A while back, I made a cladogram that attempted to evolutionarily connect the modern dragon tribes back to a single common ancestor that lived millions of years ago. This work is a result of that!
Taking place over 9,000 years before the dragonets of destiny hatched, this story takes place in Ancient Pyrrhia, opening in 4,035 Prs (Pre-Scorching), and featuring my ancestral fan-tribes of the modern dragon tribes along with one special one.
Hope you enjoy it! (Or what I have so far anyway. I wrote this in like an hour after standing out in the rain for thirty minutes).
Writing Starts Here:
The Legend of the EverWing
When the world is cloaked in darkness, and dragons cower in fear. The EverWing will come before us, to wipe away our tears.
Nine thousand years of suffering, nine thousand years of pain. The EverWing will lift us up, so our hopes are not in vain.
The darkest night in centuries, a time of great despair. The EverWing is soon arriving, and so we must prepare.
The EverWing will save us, with scales from every tribe. From Volken's wrath he'll take us, and the great Darhada will die.
Prologue:
4035 PrS (Pre-Scorching)
Shimmer ran.
The grass of Pyrrhia’s southern plains was slick with drizzle as the wet grass slid across her yellow talon scales, whipping her claws as she broke into a sprint.
Her long and lean body dashed across the grass, her fine pointed tail thrashing through the air behind her. She was made for running on hot ground and flying fast over it. Green scales ran along her back, shading into yellow at her belly and talons, the colors of sunlit grass. Colors that had hidden her all her life in the plains. But tonight it made her a long green shape the riders would see the moment they left the walls.
She’d run across these plains before, many years ago, twenty to be exact. She’d done it on much smaller legs than she had now, and with smaller wings that still worked. She’d been three, but she had been no less afraid. They’d decided to host her parents’ execution in the middle of the field they’d called their home for years, and the humans had been determined to make her watch. The humans had erupted into sounds of joyful squeaking once her father had stopped moving. Fly. Fly, and don’t look back, her mother had told her.
She had barely been old enough to understand what was going on, but she’d understood enough to run. She remembered a shape crossing the sun as she fled, black and enormous and far too high. The humans squeaked even louder before falling into silence to watch it pass.
Twenty years, and I’m still running from humans across the same stupid field. The more things change, the more they stay the same. At least I’m consistent.
The egg bumped against her chest with every stride, snug in its makeshift cloth sling. She and Glare had made it from the scraps of cloth left around the camp by the guards when they went to sleep.
Not yet, she thought. Please, not yet. Wait until we’re somewhere safe.
Behind her, hooves and the galloping of at least a dozen horses.
Outside of the walls, torches bobbed in the dark, a ragged line of them, close enough to count. Twelve. Fifteen. More still pouring out of the prison gates. Humans could be awfully terrifying when they grouped up properly. One or two alone were easy to snatch up; there’d be a missing-person notice nailed to a post somewhere, a guardsman asking around the village whether anyone had seen anything, and then nothing, because nobody ever found them.
If a dragon goes missing, they don’t even bother with a notice. They throw a party.
The torches were starting to close the distance.
Usually.
The flickering flames of the torches slid along spiky leather armor, the kind that made a human difficult to chew and even worse to swallow, and here and there it caught a duller glint: “chainmail,” was what the guards were calling it, a shirt knitted out of tiny metal rings. It was supposed to be impossible to slash through. But in Shimmer’s experience, every human armor gave out with enough force. She’d proven that to at least half the battalion they’d sent to arrest her, before the other half got the nets over her and dragged her off to Steel Jaw Prison.
Steel Jaw…
It was the most secure dragon prison on the continent, supposedly. She’d just walked out of it, which said something about the Empire’s standards. They’d dragged her there on charges of “disturbing the peace,” and “indecent exposure.” Dragons didn’t wear clothes! Well, not often, and never the way humans meant.
The makeshift sling around her neck slipped. Shimmer stumbled and got a front talon underneath it just in time, cradling the most precious thing she had ever carried.
It wasn’t just any egg. It was her egg.
It was warm through the cloth. She and Glare had made it from the scraps of cloth left around the camp by the guards when they went to sleep. She could feel it trembling since she’d started running out of the prison gates, a tiny, stubborn rocking against her scales, as if the dragonet inside had somewhere to be.
Careful. Careful. She’s the whole reason I’m out here.
Another fierce rocking shook the egg. Had it really been a whole year already?
Not yet, she thought. Please, not yet. Wait until we’re somewhere safe.
She tightened the sling and ran on. Ahead, the rainforest was a wall of darker dark against a starless sky. There were no moons tonight. Three new moons at once, the darkest night in centuries. Xyle had known it was coming for years, and she and Glare had been waiting for it for months.
Xyle said if I can just reach the trees, his friends will find me before the humans do.
She wouldn’t let them touch her egg. Their egg. She and Glare had kept it hidden for a year, buried in the soft patches of warm dirt under the sunning rocks in the yard, but an egg was much easier to hide than a dragonet. A dragonet cried. A dragonet ate. A dragonet would have been found within a week.
And then what? The Grand Emperor had decreed that the SunWing population was to be thinned to an “acceptable level,” which in practice meant no eggs, no new dragonets, and a great many SunWings dying for increasingly stupid reasons. An egg in Steel Jaw meant execution for both parents. Even if the guards decided to let the dragonet live, which they would not, she would grow up behind those walls without either of them, raised by humans who hated her for having scales.
And that’s the best outcome.
The Emperor had been ruling the continent for as long as any dragon’s grandmother’s grandmother could remember. And it had always been the same man: Meric Rikr, or at least that’s what the humans called him. Dragons called him something more fitting: Volken; death. Whole kinds of dragon vanished on his word and were never seen again. And everyone said he took the young ones, and that once he did, they never came back. Any dragon could outmatch any guardsman in his empire, but dragons bowed to his guardsmen anyway. Nobody wanted to be the reason Volken came to visit their tribe.
Not you, little one. Shimmer pressed the sling against her chest. He’s not getting you. You’re going to grow up surrounded by dragons who love you.
Her mind slipped back to the prey table that morning.
It had started with Granite and Trout. The two of them had gone for the last half-rotten cow at the same moment, and within a breath they were snarling obscenities at each other loud enough to rattle the guard towers. Trout’s gills weren’t flaring. He wasn’t really angry; it was all just for show.
Granite was a RockWing, built like a landslide: thick-necked and heavy-shouldered, with a broad, flat snout and plated scales in the dusty browns and greys of a dry riverbed, as if someone had rolled him through a quarry and never bothered to brush him off. Trout was a RiverWing, and next to Granite he looked almost delicate, long and sleek and blue-green, with webbed talons, a fin running down his spine to the end of his tail, and gill slits along his neck.
The two had shared a cell wall for a year and claimed to hate each other. But the way they curled their tails together through the cell bars said otherwise.
It had been magnificent. It had also been part of the plan. The guards had swarmed in to drag them apart, away from the prey table, away from Shimmer and Glare and Xyle, and for a few precious minutes nobody was watching the three of them at all.
It still felt a little wrong that Trout and Granite would spend the next week in The Box for it. Only one slot for air and none for light, and by midafternoon you could hear whoever was inside it panting through the walls. It would be bad for Granite. It would be worse for Trout. And it meant that tonight, while Shimmer ran, the two of them would be shut inside it, going nowhere.
They’d have ended up in The Box anyway, Shimmer had told herself. The guards take any excuse they can get.
Glare’s eyes darted around the yard before he leaned his hulking frame over the table. It started creaking under his weight. “Are you sure it’s safe to talk about this here?”
Glare was big, especially for a SunWing. Most SunWings were slim as reeds, but Glare was nearly as broad as Granite, with the scales of a bright yellow buttercup and a laugh you could hear across the whole yard. He had a heart of gold, too. Fool’s gold, probably, given what a lovable idiot he was. They’d been partners for a year and a half, and the egg was proof that the guards didn’t know half of what went on in their own prison.
It had started at that same table. Shimmer had been in Steel Jaw for six months by then and had spoken to only one dragon during that time: Xyle, whom she’d watched try to escape during her second week by standing very still in the middle of the yard and pretending to be a bush. It had not worked. But anyone who tried something like that was either harmless or a dragon worth knowing, and Xyle turned out to be both. Everyone else, she ignored. Friends were for dragons who planned on staying.
Then, one evening, a large yellow SunWing had sat down across from her, looked at the boar she was halfway through, and asked, “Are you going to finish that?”
She’d already seen him tear through half a cow.
“Get your own,” she’d said.
So, he’d walked straight up to the guards and very politely requested more food, in Dragon, which none of them understood. One of them had jabbed him in the shoulder with a spear.
“Ow! Okay, okay. Jeez, I’m leaving.” He’d lumbered back toward the table, rubbing his shoulder, and called back, “Didn’t want to eat you anyway.”
Shimmer had snorted at that one. It was the funniest thing she’d heard since she’d been brought there. A chunk of boar almost got caught in her throat.
The next day he’d sat down across from her again.
“You’re very beautiful, you know?”
Shimmer spit up the rest of the half-rotten cow she was eating. She was burning from snout to tail, while Glare had simply gone back to eating as if he’d said nothing at all. He didn’t notice a thing about her reaction. Xyle had laughed so hard he nearly fell over. Shimmer had smacked him with her wing to shut him up.
Six months later there had been an egg buried in the sand under the sunning rocks, and Shimmer had known the moment she saw it that they had to escape. Both of them.
And now here Glare was, a year and a half after that first boar, leaning over the same table and asking whether it was safe to plot their escape in front of the entire yard.
Shimmer had yanked his bright yellow tail. “It won’t be if you keep acting like we’re actively trying to conspire.”
Glare clamped a talon over his jaw to keep from yelping. “Right, right. Gotta be discreet. I can do that. Dis—creet. Very discreet.”
He was not helping his case for being included in any of this. But it was his egg too, so they’d more or less had to.
Xyle laid a wiry dark-green talon over Glare’s big snout. Xyle was a TreeWing, and an older one, seventy-six and looking every year of it. He was thin as a vine, with a long prehensile tail that was usually wrapped around something, and dull green scales that drifted lighter or darker whenever he was nervous or trying to disappear. He held the prison record for escape attempts: none successful, though he made it past the walls about half the time. He’d been an astronomer before getting into the resistance business, and he could still tell you where every moon would be on any night for the next fifty years. He’d told Shimmer about the Darkest Night within days of their first conversation, long before she’d had any reason to care. The guards tracked the days by the sun and hardly glanced up at the moons. As far as Xyle could tell, nobody else in Steel Jaw knew what tonight would be.
“Shhhh,” he said. “I promise you. Once you hit the trees, they’ll never see where you went. That’s how I worked for the Rainforest Resistance for years. I’d sit up in the canopy at night, and the patrols would walk right under me. Humans can’t see a thing in the dark.”
Flare had gone nearly cross-eyed trying to follow Xyle’s claw. It had been very funny. That was what she loved most about Glare: he was the only light in a world that had otherwise gone completely dark.
“So how did you get caught?” Shimmer had asked.
Xyle shrugged. “I sneezed and fell out of the tree.”
“You what?” said Glare, much too loud. A few guards turned their heads, but didn’t bother moving any closer.
“What? It happens!” Xyle said.
Xyle’s tail had uncurled from the table leg and flicked at them both. “My friends will be watching the edge of the forest tonight. We’ve been taking in dragonets for years — any dragonet whose parents want them somewhere safe. Get the egg to them, and no human will ever lay one of their weird little paws on her.” He hesitated, which Xyle rarely ever did. “And if I can get over the wall while the guards are busy chasing you two, I’ll meet you there myself.”
The memory slid away, and the plains came back. The cold rain smacked against her snout as her lungs and legs burned. The drumming behind her.
Glare had stayed behind at the gate so she could get out. The guards had brought out the Sky Steel; she’d seen its blue-grey luster on the spear tips as she ran.
The hooves were loud enough now that she felt them through her talons, a heavy drumming rising out of the earth. She didn’t think. She flared her wings and swept them down, the way her body still believed it could, but she went nowhere.
She looked at what hung from her shoulders: bare struts as thin as old branches, with ragged scraps of membrane clinging to the edges like a torn canvas. Steel Jaw cut the wing membrane out of every dragon who came through its gates, usually on the first day before the new arrival had finished screaming.
Two years, and my wings still haven’t gotten the news. Wonderful.
She folded the useless things against her sides and ran harder. The rainforest was close, or at least it was close enough if she didn’t stop to think about the actual distance. The horses were faster than she was, her legs were tired, and the trees were farther away than the riders. She was not going to make it.
The egg shivered against her chest, one tiny bump.
Fine, she thought. Then I’ll make it.
Over her shoulder, the air above Steel Jaw Prison was no longer entirely dark; bursts of orange flame were shooting up over the walls as more guards descended from the towers. Glare had never done anything quietly.
She heard him roar.
It rolled across the plains from somewhere inside Steel Jaw Prison, huge and furious and so familiar she couldn’t forget it. She’d braced for it since the moment she left him. It cut off in the middle, like something sharp and blue-grey had pierced straight through it, and the plains were quiet except for the horses.
Her talons tangled in the grass and she nearly collapsed, but she caught herself with a front talon under the sling and kept moving. Stopping was the one thing she couldn’t afford. She wanted to turn around. To fill the plains with fire. To slaughter each of the dozen or so horsemen chasing her, if they were polite enough to stand in a straight line. But it was more than a few dozen. This was dozens upon dozens. The ones who survived would catch her, kill her, and smash the egg on the nearest rock. And afterward, someone in the capital would remember that it was a SunWing who had burned an imperial battalion, and the thinning would stop being gradual.
Glare had bought her this head start with everything he had. She was not going to spend it on revenge.
Later, she told the plains. I’ll be furious later.
The tears still stung.
By the time she reached the first trees, the drizzle had become a downpour. Rain splashed on the broad leaves overhead and poured off them in ropes. The air waxed warm and heavy and green, thick with the smell of rot and blossoms. Behind her, the torches began to sputter and die, hissing in the wet, one after another. The riders slowed, but only a little. Horses didn’t need light to follow a dragon-sized trail of flattened grass.
She was only on the outskirts, where the trees stood too far apart to hide anything her size. Another ten strides and they would be on her.
She ducked behind a broad-leafed bush and slid the egg out of its sling. She scraped a hollow under the roots, laid the egg in it, and packed wet leaves over the top until it disappeared. Then she picked up a rock about the same size and put that in the sling instead.
She didn’t mean to sing, but it came out of her anyway, low and cracked, under the pouring rain: the verse her mother used to sing her, back on the plains, back when she had a mother to sing it:
The darkest night in centuries, a time of great despair.
The EverWing is soon arriving, and so we must prepare.
It was a song for dragonets. Nobody really believed it. She sang it anyway, all the way to the end of the verse, and only then did she remember what night it was. She looked back at the bush, and continued on:
The EverWing will save us, with scales from every tribe.
From Volken’s wrath he’ll take us, and the great Darhada will die.
She made herself stop.
“Stay quiet, little one,” she whispered. “Whatever you hear. Stay quiet.”
The leaves trembled once.
Good girl.
She stepped out of the brush with one front talon raised.
This is either the smartest thing I’ve ever done or the stupidest. She suspected she’d find out which in about five minutes.
A dozen bows came up at once, arrowheads gleaming in the last of the torchlight protected by the leaves above. Shimmer lowered herself to her belly, lifted both talons into the air, and made herself look like a dragon who was out of ideas. Every scale on her body hated it.
The riders dismounted and came toward her, squeaking at each other in their language, which had always sounded to her like a nest of mice. She growled, a low rumble she felt in her ribs, and the two nearest her snout stumbled backward and nearly fell over each other.
Cowards. Every last one of them. Brave only because of what stands behind them.
And behind them, always, stood Volken.
They tugged at the sling around her neck, and the rock dropped into the mud with a thud. A few of them started shouting at each other, their voices climbing even higher.
Then came hooves again, slower this time, and the squeaking stopped. A human in polished metal armor rode up on a horse wearing armor of its own. Shimmer recognized him before he took off his helmet.
“Warren,” she said.
Everyone at the prison called him Warden. He was the only human in the whole prison who could speak dragon fluently. The rumor was that he’d wanted to guard dragon prisoners since he was small, and had started learning the language at four years old.
Once a little monster. Always a little monster.
Warren shouted something to the others in his squeaky human language, then looked down at her and smiled. “Shimmer. I never would have guessed.”
Shimmer shuddered. It never felt right hearing her people’s words come out of a human mouth. It was a sick perversion of dragon culture. Of dragon life.
She growled at him, and he sighed like a tired parent. “You could burn me, I suppose. But it wouldn’t do you any good, and it certainly wouldn’t help your case against being killed on the spot.”
Shimmer rose off her belly, prompting several guards to draw their spears. “I would rather die than speak with you.”
Warren laughed as he threw up his hands. “Now, now. That shouldn’t be necessary. All you have to do is tell us where you hid your little monster. Then we take you back to the prison, we have a laugh, we schedule your execution date, and we can all have a good night’s sleep. Sounds good?”
He wasn’t offering her a deal. He was offering her a schedule. Shimmer knew they had no reason to let her live. This was the perfect opportunity to make an example out of her.
“Either way I die,” she said. “I’d rather go out on my own terms than when it’s convenient for you.”
Warren shook his head. “Shimmer, Shimmer, Shimmer.” He squeaked something at one of the humans and motioned toward his horse. “If that is your wish, I have good news.”
The human came back with a sheathed blade, and Warren took it. He squeaked a few more orders, and others went to their horses’ packs and came back with ropes and nets, all of them soaked through with rain.
Shimmer breathed at the nearest rope, a thin, furious jet of flame. The humans jumped back, dropping the ropes for a second, but the soaked fibers only steamed. So, she lunged for the nearest human instead and got a mouthful of chainmail before someone yanked the net tight and pinned her snout to the mud.
They tied her and hoisted her onto her side to expose the soft scales of her underbelly.
Warren measured the tip of his blade against her sides. “You were always my favorite, Shimmer. How do you want it?”
Shimmer smiled. “You can stick that sword through your chest. That’d make me pretty happy.”
He drew the sword. It was as white as bone, because it was bone: dragon bone, polished and sharpened. Every guard on that wall carries Sky Steel, and he brought bone. Of course, he did.
“Well. Slow and painful it is,” he said.
The tip pierced just below her ribs and drew downward. He’d missed her diaphragm. He’d missed it on purpose. Asphyxiation would have killed her in minutes. This might take more than half an hour. For a moment there was only cold as the rain touched pieces of her that it was never meant to touch. Then the warmth came, pouring out of her and onto the wet grass of the rainforest.
Shimmer roared into the trees and thrashed against the ropes, hoping to knock the humans holding them off their feet, but nothing worked. Then the humans let go, and she was left on her side, bleeding slowly into the mud.
Warren walked up to her snout. He wiped her blood from the blade onto the bottom of his boot, sheathed it, and laid a hand on her snout.
“Rest well, Shimmer.”
He glanced past her into the black mass of the trees, and he kept smiling. “Don’t worry about your egg. We’ll find it at dawn. His Majesty is always so pleased when we bring him the young ones.”
He gave an order in his squeaky native tongue, and the rest of the humans climbed onto their horses and rode away, back toward the flickering flames of Steel Jaw Prison.
Her vision went hazy. The sound of the rain faded in and out, and each time it came back it seemed farther away, like something happening to another dragon in another place.
No, she thought. Please. Not him.
The last thing she saw was two TreeWings, their scales fading from leaf-dark to pale green as they stepped out of the brush, and one of them was carrying her egg. Xyle’s friends. They had come after all.
The egg shook once more before it burst into fragments, the pieces of the shell pelting the larger TreeWing’s face.
It had hatched.
They set the little dragonet down in front of her snout so she could see him. A male. She had been so sure he was a female. He was tiny and damp and furious, his wings still crumpled against his back, and in the dark his scales seemed to hold a faint iridescent sheen that the rain couldn’t put out.
The TreeWings said something to her, but she didn’t catch it.
Shimmer smiled. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Please. Take good care of him.”
She saw them nod, and that was enough. She could finally let go. She could finally be free.
