggest brute on the rotation was circling out there — and there he was, that bastard. Total, complete bastard. She still hated the guts out of him, because he still, genuinely, believed she would fold one day and join his harem. His little poison court.
"BASTARD!" she roared across the open air at him.
The feelings had gotten the better of her again — but she couldn't even be sorry. It was worth it just to watch him flinch and drop a wing to guard his underside.
She'd tried to geld him once, years ago. That attempt had failed — he'd simply been the stronger that day. But the memory stuck, and now he flinched whenever she came near. Half the males on the rotation did the same, a quick protective tuck, and most of them had good reason for it. [POWER.] That part always felt good.
Then she felt the shift in the air, and looked down like every other dragon on the wing.
The Dragon King had passed out through the great dome, and he was moving — toward the sinners. Toward the ones who'd broken the one rule that mattered, and would be punished for it forever.
What followed was one of the strangest things Ash had ever seen — and from the look of every dragon on the wing, she wasn't alone in that. A ripple of shock ran through the whole rotation.
The King broke the chains and released Seraphine.
Everyone up here knew that name. The ice princess. The azure beauty. Breaker of a million hearts, and half a dozen other titles besides. Act like a magnificent bitch for a few thousand years and the stories grew all on their own; twenty thousand more in chains hadn't dimmed a single one. If anything the legend had only fattened — because every dragon who'd ever circled this valley could look down and see her hanging there, real and ruined and still, somehow, her.
Ash watched the azure dragon lurch into the air, and it was almost comical — a true dragon who'd forgotten how to fly, wings catching their rhythm a beat too late, the great body wallowing like a fresh-broken hatchling's. Almost comical. Not quite. Because underneath the comedy sat a question she couldn't put down.
[Can even the King do this? That rule sits above all the others for a reason. Never let an ant ride you, never let an ant command you — break it and the whole order we're built on starts to rot. You don't just let one of those back into the sky.]
She was still turning it over when the King's eye found her, and he tipped his great head. Down.
Ash folded her wings and dropped, leveling out before him with her head bowed the correct amount — not a hair more.
He didn't waste words. He never did.
"Follow that azure dragon. If she causes problems in other dragons' territories or with the Syndicate, kill her immediately. Otherwise, let her find her target and fight without interference. If she wins her revenge, kill her after. If she loses, she's dead anyway—just record who owns the Chain. Do not attempt to claim the Chain yourself. It's a dangerous mental weapon that can affect even dragons."
Ash dipped her head again. "This one understands. Will follow the prisoner, kill her if she causes issues or survives, and report everything back."
"Good." The King was already turning away. "Go."
So Ash went.
She climbed back into the cold and set out after her. Seraphine was already a shrinking speck against the horizon — a ruined, magnificent thing, flying badly toward whatever was left of her revenge.
[Escort duty,] Ash thought. And if there was something heavy sitting under the words, she didn't look at it yet.
The failing came on slowly, and Ash watched every stage of it.
For the first stretch Seraphine flew almost convincingly — if you didn't know what to look for. But Ash knew. She caught the wingbeats coming a fraction late, saw the great body sag between them and haul itself back up, watched the azure dragon fight her own flight muscles for every length of sky. The rhythm frayed. The sags got deeper. Twice Seraphine saved herself with a hard, ugly flap no dragon her size should ever have needed.
Then she simply stopped flying and fell — dropped out of the air like a thrown stone, wings gone limp, and slammed into a bare ridge below hard enough that Ash felt it in her own chest.
[There it is.]
Ash spiraled down and set herself at a careful distance, then did the thing she trusted more than her own eyes. She sniffed — long and slow and thorough. Her nose had always been the finest in any sky she flew, and she was quietly, enormously proud of it.
What it told her was two things at once, and they had no business sitting together.
Sexy. And utterly, completely broken.
[Twenty thousand years in chains did this. There's a limit to what magic and hate can hold up, and she's long past it.] The heart was the exception. Ash could smell it from here — that heart, gone huge and hot and impossibly strong, fed fat on two hundred centuries of unbroken loathing. Strongest heart she'd ever stood near, maybe. But a heart like that in a body like this was only a bigger engine bolted into a rotted frame. The rest of Seraphine smelled like a balloon: grand and taut and lovely on the skin of it, and so brittle underneath that Ash half expected her to come apart at the wrong touch.
Ash circled overhead another hour. Below, Seraphine barely stirred, sprawled across the ridge with her sides heaving, dragging thin threads of power out of the empty air the slow way — the only way left to her.
[Days of this. She'll scrape together enough to fly again, and it'll buy her what — five minutes? Then down she goes, and we do the whole thing over.]
If the target lived somewhere far, this could take a very long time. True dragons had forever to spend, true. But spending the thousands of years shadowing one broken lunatic across the world, five wretched minutes to a hop, struck Ash as a spectacularly stupid use of eternity.
A thread of smoke curled from Ash's nostrils — as close to a laugh as she got up here. [Real question is which of us is the bigger idiot. Her, for chasing a death she can barely fly to. Or me, for following.]
In the end she just landed beside her.
Seraphine's eyes tracked her the whole way down, and if a look could kill, Ash would have dropped dead on the spot. This one nearly could. The loathing pouring off her had already done for the grass — every blade beneath her gone black and dead, the soil under it souring by the hour. Ash half expected the whole ridge to curdle into cursed ground by morning, the kind of place you had to sacrifice a few virgins over, or hire an actual saint to come sing it clean.
[Not my domain, thank the dark. Let whoever inherits this rock deal with it.]
She settled her wings and got to the point. "How far is this Chain you're chasing?"
Seraphine's answer came soaked in venom. "My prey."
Ash cursed under her breath, a little gout of smoke with it. "You idiot. I don't want your cursed trinket. No interest in the thing at all — it's all yours."
Seraphine blinked, thrown for the first time since the chains came off. "...Eh?"
"Yes." Ash let the word drag. "How far is it? Pinky promise I won't lay a claw on your hunt." A human phrase, that last — she'd collected a hundred of them walking among the ants, whether for spying or just to kill some time — and it landed on the azure dragon like a foreign language.
Seraphine weighed it a long moment, suspicion warring with something slower underneath. "...Far."
"Of course it is." Ash groaned. [Damn my luck. Am I actually fated to spend my days babysitting idiots?] She chewed on it, then tried again. "All right. Let's make a deal. I get you there fast — and in return, you don't cause problems on the way."
Seraphine only stared, uncomprehending.
[Going to need smaller words for this one.] Ash sighed. "I find you food. I heal you up so you can fly like a proper dragon again instead of dropping out of the sky every five minutes. And in return, you steer clear of other dragons' territory and the bigger ant-nests. You don't want to die on the road because some fool picks a fight before you ever reach your prey — do you?"
That got through. Seraphine's lip curled off a fang. "...Sure. Whatever. But you don't steal my revenge."
Ash cursed one last time, for the road. "Yes. Yes. I don't want your damned Chain. All yours — destroy it, die trying, I couldn't give a single scale either way. Are we agreed?"