The Coming of Dragons
First and foremost, this has nothing to do with any of my other stories or worlds. Nothing. At. All!
This is an older commission that I had placed. Mostly to see how a professional writer would interpret my ideas.
Has some adult scenes, and also has transformation (primary focus) and transgender elements.
If you enjoy it, please let the real author know.
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The Coming of Dragons
Written by Arian Mabe
(Amethyst Mare)
Commissioned by Walnut45
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Story and writing copyrighted to Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare).
Characters and story world copyrighted to Walnut45 and may not be used without the express permission of Walnut45.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
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Chapter One
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“This next stretch is a difficult one for those who haven’t been into this cave system before, please take care.”
Alex frowned, an older gentleman with a rough salt and pepper beard, though he was not a man who liked to at all be reminded of his age. It reminded him of years gone by, what he had lost, the scar on the line of his scar a physical remnant, his fingers gnarled and stiffening with a hint of arthritis. With the red helmet crammed down over the dome of his skull, no one could tell that he was more bald than with hair, though that in itself was something that he tried to hide too. Sandra nodded to him from the tail end of their expedition group, looking after those in their care as they always had.
His wife, Sandra, was a little shorter than him, though slight as if a breath of wind could blow her away – that was, of course, until one realised the inner strength that she had had to draw on. She was strong underneath, her muscles firm and toned, though her attire often hid that. What it could not hide was the tight line of her lips, as if her jaw was always clenched, her blue eyes tight at the corners. Those weren’t laughter lines to be found there.
Spelunking was considered an extreme sport of a reason, although not many understood the intricacies of it. It was about delving into the depths of the earth with a plan and a map of what was known and understood about the cave system, though there was an element of knowing where one had been when it came to exploring fresh tunnels. It was neither a beginner’s sport and exploration where one could, merely, expect to scale walls and work their way through perhaps even flooded caverns, depending on the location, but a matter of squeezing through small gaps, uncovering fresh territory to push the boundaries of what any single person had thought, prior that they were capable of.
“Are we going the right way?”
“Shush, they know what they’re doing.”
“How do you know that?”
Although Alex and Sandra’s eyes brushed over those that those words had come from, they did not pause, working their way deeper. They’d informed them all that it was a more dangerous route, not one for those who were inexperienced, though it was not often that they were listened to. As long as those that came with them on the exploration, however, were trained and could provide evidence of such practise and training, there was little they could do about it. It was worse to go into such systems on their own, after all, and Alex did not want to have anyone delving into something, alone, that they were nowhere near ready for.
He sighed minutely, keeping his feelings close. Students. They were both good and bad, something tightening around his heart as he turned his eyes from bold faces and worried faces alike. They reminded him of something, or someone, who had left a hole in his heart too long ago.
“Come on, we’ll get past this section and then it’ll open out again.”
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Their names were all known to him: Anniyah and Jenson, of course, he knew already. They had been on expeditions with him before and, although older than him and Sandra, their experience rendered them excellent spelunkers, expert cavers who were looking to keep active in their old age. That they were slow only made them more careful than others, less willing to take risks, which was a better quality to have when one was running a risk every time they entered the caves. That system was in North America, set back from a small, local town that was nothing in the grand scheme of the country, but a hotspot for some who could not help but be drawn to the area.
“I always feel at home down there,” Anniyah had said once, while they were sipping hot drinks after an expedition. “I can’t explain it… I just have to go back. There’s more to be seen.”
It kept Alex and Sandra sane, though that was for different reasons entirely. That was not something that either of them had to think about while they were in the darkness, their head torches lighting the way, harnesses snug around them, all exactly as it needed to be. The students, however, had needed more help than them in getting into their equipment, their personal gear all hired or borrowed – none of which was to the standards that Sandra expected. With her greying-blonde hair pulled back in a tight, serious ponytail, she had looked it all over and shaken her head.
“You’ll use some of ours. This head torch will go within two hours.”
The girl, for Sandra could only see her as such, even though she was an adult at university like the rest of the group that had joined them, swallowed hard, a gleam of moisture at the corners of her eyes. Isla-Rae had soft features and dark hair, though there was not much of that to be seen when it was stuffed into her helmet. Sandra supposed she was mixed-race, with the light brown of her skin, lighter than many she knew, but that sort of thing had never registered much to her. The shades blended, anyway, when they were down in the caves.
“You mean we’re going to be down there for longer?”
Isla-Rae swallowed hard. She had to be strong, had to do it. She didn’t know who she was trying to impress but something pushed her on, step by step, her legs trembling as she eased herself into the harness as if she was afraid of tightening that too much. It fit well, even though Sandra did it up another notch for her, the older woman’s hands both firm and gentle at the same time. She reminded her of her own mother, though she had not seen her in years.
No. That was not a thought for that time as she stayed close to Alan, a slender built man who didn’t seem like he was suited to spelunking. He pushed his glasses up his nose again even though they were already in place, wriggling through a narrow gap with ease compared to some of the larger men in their expedition who were more thickly built. Freckles splashed his nose and brown hair was trimmed neatly short under his helmet, using his natural features, his slenderness, to his advantage to get through tighter gaps and down into a more open cavern.
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“It’s such a shame that I couldn’t bring my equipment down here,” he grumbled, though it was hard for him to appear upset at anything. “Wow, this has to be twenty metres high!”
It may not have been that impressive for those experienced in spelunking, more so than him as a scientist with a hankering for knowledge, but Alan’s wonder was absolute as he turned and turned, watching the others emerge from the tunnel that they had been travelling through. It had been mostly a crawling endeavour there but something that they were used to well enough, even though the gentleman with darker, olive-tone skin seemed a little green around the gills when he near enough toppled out.
“Erf…”
Alan extended his hand to help him up but was nearly yanked off his feet as Santino pulled too hard on him, putting too much of his weight and trust in Alan to assist him. Although he staggered, Santino still had a watery smile for them, his bravado shining through despite his trepidation.
“Wow… Look at that! Hah, those slow-coaches just can’t keep up back there, can they?”
He grinned, his smile strengthening, as he looked back to those following: Brent, Arya and Kelvin. They all knew one another in some capacity, though no one could have said that they had been close at university together, past the exams of their final year while, of course, Alan was angling to go forward for his master’s degree and post-graduate work. He hadn’t decided on what he wanted to do yet while Santino was just grateful to be done with it all, just about scraping through with the grades he needed and being grateful for that. Of course, that wasn’t something that he let on to anyone.
“Come on!”
He cupped his hands to his lips and shouted, voice echoing and bouncing painfully off the cave walls. Alan winced and moved away to stand with Isla-Rae while Alex waited on the rest, Anniyah and Jenson already with him. It was only the students and Sandra bringing up the tail-end of their procession that they had to worry about then, though everything seemed to be progressing more smoothly than expected.
“There shouldn’t be much more of a tight squeeze as we go on,” Alex said, his map in hand, though he already knew the route ahead as if he had travelled it before. “Everyone okay back there?”
Arya grinned as she swung her legs down from the tunnel, which was raised slightly from the ground level where it opened up into the larger cavern, hopping down as if she had been doing it all her life.
“Yeah! This is amazing! And you guys do it all the time?”
Although Alex had a smile for her, Anniyah and Jenson were happier to converse with her, regaling her with tales of that particular cavern system. Although Anniyah was from Europe, she had an accent that would be difficult to place, a mix of her home in
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Italy and American, broadened by her travels, Jenson was dark-skinned and impossible to mistake as anyone but African American. His skin was the only one that blended so softly into the caving systems that it was very much as if he was meant to be there, the light of his eyes and his smile easing into the dark wrinkles around his eyes, sunspots marking his cheeks.
“The route we’re going today is new though, a new adventure,” Jenson said happily, still outspoken for a man without being overbearing. “You’d think that we shouldn’t be diving into this at our age but it’s whatever keeps you young! You remember that now, Arya!”
He knew everyone’s names and faces, though Brent perhaps was the one amongst the students who was best suited to spelunking. He was a jock, which, surprisingly, was only known because Arya had revealed it, being the closest to him, though his penchant for sports and fitness came quite naturally to both the man and his lips. He talked easily about soccer with Santino, despite preferring football, and they’d already made plans to have a game between their “friendly” teams when they were back in dorms and waiting on final grades. Alan, based in the United Kingdom before he had come abroad to the States to study a specialist niche of science that he couldn’t get closer to home, had been confused about the terms for a while, however, before understanding that “football” was, in fact, “rugby”.
What a strange world it was that they lived in with so many terms bouncing around all seemingly for the same things. He even called “spelunking” something different!
The cavern was beautiful, however, water streaming down one wall over rock formations that were worn smooth with the passage of both time and that very water. Alan trailed his fingers softly through it, disrupting the trickle for a moment, yet time had come to move on already. It was not yet the stopping point where they were to rest on their expedition and they had to go deeper still.
Scaling the wall to the next tunnel was trickier, though it was not so steep that they had to set up a channel of bolts to climb. Something that was further than two, perhaps not even three, metres did not need extreme techniques or fixed bolts and rope to which to clip one’s harness for safety purposes. Those features were generally set up along better-known routes and not set up, initially, on exploration endeavours where new tunnel systems were being explored, and logged: not the case for them. They had, however, come across some incidents of that in the earlier part of the caves where many travellers and thrill-seekers had come to explore, whether they were seasoned cavers or those more of the touristy kind. Those with less experience, of course, did not go deeper, barely an hour or so into the caves themselves.
Arya grunted as she scaled the wall, accepting a strong hand from Alex to help her up, though there was a part of her that would have much preferred that it was Brent helping her up. His blonde hair and broad shoulders (not to mention his chest) would have drawn anyone’s eye and yet she had more than just an eye for him, blushing mildly as she eased past him to take a more forward role.
“Excuse me.”
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It was polite and yet something of a flirt too could be contained in two little words, Alan scrambling up behind them, Isla-Rae taking the most effort to get up there. She had not quite known what she was signing up for even as Santino laughed behind her, his hands on his hips. Kelvin was the quietest of them all, so quiet, in fact, that no one even noticed he was there most of the time – much less when Santino accidentally jostled him.
“Come on – get up there! You’re holding the rest of us up!”
Isla-Rae’s face burned with embarrassment, stomaching churning, but she somehow managed to heft herself up without too much further trouble, standing comfortably in the tunnel. Kelvin didn’t have any trouble, a moderate man who didn’t want to be obtrusive, always observing, always watching, never spending too many words. At least the tunnel was not too small, though he was wondering just what he was doing out there, berating himself for taking a chance when, really, he would have been quite comfortable at home with a good book. But he’d read that novel about being underground, trapped, and it had made him wonder what those characters had seen in more detail. Of course, they’d gotten out in good time, so that was not a problem at all. He didn’t think they were going to get trapped down there, even if the walls of the tunnel seemed to press more urgently in around him than ever.
The tunnel… Most of them were okay with it after the narrower squeeze of the one earlier where they had been carefully wriggling, though neither was that tight enough, truly, to snag harnesses or packs, not really. He could see that for himself, as much as it felt like the sort of expedition that could go wrong at a moment’s notice. It was large enough that only Jenson and Brent, the tallest of them, had to crouch a little, the others managing to walk through without hindrance. Sandra hopped up into the tunnel as if it was no trouble at all, stones crunching and shifting underfoot.
Running water pricked at their ears, but there was no sense of where it was coming from, flashlights in hand and glancing off the rounded cave walls as they worked their way through. Step by step took them where they needed to go, yet none of them, as yet, could have possibly understood the gravity of what was set to occur that day.
“How far is it?”
“Oh, quiet… We’ll get there when we get there!”
Whereas Brent constantly had an easy smile on his face, Santino bounced about from one person to the other, squeezing by when the tunnel tightened, wanting to be involved in everything. He didn’t seem to be as queasy as he had been in the narrower tunnel, even though it should have been something that he should have expected with that expedition. Alex shook his head, though there was a part of him too that wondered at his energy and if he had ever had that.
Maybe back before the accident…
But that memory brought a pang with it as they crossed a small, underground stream, the cave system opening directly above the stream where it crossed their tunnel. There were off-shoots to their tunnel, gaping holes that snarled and yawned and threatened
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to swallow them up if they strayed from the group, Isla-Rae keeping so close that she constantly bumped into people.
“Oh! Sorry!”
She wasn’t so sure that she was sorry, however. She just wanted to be near, fearing getting lost. What if she turned around and no one was there, leaving her trapped down there forever? Of course, there would be no forever for someone stuck in the caves: they’d die, there was no doubt about that. But she didn’t want to be stuck, didn’t want to die, breath catching in her throat as her vision wavered and she pushed on. Brent didn’t mind too much if she stood on his heels, at least.
Yet the cavern that their tunnel opened into… Well, to say that it was worth coming for was an understatement. Expansive with a ceiling so high that their torchlight could not reach it, flashlights sweeping back and forth as even Anniyah and Sandra, experienced as they were, let out twin gasps, it begged the eye and every drop of attention that they had to give. The walls were dry, perfectly so, carvings and markings layered into them, though they appeared to have been painted too, or even dyed. Scenes and expanses unlike anything at all that they could have ever seen before stretched into the darkness, torchlight revealing more as they advanced, step by step, into the belly of the cave system.
It was not for them and all for them, for they were not as they were supposed to be, not in the presence of such grandeur. The students could not have known what they were looking at, even Alan appearing a little uncertain as he looked back and forth. Was that something that was supposed to be there? The floor dropped off before them, scooping down into a moat-like feature that surrounded a plinth in the middle, that would have been large enough to hold several double-decker buses. It was hard to take in the scale of the enormous cavern with a single sweep and, indeed, the other side of the raised plinth in the centre could not be seen with the light from their head torches alone.
“Heavens…”
Even Alex was stunned, his lower jaw easing ever so slightly slack, though he had thought that he had seen everything that there was to see down there. His heart pounded and he wiped sweat from his brow, Sandra stepping up to his side.
“Julia would have loved to see it.”
Again, the steely fist tightened around his heart. It was always there, but there were some times that it liked to make itself known more than others.
It was not to be dug through, however, at such a pivotal moment, a moment that would change everything for everyone there. Some may think it for the better while others, initially, for the worse, but the wheels of change had already been set in motion the very moment that they had set foot, together, in the tunnel system. The cavern had called them all there, individually, and they had had no option but to heed the call of something far greater than they were alone.
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But together…they could take that greatness head-on.
“Here, take my second camera…”
That had been one item that Alex and Sandra had permitted Alan to bring and he excitedly thrust it into Isla-Rae’s hands, already levelling his own. They did not know whether flash photography would damage the painting, if not the engraving, that they found there, but it had to be catalogued and logged, placed somewhere where they could more easily examine it later. Kelvin turned over a piece of equipment of Alan’s in his hands, not sure how to use it. Something about measuring moisture levels in a place? Was that even necessary? Something about the place set the hairs on the back of his neck lifting, shifting his weight, licking his lips as he looked around.
Leave.
But Kelvin couldn’t. No one could. It was not the path in life that they were supposed to take and he should have known more than enough about fate from his fantasy and adventure books, the films he had devoured, than anyone else.
Alex crouched, marking the route on his map and detailing the exact turns they had taken, although a path back to the surface had already been laid down for them, ensuring that their safety was kept well in hand at all times.
While he took care of the required work, Sandra wandered, dipping down into the moat-like feature that surrounded the plinth and tableau of rock. She was able to scale it easily, simply using a pair of climbing axes, although there was a part of her too that loathed causing damage to the cave, the secret that they had uncovered there that day.
Some secrets were never meant to be secrets.
She shivered. Was that a thought of hers? It didn’t seem like her own voice in her head at all…
But she had to climb, had to go on, huffing with the hasty exertion required to get up onto the tableau, on her own up there but more than confident enough in her ability to know that she would be able to get down if needed. Her chest heaved for breath and yet a sense of simply being alive thrummed through her veins, heart pounding, her body trembling with every beat.
Sandra gulped. Was she vibrating? She had to get her breathing under control, maybe there was something down there that was restricting her breath in some way. Yet there was nothing for her to fear as she crouched, splaying her fingers out over a raised embossed carving, strangely placed on the edge of the plinth. A reptile of some kind? She could see the teeth, something like horns, a long tail…
She stiffened. Not a lizard but something from childhood stories, stories that she had told to Julia so very long ago when there had not been a lingering taste of bitter alcohol in the back of her mouth. What on earth was something like that doing down there? Just who had come before them.
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Yet the answer to that question, simply, was that no one had ever, in fact, been there before them. They were the first, the group that was always meant to come together at the same time to bring forth a new age, even if they had not said that they were ready and prepared to do so out loud.
Sometimes, the choice was taken from people.
Alex looked up, unable to see Sandra. And yet he knew that something was wrong as the others explored, taking as many photographs as they could with phones and cameras alike, Alan taking a few readings that Alex could not have said that he was as interested in as the history of the place. Someone had been there and he wanted to know, but his heart pulled for his wife too demandingly and urgently for him to chastise Alan for bringing in equipment that had not been tested and allowed beforehand.
“Sandra?”
His throat tightened. Something was wrong, something was very wrong, even if he could not say how, heart pounding he had to reach her! His feet were in motion before his mind had even caught up with the urgency of his body, throwing himself at the stone wall, already down in the “moat”, heaving for breath. He sweated profusely, the harness suddenly too tight and restrictive, climbing and scaling the path that Sandra had taken. Dimly, he was aware of Jenson calling out to him, but he was too manic to stop and explain, desperate to get to Sandra’s side at all costs.
And yet what he saw on top of the tableau was nothing that would soothe his mind as his wife collapsed to all fours, on her knees, staring at her hands as they shook and shook.
“Al…” Her face twisted, skin bulging and pushing out as if there was something inside that was apt to come out. “Alex… Alex… What…”
He grabbed her, ripping off his gloves, feeling her forehead, though that was not enough to diagnose what was wrong with her. Screams and shouts bounced off the walls, a cacophony of mayhem, yet the sickness in his stomach was concern for her and not regret in the slightest that they had come down there that day.
In the presence of death, one must choose life to go on.
Sandra groaned, someone else by her side that was not her husband, though she did not recognise Anniyah in a moment like that. Her face pushed out, changing shape, horror in her heart, though no matter how much she clawed and pulled at her face, there was no changing what was happening to her. To call a halt to it would have been to break the very fabric of time and space that had brought them there, fatefully, and she was not so strong as yet to take such matters in charge and in hand.
Her skin darkened, taking on a deep blue hue, yet that seemed “right”, in a strange sort of way, as scales prickled to life all over her body, layering her skin and flesh. Blood pumped just as it always had but her chest rounded out, breaking through her
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clothes and her harness, breasts flattening as if they had never existed, to begin with. There was no feeling of nudity as her body burst through her clothes, tatters of quality fabric hanging from her, the strapping of good quality and useless as she grew and grew. Sandra’s spine ached, stretching and pulling into a new position where she would have her younger flexibility, easing out from the base too. She didn’t yet know what was happening as she grunted and trembled, her husband shouting her name, though she was hardly in a place that she could respond to him, sick, chilling dread seeping from her, moment by moment.
But there was something else there, a sense of warmth flowing through her to her new scales, a sense of completion as every one of them settled into place on her body. It was as if they were merely coming home to her, destined to be there, security encompassing her, wrapping her up in the arms of a mother who had passed on, quietly in her sleep, so very many years ago.
Is this how it’s meant to be?
She lifted her head, her jaw stronger and longer, teeth sharpening, lining a face that was that of a reptile and not a human. She could not have said just how there was such clarity about what was happening to her there in her mind, but she knew, she just knew. Something bony protruded from the back of her head and marked around her cheek, though it did not restrict her in opening and closing her mouth at all, her neck feeling like it was being stretched. Nothing about her body was under her control anymore, though that was a feeling that she was well familiar with, grunting as she pressed her head into Alex’s hands, his fingers trembling as they brushed over new scales.
“Alex…”
His brow furrowed.
“Sandra? Sandra, say something!”
Yet she had and she could not understand why he had not understood her. Maybe it was better to rest there for a while and take great, big shuddering gasps of air as her chest rounded out. Her stomach tucked up towards her legs as she settled onto four legs, hands twisting into claws, the nails breaking and splintering off into something sharper and more deadly. Was she a bird? The claws were black, curving as they tried to dig into the rock, though she did not understand their presence there.
No…
Not a bird.
Oh no… No, birds did not have scales, not like Sandra had, but she would not laugh at such a thing in the seriousness of a moment like that. Her back took on the shape it was meant to, rounded like a hill, and a tail lashing out behind, the tip incredibly slender and twisting back and forth as if it was already looking for something to grasp onto. Yet she had to, somehow, hold herself there as she heaved and panted, tongue
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fluttering narrowly out between rows of sharp teeth, her shoulder blades aching as something new tried to make itself known.
The world around her trembled – and then Alex was there, shouting, filling her vision.
“Come on!” Her husband grabbed at her, pointing to a new tunnel. “I know where this joins up! Sandra… Oh, god, love… Love, we’ve got to get out of here! Come with me! Now!”
Sandra may not have understood the urgency in his tone, still reeling from the shock of her transformation, but she would have followed her husband into the pits of hell themselves. Following him to safety, after that, was hardly a tall ask and she lumbered after him, nails scraping up and out into oddly hooked claws, though they were not so easily breakable. Her size grew and grew as she lumbered, tripping over her own feet, not yet understanding how to walk on four legs. How could she when she had been a biped for her whole life?
Her throat tightened but not with emotion, odd mirth bubbling up within her. Maybe she was losing her mind. That would make more sense than her feeling good about what was happening to her.
He dragged her out and she crawled after him, grunting as her body forced its way through the rocks. The tunnels were too small and constrictive, but her body seemed able to wriggle and worm its way through them, shattering rock and leaving destruction, and a wider path, in her wake. It made no sense just how she was able to get through such tight spaces when everything pressed in constrictively around her, the sense of rocks breaking and falling away strange and foreign to her.
The surface, however, beckoned as she pressed on, working her way up and up and up, following her husband to the light beyond. Little did she know that there was still someone in the belly of the cavern that was caught up in changes that they could not control…
Isla-Rae screamed and pressed herself back flat to the wall as Brent hunched over, contorting in such a way that she had thought, for a horrifying moment, that he was possessed. But, no, that was something that only happened in horror films and was not the truth of the true terror snatching him up for his own. Alan shouted something that washed over her, Arya grabbing her arm to drag her away, yet no one could help Brent as his skin turned light, a pale shade somewhere between a hint at gold and white.
He groaned, twisting his head back and forth, but there was no controlling what was happening to him, no calling it back once it had begun. His heart pounded more strongly than ever as if it had grown larger, though he would only uncover the truth of that later on. His body was no longer his own to control as he grunted and heaved, neck extending, something pushing from the back of his skull. His transformation was not the same as Sandra’s, although he did not have the luxury of seeing what was to happen to him ahead of time, his muzzle shaping up into a delicate snout and eyes moving a little so that he could see more around him. The tiniest blind spot remained in front of his nose and his horns curved up and around like those of a ram, sensation
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fading from them as soon as they had lodged themselves in place. He groaned and dipped his nose down, but Arya was there, holding him firm, telling him to get up, to find his feet again.
He had to try, had to for her, but his hands were not hands anymore. As scales burst and tickled into itchy life all over his body, his hands spread out into claw-like features instead, something that he could have found on a lizard, but still larger and better able to bear weight. He shuddered. He may not have wanted to study all that much, but he knew that larger creatures had larger feet and claws and that stuff…only because his younger brother had been ridiculously into that kind of stuff. Some odd facts remained lodged in his head as his back rounded into an arch that pulled him up into position, each breath coming more easily as his lungs expanded.
“Brent! You’ve got to go! Alex said, fuck, it’s Sandra – you too! You’ve got to get out of here!”
Arya grabbed his face, though that felt too intimate for such a moment, trembling as her eyes brimmed over with tears. She hated how stress brought forth that reaction in her, but it was not something she could control and she would just have to deal with it, just to get Brent out of there. She couldn’t put words to the twisted monstrosity of a beast that their leader had dragged out of the cave but all she knew was that they all had to follow, flashlights swinging madly, glancing off the walls without illuminating anything at all that could possibly have been of any use to them.
But pressing on… Yes, that was all they could do.
She pushed him bodily, though Brent was already as big as a pony, his legs shifting and wobbling, setting him down on four legs and not two, arms adjusting themselves. His front feet may have looked like they could grip and hold but they were not the hands that he should have had as she screamed at him to move, to get out, to get on, to do something, anything. He scrambled, grey claws digging into the ground, his neck long but not as great as Sandra’s had turned out to be. Not yet, at least.
Eventually, the transforming creature lumbered into motion, ungainly and wobbly, as if he had been born again. Brent groaned and tried to do as Arya bid him to, though he had to be led by her, rope looped around his horns so that she could drag him on, hauling his transforming body through the tunnel that Alex had taken back up to the surface even though she was mostly just directing him. There was no human on earth, after all, that could move any dragon with sheer force of will alone.
Yet out he had to go and the others scrabbled along with them, though they used up too much air, giving themselves the impression that they were running out of it as they fled for the surface with all the strength they had left in their bodies. Sweaty fingers scrabbled, Alan not sure at all where he had left his gloves, Santino muttering things in Spanish that, frankly, he wasn’t even sure he understood. No one would ever be able to tell just what they would do in such a moment of panic until it happened to them: the results, to all, were surprising if not understandable.
The day had greyed out with cloud cover outside as they burst into a rocky landscape, though it was still so much brighter that they blinked and cursed, trying to see, even
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as Sandra and Brent breathed more easily in the greater space. Without rocks closing in around them, their transformations were free to complete exactly as they were, sides billowing out, rounding into the belly and sides of something more animalistic and Sandra’s wings finally spreading as she bellowed out a roar that could only ever come from the throat of a dragon.
Brent shuddered, looking up to the larger, deep blue dragoness, his scales finer as he grew, but there was something different about him, something pulling at the pit of his stomach that he could not yet put his finger on. Did he even have fingers anymore? He didn’t know what he should think about that as he stood and braced on all four feet, tail swinging out, a thicker appendage than that which Sandra had. The dragoness swayed before him, head drooping, her eyelids heavier, though he understood just how drained she was even in that moment. He felt it too, aching through his bones as his wings too finally came to life, spreading and stretching, bones laced with light membrane that did not feel as strong as it was. His insides felt hollow, bones so light, though that was apt for a creature, of course, that was meant to be a queen of the skies?
Queen?
That didn’t make sense. A strange thought. He tried to push it away, scales defining themselves down his body. He had not noticed the colour previously but that might have been due to the shift in the shades, darting and dancing between blue and green as if he was painted to be a forest pool on a summer’s day. He shifted his weight, grunting thickly in the back of his throat, the weight of his horns tipping his head too much to one side. He just couldn’t seem to balance it quite right, feeling as if he was wearing a helmet that was too heavy, strangely so.
The others swarmed around him, but he could not think like that, their cries nothing more than gibberish to him. Were they speaking English? His head pounded too much to tell as he peered down, everyone that he’d known smaller, smaller than they had been.
Nothing made sense, not even as light ridges defined themselves down the lines of his curved horns, showing the shape of them a little more. He shook as his wings spread, growing the bone and muscle from where his shoulder blades may have been, though it was difficult to tell even with the itching, pulling sensation, in part, to guide him.
Out and out and out… It was stranger even than the tail curling back and forth behind him, another appendage that he would have to learn to control, though he didn’t know why, either, he was thinking that. Thoughts that were not his own bounced off the inside of his skull, his head reeling, gasping and panting as his tongue slimmed down within his mouth. His teeth were sharper, but his tongue seemed to know to keep away from them, fangs pulling into points like rows of stalagmites and stalactites, dripping with saliva.
He panted, eyeing up his wings, Alan before him, flapping his hands. What good was that going to do? The human only seemed to come up to his shoulder and dropped
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away even more as his length lengthened, awkward on all fours but finding it more comfortable than trying to stand on his feet.
Brent grunted. His feet… Did he even have hands anymore? The perspective was all wrong as he looked down at his own “hands”, the grey claws, how they dug into the ground, the membranes stretching to life down his wings, translucent with a light hint of blue green that could have been true turquoise, but strong, cupping and holding the air even then. He might have considered them bat-like but it was hard to think about anything much as he wriggled in place, something strange shifting under him, his crotch… His tail?
It wriggled at his mere thinking of it, but maybe he should have considered the strange, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach a little more, why something had pulled inside him. It was not just his digestive and life-functioning organs, after all, that had grown and found a new place to settle inside him during the change. There was something more, though Brent would never quite be able to say how he knew, without knowing, a startling shock of revelation.
No!
He twisted around, looking under his tail, jaws agape, gasping.
No…
No, he would not believe it.
Ah, for that was the crux of it as Brent stumbled and gasped, tongue drooling out and saliva spilling forth as if she suddenly was no longer able to control that. Her head pounded and roared for Brent was no longer a male, her new genitalia neatly tucked within a slit that lay beneath her tail, ready and waiting for whenever it would be needed. Her past reeled before her, presenting her with everyone that she had been with and everyone that she had lost, everything she had lost, the changes so enormous that it simply…was too much.
She? He? She scrambled at the truth. She must have made a mistake, maybe that was just…where a penis was tucked away too? She must have jumped to conclusions, yet there was no time for her racing mind to find the right answer, not even then.
“Brent!”
Santino rushed to his side, the only one who seemed to have enough strength left in his limbs, though running towards a collapsing dragon as unconsciousness claimed her was probably not the smartest thing to do. No one else knew that the dragons, both, were female, Santino floundering, not knowing whether to throw cold water over the dragon or slap their face. That was what they did in films, wasn’t it, to wake people up? But what could anyone do about waking a dragon up? What even were they – half-human and half-dragon? Brent shuddered away and Santino pressed on, grabbing at a backpack, for all the good that that would do.
“Oh… Oh, my hands…”
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Alan held his hands up as if scientifically fascinated, his weight shifting back onto his heels, his boots with the good grip underneath feeling tight. No one had noticed Brent or Sandra losing their shoes in the madness of their bodily changes, but everyone was at liberty to watch his changes far more slowly progress as Brent lifted her head. Kneeling beside the dragon, Santino rubbed her shoulder soothingly, though even he could not be sure how much comfort he was giving, considering the trouble that all of them felt themselves to be in at that moment in time. It was nothing that any of them could ever have imagined as Alan panted and shrugged, trying to get out of his caving harness and the clothes beneath while he lost dexterity in his fingers.
“Ah, should I help you with that?”
Jenson and Anniyah did not know what to do. It should have been Alex and Sandra taking care of details like that when an incident had occurred but, frankly, Alex had more important things on his mind as his dragon-wife stretched out her wings, complete with pale blue membranes, in turn. She wondrously examined them, though she was not yet entirely present in reality the final changes etching themselves into the detail of her quadruped dragoness body. Her scales defined themselves in various shades of blue, not the deep blue only of her initial transformation, her horns teasing out in straight-ish points, her eyes fading to aquamarine, not the enticing blue of her human form. It was a form, after all, the human still in there, the dragoness turning her head back and forth as if to get a better feel of her surroundings.
Why did this happen?
It was wrong to be so calm as she tried to lift a foot (or hand? What did she even call that anymore?) and comfort Alex, her husband’s eyes wet with tears, as much as he strove to hide it from her. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, but he didn’t seem to understand her croons and growls, finding her voice, though it was thick in her throat, needing to work a far different voice box than what Sandra could have claimed to have previously.
“Al…Ah…Al…” She tried, pulling her head back and surprising herself with just how far her neck went. “Al…Al…ex…”
“Yes, yes, it’s me, love, oh lord…” He wept openly, clinging to her as she awkwardly folded a foreleg around him. “Sandra… Sandra, what’s happened to you?”
“Alex… It’s…okay.”
The words came more easily the more she worked out how to move her lips and tongue to sound them out, though they were in a language that would not have been understood by any normal humans. Alex looked up at her, her expression calm and serene, no worry lines in her muzzle, no jots of tension that needed easing out there. For she knew that there was nothing to worry about, a feeling of absolute calm settling over her, the first of them all, the dragoness that would lead them all to a place of safety.
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And it was up to her to take that role in hand, gently nuzzling her husband (she bumped him a little roughly, in all matter of fact, something that she would need to learn how to temper the force of) and moving off. She stumbled but caught herself, wings flaring out naturally for balance, and she found that her tail swung easily to act as a balancer. Even then, she could not resist wondering just how that tail would work when she was airborne.
Airborne?
Maybe later. Alan grunted and rocked on all fours, trying to hold himself steady even as panic overtook him, his clothes tighter and tighter even as Anniyah struggled to help him out. No one knew what to do, which was just what Sandra was there for.
“Easy there, young ones,” Sandra said, shaking out the soreness from her spine as she walked, however unsteadily, over to the lying, panting Brent and the transforming Alan. “It doesn’t hurt… I don’t know what this is all about, but just take big, deep breaths, okay? It’s all going to be okay, don’t worry, everything’s going to be just fine.”
She didn’t talk like a human anymore, but Alan seemed to understand her, at least in part, nodding tightly. He gaped like a fish, chest too tightly constricted for breath, but there was something in her warmly soothing tone that eased it a little. He didn’t want to appear out of sorts, embarrassed to have all eyes on him, though he already knew quite what was to happen to him. They clustered around, getting him out of his harness, his jacket, his T-shirt, leaving the clothes on his bottom half for his modesty. That would be needed, thankfully, in time as his gender changes, the transformation slow and subtle, treating them all to what would and could happen to them.
For it was already set in the fates of the stars above, even if no one wanted to acknowledge it just yet. Soon, however, they would all know what path it was that destiny had set out for him. The sun loomed overhead, bearing witness to the time taken for Alan’s transformation to tick on, everyone who could clustered around, trying to help him, soothe him. Alan grunted, his lips thick and lacking in the delicacy of speech, but he could not do anything but allow it to carry on, all as it was supposed to.
The day moved on as Brent found her feet again and clamped her tail down. She was denying it still, but…she had to look, had to see, had to…try to understand what had happened to her. Still, she wanted to think that she was making it all up, that she had made a mistake, that that “change” in her could not have reached her most intimate of regions.
She took a breath. It did not steady her, not as she tried to settle, tried to make sense of the thoughts racing through her head, unspoken to anyone else and churning in her guts.
What if she really was a female? What if she was no longer male? What then?
No… No, it could not be. She’d lost her shaft, that much was obvious, but no one really was showing anything like that… She knew without knowing – but she knew too, didn’t she? Brent growled softly, shaking her head from side to side, trembling in place. While
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their eyes weren’t on her, she peered more closely under her tail. Surely, without a slit at the bare minimum in the right place…she could not still be…male…
She kept her back to the others, refusing to let anyone see that she was, well, a dragoness not a man anymore. She wasn’t even sure if she believed it for herself – maybe she’d gotten it wrong? It could be true, really, if she had gone through such a big change, but there was still something in her that said that if she didn’t have a malehood, well… It was self-explanatory, surely? In a way, she assumed more than “knew” that she had transformed from male to female, becoming not only a dragon but a dragoness.
She didn’t know why she hid it though, for it was not as if it was something she had chosen, but it felt like a cruel trick played at Halloween, something not real at all, a nightmare that she would have to wake up from sooner or later. She would have thought that her friends were in on it, if she had been around her old gang, twisting in worry, confusion. Maybe she was wrong? Maybe there’d been a mistake? But that was not something that she would get an answer to until later.
Yet it was not, could not be, and she would have to face up to the reality of trading her strong human body for a similarly strong draconic one. She tried to stay close to Alan, wondering if she’d need to find some way to warn him, but that would have revealed that she was a female too and…Brent just wasn’t ready for it.
Alan’s back rounded up into the shape of a dragon’s humped back, stronger at the hind end, dipping at the shoulders and then rising up and up over the curve of his hindquarters, strength rising where there had not been any before. That was two hours into his transformation, his breath laboured and yet not outside a boundary that he could control.
A tail stretched out but the line of spikes down his back slowly made themselves known, skin becoming scales in shades of purple and violet, dipping through the hues as if he had been painted with an artist’s brush. That was strange… Strange but in a nice kind of way. He rolled his head to the side, trying to turn, but it was hard to do that when his neck felt “funny”, stiff and clunky, as if he no longer had enough muscles there to turn his head.
Muscles rose where there had been none before, though he remained lighter and lither than Brent, a slim and svelte form of a dragoness taking place over the coming hours. Four hours or five? Someone was keeping time, but Alan struggled to focus as his eyes shifted position, still mostly facing forward in a predator’s gaze but still different to what he was used to. Some things like that, after all, would take time to become accustomed to them. It felt more comfortable to stay on all fours, though he lay down, his shoulders shifting, bones grating lightly against one another, though there was no pain in it.
His tail twitched, the line of light spines going down the full length jostling back and forth, not all moving in the same direction at once. Even to him, in such a state, that was interesting, very much so…
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Although all stayed close to Alan, Isla-Rae hunkered down with Kelvin, the man fluttering and dithering, not knowing how to comfort her as she rocked back and forth, crouched like a gnome. One thing he knew, however, was that he shouldn’t refer to Isla-Rae as a gnome, not even as her dark hair fell across her chin like a little gnome’s beard.
“It’s…ah…” He fished for the right words. “It’s not going to happen to us. It’s not… Well, things… You see…”
“Don’t try to make this better, Kelvin,” she muttered into her legs, sitting on a rock as she hugged them to her chest. “This isn’t right, none of it is. There’s something really, really wrong here, we’re all going, something’s going to take us…”
“No! No one is taken or going anywhere.”
Jenson held her firmly by the shoulders, yet he did not have the comforting words that should have been spent, eyes fierce as his fingers dug in just the right amount. Alan grunted before them, catching their attention, though Isla-Rae appreciated his firm hold. Sometimes everyone needed a moment like that to root them back in reality.
Yet Alan was due to find out something different indeed as her body changed, finally bursting through her trousers, the thick ones that were intended to protect his body when in the caves – not that that was a point anymore. Yet it was at that moment that her genitalia shifted, tickling back up into her body, though it was such a smooth shifting of all that she had known that she barely realised that it was happening even then. Her tail wriggled back and forth, as thick around at the base as her wrist had been, though even that still had time to grow.
But she could not be called a “he” anymore, not even if she did not know that that was the case. Alan tried to stand, shifting her weight from one hind leg to the other, trying to lick her lips as her tongue slipped halfway between human and draconian, her muzzle lightly defined yet with a strong jaw still. She groaned, eyes widening, feeling different without being able to say why, her tail flicking, the tip pointed with spikes that were thick enough to crack rocks, if she put enough pressure behind it. Alan shivered. There was a part of her that wanted to see that already as her eyes locked onto those spikes, how they could be used as a club.
“Www…” She fought with the words, wrapping her tongue around them. “Wwwhat…”
What in Einstein’s name was happening? She didn’t believe in any gods, but it was hard to see what was taking place as anything but a fantasy of the highest order. Her back end didn’t feel right but could she put all of that down to her transformation? Something pulled inside her and she wriggled her tail, standing shakily, head tilting from one side to the other.
“Mmph… San… Sandra?”
Were those words? They didn’t sound like human words, but the meaning was there, behind them, speaking in another tongue. A dragon-tongue, if one was to believe the
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looming yet comforting presence of Sandra clad in her deep blue scales rushing in to comfort her.
Alan’s jaw opened, licking her muzzle, trying to talk as Sandra pressed in close, soothing and comforting her lightly and softly.
“Take your time, it’s okay. The words will come, you can still talk. We’re all here for you, don’t worry about anything.”
Alan didn’t know what to say, turning back and forth, suspecting something even without realising it truly. Or was that her mind merely rejecting what was taking place, as much as it did not make sense at all. If she had been alone, she would have twisted and wriggled, making sense of what had happened “down there”, but it would have been entirely unrealistic for her not to know that something had occurred, even if not what.
She gulped, laying her head back on the ground, snorting softly with a flutter of nostrils, which pulled into shape at the tip of her muzzle. She still had her scales to come, supposedly like Sandra’s, like Brent’s, and there was more to be deduced there, her intellectual mind sharpening, cutting through the noisy chaos of such transformation.
They hunkered down, Alan letting her transformation proceed, everyone taking their own time, though Brent was fully formed as a dragoness, stretching out her wings. Alan’s scales softened into odd shades of red and green, appearing to change colour with the light, though to be solely brown would have camouflaged her with the rocks a little better. The undergrowth up in the mountains was not as thick as anyone would have liked as she hunkered down, shivering, her new wings soft and fragile, not seeming large enough yet to lift her airborne. They were slow to grow like spiderwebs clad with gossamer due, the membranes green with a patterning like the veins of a leaf spidering across them.
“Come.”
Sandra took charge, as she always had, waiting only for the last of her charges, Alan, to be stable enough to at the very least walk. She had to be the one to take charge, her husband beside her, even though he could have done the same. The dragoness found her feet, leading them to safety, though safety in itself was just a cave where they had stopped for lunch and such on other expeditions. Caving, after all, was not only about delving down into the belly of the earth but seeing the world, exploring it, finding the beauty in the world that she had thought she had lost at the bottom of a bottle after…
Sandra flinched. She didn’t even feel like a drink anymore, though that was just why she and Alex spent so much time outdoors. If she was away from the bottles or the ability to buy them, she didn’t feel as tempted. Alex was just the same, though that was most likely as they had gone through it together.
Going back to civilisation was not an option as she directed a shaking Kelvin out to pick up firewood, though he was not the most well suited to starting a fire. That was
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for Santino, who bragged about being in Scouts or something like that, rubbing two sticks together with some dry leaves until a wisp of smoke appeared.
“If you’re dragons, I don’t know why you don’t breathe fire on it or something.”
Arya giggled but Kelvin only glowered.
“Is it really the time to be making jokes like that?”
“Dude.” Santino blinked, holding up his hands, his black hair and stubble visible without his helmet, as the rest of them had removed their spelunking gear too. “Chill out, that’s not a big deal.”
“It’s all a big deal!”
Kelvin snapped but he was not one to follow things up, turning on his heel and stalking off as if saying that was all that was needed, perhaps in that moment. Anger simmered and writhed within him without reaching boiling point, Sandra extending a wing after him even as her husband stopped her.
“Let him be. He needs some time alone.”
No answers could prompt some to despair and others to seek them out, using their supplies to feed themselves for the night, though it was a cold meal. That did not mean that it was heartless, however, as Isla-Rae found a little more bravery in her heart, inspecting Sandra’s wings, the dragoness extending them gently for her.
“Are we going to be stuck like this forever?”
It was Alan who said that, turning his head back and forth, somehow revelling in her night vision, even though his glasses were crunched underfoot somewhere back at the exit to the cave system. The dragoness chittered, clicking her teeth, the sound surprising even her as Santino let out a bark of laughter.
“Ahaha – you sound like, like…a cat! Is that purring?”
And it was, the dragoness settling a little closer to the fire. Things were a lot less frightening once she didn’t have to worry about the transformation, her red and green and brown scales soft and muted, easy on the eye. She rather liked it and kept extending one wing to admire just how the flames flickered through the thin, vein-patterned membrane, her body something foreign and yet settling over her at the same time. In a way, having changed shape felt like donning a wetsuit: skin-tight and yet right. She was never sporty, not often, but she still remembered summers at the beach with her family spent in the ocean, learning to surf on a foam board and taking the longboards out for a spin when she grew older. Those didn’t take masses of strength to handle, only finesse. And that was something that someone who was growing up to be a scientist, even then, knew all about.
The night had no answers and no one quite dared bring them up, not even as Kelvin glowered in the corner of the cave, his back against the wall and his pack set beside
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him as if he thought that he had to always keep an eye on it. He wasn’t going to become a dragon, not like them. It couldn’t happen, not to all of them, though there was a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he pushed away, not wanting to address it. Even Brent was oddly quiet, though she had good reason to be, contemplative, licking her lips, eyeing up the others as if she was checking, constantly, whether they were watching her or not.
Kelvin sat alone, for good reason. The flames crackled and snapped up kindling as Santino kindly tended to it though, for once, the man was quiet, thoughtful and stroking his stubble in a raspy glide of fingers. Kelvin shuddered.
“Do you have to do that?”
“What now?” Santino grinned, perpetually in a good mood, despite the gravity of the situation. “You don’t like it? You think that it’s bad just because you can’t grow a manly beard like this?”
Little did he know just how such a thing would backfire on him as they set themselves down on makeshift sleeping bags for the night, shifting and turning to try to get comfortable. The ones that rested easiest were, strangely, the dragons, the calm that had settled over the infiltrating the rest of the group, though not quite to the extent that the dragons felt it. Maybe it was because they were reptiles – did that count? They were sure it did even if dragons were not meant to exist – and wanted to huddle for warmth, but they all curled up close enough to one another for their tails to touch, sides rising and falling softly in slumber.
Alex’s hand rested on Sandra’s neck the whole night.
Questions were there to be answered, yet there would only be more questions during the course of the coming day.
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Chapter Two
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They’d thought, on waking the next morning, that that may have been it, even if they knew in their hearts that it could not be so, that it was not so. They could not call a halt to such changes, not when they were already in progress. It was Arya that woke the next morning with her skin a pinker shade than it should have been, though she tried to ignore it at first. If she didn’t think about it, maybe that would make it not so.
That, however, was a fallacy.
She could not ignore the changes as her skin slowly became more and more scaley, changing softly and patiently over the day. Alex tried to gather them to go back to civilisation but, well, the problem there lay with the fact that they could not just waltz back into any town, city or even a village with a dragon. And what if they went back without the dragons leaving them out there? Alex adamantly refused to leave Sandra, Anniyah and Jenson supporting him. That only meant that the university students, so far from home, would be left to their own devices when the fate of their destinies was not quite yet played out as it was supposed to be.
“This is…really weird.”
Arya gulped and shifted her weight, trying to sit up but her legs no longer wanted to bend in the right direction, making it too uncomfortable for her. She had a blanket to be draped over her, protecting her modesty, but there was still the sense, as her chest very slowly softened and melded into the curve of a dragon’s chest, that she was not naked at all. Maybe the scales helped with that, one of the first things to garb her slowly, patiently, changing body, pink all over and more defined at the edges of each scale. Fascinated, she turned her hand back and forth, her nails, even then, pulling into claws, though the transformation was so slow that it was hard to see it happening with the naked eye. But look away and look back and something would have happened.
Maybe shock and adrenaline made her calm, but Arya did not stress too much about what was happening. It was better than dying and, truthfully, that was her one greatest fear in life, going into the darkness of that abyss with nothing left behind her and nothing ahead. Turning into a dragon… Okay, well, it was a shock but was it really so dreadful? She’d seen so much worse in her time, even going abroad to assist as a volunteer after natural disasters, that her perception of what was dreadful and what was not had drastically shifted from perhaps the view of ones, maybe like Kelvin and Brent, who had not experienced true horrors before. She could only count herself fortunate that she had never been caught up in such terrible situations as what she had thrown herself into aiding before, though being a dragoness too would certainly come with its challenges.
Alan took it scientifically, though she was not as steady on her feet as yet as she may have liked. She could not hold a pen and paper or even her cameras with her clawed front feet, which could act more like paws, depending on how one looked at them. Thus it was that she directed Isla-Rae to record Arya’s transformation – all for science, of course.
“You don’t look like you’re going a mixed shade like me,” Brent observed. “Do you think I’ll be the palest one?”
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“You were white as a ghost anyway – maybe all of you are just spirits or something? And you think that’s pale? You’re green!”
“And blue!” Brent shot back. “This is…periwinkle?”
“Peri-winkle – what? Really?” Santino laughed, slapping his thigh. “What are you, picking out your prom dress?”
The twinkle in Santino’s eyes bragged at a jest and he wiggled his fingers even as Brent rolled her eyes. That was one thing that she had not lost the ability to do as a dragon, although facial expressions no longer appeared to be entirely within her range of ability anymore. She had no eyebrows with which to convey a lot of expressions so more was shown subtly in the lines of muscles along her jaw, the little twitches and pulls there that could convey so much with such a light motion. It was more subtle than she had been, to be fair, in her life as a man.
Arya let her body change more privately when she could no longer fit into her clothes, taking her leave by a small pool into which a waterfall plunged, though the blanket comforted her a little more. It felt more private to have it, relaxing, breathing slowly and evenly, a sense of calm enveloping her. It was hard to be afraid when she already knew the outcome and, unlike so much that she had seen in life so far, she knew with all certainty that there were worse fates.
With the spray prickling lightly at her scales, she took her time in allowing the transformation to take over her, her tail moderately thick with a heart-shaped tip, deep green scales enriching her form as if she had become one with an emerald forest of vibrant moss. Where Brent was more blue than green, the boldness of the sky dominating her frame, she was a creature of the forest, nimble and sharp, her breath catching softly.
“Oh…”
Small plate-like protrusions, pulled to a point, lined her spine from the back of her neck down to the base of her tail and her horns were a similar, strong shade of brown that reminded her of fresh earth after a rainfall. She did not need to be anything else as she was, unsettled only by how readily her mind accepted the change, despite twisting unease in the pit of her belly. In a way, it was hard to tell just what it was that she was worried about, in the end.
Was there anything to worry about? She thought that she should worry as her brown claws curled into the dirt, her horns light and delicate, framing her face like antlers. They rose to a point and tines – three on each side, though left the impression that there was more to come, perhaps later. Would they even shed like a deer’s antlers? She tried to eye up her reflection in the pool of water, though the surface was too broken to get a clear view of herself.
They would have to find out more, she thought, presenting herself to the rest of them again as a fully formed dragoness before the close of the day, her modesty preserved, though there would no longer be any need at all for clothes or anything like that.
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Dragons did not need clothes as anything that needed covering was often not in the line of sight. Arya had tried to sit more and keep her tail tucked around her at first, but it was something that slipped from her more and more as she found her feet, extending a pair of wings with pale green membranes stretched beautifully between the spines of them. The modesty aspect… Well, it simply teased from her mind as if it had never existed. And was that not just what she needed anyway?
“Here, Isla-Rae – can you take some photos of her final form?”
“Do you think you’re even going to get a chance to upload this to any computer, Alan?”
Alan shook her head, though her lips quirked in a light smile, something softer about her muzzle. Brent looked away, trying not to squirm, though she could not stop her guts from twisting anxiously. Was Alan the same as her? Or had she remained a male? How could she tell?
“Maybe not… But I can hope, right? There’s something amazing happening here. What’s happened, to start with? Is this even scientifically possible? Do we have to acknowledge the presence of some kind of magic in the world or is this something that has an explanation, something we can study, something we can use for the good of mankind? It’s fascinating to consider…”
Isla-Rae groaned and pressed her fingers to her head as Alan rambled on, a watery smile trembling over her lips.
“I think that’s all a bit heavy for me… Sorry…”
That was alright too. Not everyone had to be as into what Alan was, or any one person, as they were. That was the beauty of living as a coven of dragons, finding the warmth and comfort in something other than humanity, which, to be fair, had not done all that much for anyone.
Kelvin did not want the change to happen, the next day coming as he fought and fought to hide it. He fought it, peeling off scales and injuring himself in the process, nails raking across his skin as he scraped off what he saw to be the transformation into a brute, a monster. His breath locked into his lungs, sprawled across the cave floor when he could hide it no more, scales peeling off from his skin, scraped up as if he was shedding it.
“Kelvin! You’ve got to stop that!”
“Seriously, you’re going to hurt yourself!”
They didn’t understand, the calm Arya watching over him, yet he hated seeing the face of a dragon so close even as he twisted and gasped, his muscles stiffening. It was as if he couldn’t fight off the changes as much as he wanted to, despite it all. He could not be a dragoness! He wouldn’t go down without a fight, pushing back against every little bit of it every tooth-raking step of the way!
“Kelvin… Kelvin, sweetheart, you can’t do that. You’ve got to stop.”
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Sandra nuzzled him but he pushed her away, a growl ripping itself from the back of his throat. Yet, even in Kelvin’s fervour, he did not yet understand what the others, the ones who had been male before their transformations, had deduced privately.
Well…it was still something that the males, transformed into dragonesses, would have to speak to each other about.
“It’s okay for you! You had nothing to go back for! What do you think this is going to be like for me? I can’t be an animal!”
Sandra reeled but was not stung: sometimes young ones needed time to come to grips with things, even if that “thing” was being transformed into a dragon. She knew that from her own life, even though it was not something that she wanted to particularly revisit. Her dragon form seemed more natural to her than her human one had been after the accident, her muscles no longer aching, the old injuries that had plagued her, particularly in her lower abdomen, no longer present. They simply were not there and she took a moment to stretch out luxuriously like a feline, her tail pushed high while her front end bowed down, forelegs stretched out, allowing herself some space from Kelvin, just for a short while.
In such a position, it was only natural to yawn and Alex chuckled, setting himself down beside her, his back to her side as she flopped down heavily. The ground shook under them but no words were needed between them to share a moment of soft and quiet companionship.
Silence. It had been a painful thing, loud in the memories that tried to fill it, but no longer did that cut her to the core. She could sit there, rest there, forget about everything that had gone before. Not because that the memories were not there, of course, and not that they were not sad anymore, but she no longer felt as if she was living through them. The car accident no longer played out before her eyes as if she was living there, in that moment, all over again, how Alex’s head had shot forward, blood trickling, glass shards falling like fatal diamonds, filling the air, the car spinning. The thoughts were there, the memories were there, but no longer did they bite and come up intrusively, Sandra tenderly cradling the memory of her sweet daughter, Julia, close.
One day, they would see her again.
She tried to comfort Kelvin again, but he did better with Jenson, though there was something about the shift and the set of Jenson’s body that made her think too that he would not be long in transforming either. The words that passed between the two of them may not have been for anyone else’s ears, but all was still as it was meant to be, evergreen trees waving their needled branches above, watching over the greatest change in recent years that the earth had seen.
Kelvin turned from Jenson, his strong presence a rock there, but a rock was not what Kelvin needed. He needed a way to not turn into a dragon, not to become an animal, breathing heavily, raggedly, as if he had run a race or been flying…
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No… He started, shuddering in place, muscles twitching, scales shifting over his body where they tried to form, skin rubbed raw. No, he couldn’t think of flying. That was not a human thing to think.
“Kelvin…”
No.
He struggled to his feet, ignoring their concerns about him, still walking on two legs. He had to go, had to try, had to…take it all in at his own pace.
If he could not stop it, he would be alone.
Kelvin left entirely as she became a dragoness, her stomach rumbling, though they knew where she was, the dragonesses leaving her food outside the cave down in the ravine that she had chosen to seclude herself away in. Thus it was that she did not even bear witness to her scales forming in a pattern, blue splashed through with white, the light shade glittering as if she had been dusted with precious gemstones. Yet it was not what she wanted, panting heavily, her eyes wide and wild, turning deeper, the irises enlarging as her ability to see in the dark increased.
Her horns were small and tucked down close to her head, though she could not quite feel out how they had set themselves on her head, something bony beneath them as if there were two small sets there. Kelvin’s wings were kept folded in close to her back, too large to spread in the cave, despite her body aching to work out the kinks of the transformation. It felt wrong to want to spread them even as she tilted her head, a chunkier horn that felt as if it spiralled somewhat, ridged and bumpy, bumping into the roof. She’d barely even noticed that she was larger, but something tugged in her gut, drawing a pained grunt from her muzzle, even though it was not truly painful.
It only felt like pain to lose what had been a part of her as a male, but the dragoness could never again say that she was male, a lack of understanding in what was happening twisting in her gut. She did not know that she was a dragoness. Only in time would that realisation come to her, panting softly, her neck wriggling, lengthening, more vertebrae slotting neatly into place. The back of it was smooth down the line of her back, no spines or scales breaking the mark, though she loathed the strained pull of her tail emerging, how it had wriggled back and forth. She’d always hated cracking her knuckles and it felt like that tenfold, her clothes torn and fallen from her, the size of her body too great to even let them remain.
Kelvin ached through. She hadn’t even felt the seams ripping, her body bursting through, but she had no sense of time in which to place all that had happened. Was she done? She wriggled her toes, claws tapping, long and delicate, yet she felt there was a sense of strength about them too. How did she know? How did she tell?
She couldn’t face it.
She licked her muzzle, quiet in the darkness. Somewhere, water dripped. A songbird caught her attention, outside the cave, the mouth bright to reveal the outside world. She sighed. So, it was daylight. Again. She wasn’t so sure anymore that she wanted
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to face the world, for she had been a man when she had stepped into the cave and now…well…she was anything but.
Her scales may have been beautiful, her body light and lithe as if she was more of a swimmer than a flyer, acrobatic in a way, but there was one thing there that she could not bear to see. A scar remained where she had harmed herself too badly, initially, when she’d tried to peel her scales off, to stop the change. It was subtle, barely noticeable, but on the back of her front right foot where she’d have to look at it the whole time, always there. Others may not have even recognised it for what it was, but Kelvin would always know that it was there.
“Kelvin?”
Alan poked her head around, hanging over the lip of the cave roof and dangling her neck; it was not the most stable of positions, but she made it work, wings flapping to balance herself.
“We brought you food. Oh! Wow, what a pattern! Can I get a photo of that? Come on out!”
Kelvin swallowed hard. She’d never been spoken to as if she was interesting, not really, the one to find other things interesting rather than being the interesting one herself. Was that how things could be as a dragon? Or would she just be an object of science, in the end, like Alan was treating everyone? That said, Alan was a dragoness too and that much could not be denied.
It was strange to be so welcomed back but she did not feel settled in her own skin, constantly turning to itch at herself.
“Do dragons shed?”
Brent blinked.
“How would I know? You’re the one that read all those books, don’t you know about things like that more than us? Aren’t you going to come out about something like we’re going to breathe fire next?”
Kelvin sighed.
“I don’t know about that… I wouldn’t like to say.”
Brent rolled his eyes – or, well, she tried to. She didn’t seem to have quite that nuanced control over her body yet, though that, strangely so, only served to aggravate Kelvin further. Did Brent think that reading was going to tell them anything about becoming and turning into dragons? It was a completely different thing! Maybe if she referred to it as a “ball game” that would be something that Brent would understand? Even that vitriol was far beyond how Kelvin would have naturally behaved, grunting, shuffling her wings down against her back, though they didn’t sit comfortably.
Nothing sat comfortably anymore.
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“Yeah, fantasy books are one thing…but how am I supposed to know what from there could be real and what was fiction? None of us thought that this could be possible before and now we’re stuck like this, just trying to figure all of it out as we go along.”
The fire crackled, warming them even though they did not need its heat anymore. Although they were slower in the cooler mornings than they were after the sun had been on the dragons for some time, their bodies adjusted better to the environment and temperatures than they had as human beings. The spit and snap of the flames eating up wood and devouring oxygen was all that broke the silence, the dragons nestling closer together, taking soothing comfort from each other’s presence.
Kelvin was no more settled pressed between Brent and Alan that night than she was any other.
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Chapter Three
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Anniyah and Jenson transformed together, staying close and not worrying too much about their modesty as they allowed their transformations to come over them. Anniyah grew a pair of horns that could have been mistaken for the antlers of a fallow deer with their intricate, delicate yet powerful, beauty, she was still a dragoness clad in rusty orange scales, a creature of Autumn and the change of the seasons for Winter hibernation.
Her transformation came quickly, though it was better for them, sitting close together and not feeling as if they had to leave the others, to be around friends. For the group of them could not be considered anything but friends after all that had come to pass between them, all that they had experienced so far. It would have been strange, so very strange indeed, to consider them anything out than that.
Her body shifted, her muzzle slimming down into an elegant jaw, her nostrils defined, and light ridges above her eyes that could have been something like brows. She murmured, stretching to lie somewhat flat, though her husband was still larger than her, the round of his back, a dark hill that fascinated her. Her antlers had itched something dreadful as they had emerged from an almost human head, though her hair falling away had brought a sense of loss with it too.
Her antlers fell cupped as her transformation progressed, like palms with fingers stretching up to welcome the sky. She breathed slowly and evenly, Sandra watching over them, though Isla-Rae and Santino kept their distance. In a way, she didn’t blame them, not even as her tail wriggled back and forth, tapered to a strong point, though the tip was blunted and rounded. Maybe that was due to her old tail-bone injury?
Her husband was stranger still, the one of them with the darkest skin, though she, as she became a dragoness, neither lost nor gained from the hues of her scales as Jenson’s transformation pressed through her. Jenson gulped and swallowed, her eyes wide, though even she did not understand that her sex and gender were both changing at that very moment, panting lightly, tongue fluttering between her teeth as they drew into points, strong and savage, betraying her power.
“If you look at them from this angle,” Anniyah said, tilting a half-transformed draconic head. “They look black from this angle. But over here,” she murmured, changing again, “they look silver. How can that be?”
It was not a phenomenon that any of them had ever experienced before but neither did it have to be known to them as they matched one another well in size, one a beautiful, burned shade of orange and the other flickering between silver and black, though there was still a shine to the black of her scales. Jenson’s eyes betrayed her humour, a smile in the no longer strictly elderly dragoness. In fact, they seemed to be middle-aged again in the prime of their lives, their bodies strong and fit as Anniyah delighted in just how she could twist back and forth. It was just like all those earlier years where she had been able to do yoga like a professional yogi!
Jenson’s horns were strong and powerful, thick with ridges down the bone-like protrusions, angled forward like those of a bull. That she was a defender and a protector gave her power, though she stumbled over becoming a dragoness rather than merely a dragon. Although she did not say it out loud, it was emasculating to
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become another gender when, frankly, she had been so comfortable in her own skin and body before. She’d seen so much about others who had been born into the wrong bodies, whether they were transgender or something else entirely, merely “out of place”… Yet Jenson had always counted herself fortunate to never wonder about things like that. She’d gone to church and been a good citizen, perhaps the two of them holding more conservative views than most.
She sighed. Her horizons had not just been expanded, forcing her to confront what she had merely turned from in the past, but exploded. There were no longer any horizons, just experience and knowledge yet to be gained stretching out in all directions. Her view of the world, while experience to be learned from, could no longer be trusted as she shook her head against the daunting loom of changing her beliefs. Whereas it could be done, it was hardly something that anyone at all could or would say was easy at all.
Anniyah sat quietly beside her, leaning into her shoulder.
“Well, I think you look very handsome, darling. You’ll always be the most handsome to me, whether you are a man or a dragon.”
Jenson chuckled lightly, shaking her blockier head, getting used to the weight of the horns. They made her keep wanting to tip her head more one way than the other, sitting up carefully. Would the muscles of her neck strengthen to account for that? She could only hope so, in that case.
“You would say that, wouldn’t you, dear…
And Jenson knew that, if she had Anniyah there beside her, she would be able to get through anything.
*
That only left Isla-Rae, Alex and Santino to transform, all thoughts of returning to civilisation before they had worked out at least a little more of what had happened to them leaving their minds. They wondered what would happen if they returned to humanity, to civilisation, but the changes didn’t seem to be stopping – and just what would humans, themselves, think about dragons storming in shouting about being people? They’d be caught and trapped! Experimented on! No, they had to be smart about it, to think about everything that they needed to take with them, learn all they could.
Escape? Leaving? It may have weighed heavy on them but, in the end, there was no other option but to stay, to wait it out, to uncover all they could. It was no longer anything of an option even as Brent and Alan enlisted them in helping them back into the tunnels and cave system before they transformed.
“We’ve got to see what’s down there again. As dragons, at least, it will be easier to see what is carved and engraved on the walls – don’t you agree?”
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It didn’t matter whether they agreed with Alan or not – not when he was that excited. She’d gained better control over his body, partly over Brent’s cheerleading and encouragement. That Brent had become the most athletic of them and most certainly the best in control of her body was no surprise, though him trying to fashion balls to play with (she had not yet named the sport) out of twisted tree branches was…questionable at best. Pinecones had not amused her for long, too tame of a game, until she realised that she could toy with them while airborne too, enhancing the difficulty. It was a game of “keep ups” with herself, bouncing them from legs to feet to tail to horns to head and back again – all over again. It was only a waste of time when she had to keep landing again to collect all the ones that she had dropped.
But she could help Alan dig down into the tunnels, the humans mapping out the way even as Alex’s hands became more and more claw-like. He could not help for long, not after he had laid out the route for them, but Sandra was more than willing to stay with her husband while she became a big, strong dragoness with ruby-red scales that darkly and starkly contrasted her shades of blue.
It was good, yes, that Brent was able to provide the muscle for digging and excavating, though they had professed still an intent to preserve as much of the caves as possible while uncovering…well, whatever it was that they could. It meant that Sandra was able to stay with Alex, patiently allowing everything to come at exactly the pace that it was meant to. Sandra steadied Alex as his transformation developed, step by step, though it was strange how his wings transformed first, becoming something that could have lifted his weight from the ground, even in human form. He extended them, one after the other, the red shades obvious in the membrane, splashed through as if in memory of paint spilt across the floor, pooling and puddling, some parts of the thin membrane darker than others.
His body was next, shifting and rounding into a belly and flank, quickly enough that Sandra could see it with her naked eye, despite the sun tracking a path through the sky, a blustery wind scudding clouds across the sky. The smooth round of his back softened to the point of his tail, which grew seamlessly at the same pace, every part of his body coming along to catch up with his wings, which spread wide, trembling like leaves that refused an autumn wind, above his back.
“You’re doing well, darling…”
Sandra did not need to say much, her husband settled into it, neck lengthening, his horns rising on either side of his head with a light undulation in them. His jaw did not become as soft as the others, but stronger and braced, the lighter line to his cheekbone hinting at a strange sort of femininity. But it was the crimson scales that peppered his body from head to toe that were the most alluring of all, tail twitching, light spines prickling down the ridge of his back, small and tucked in, though with a defensive power behind them that could not be denied. Sandra licked her lips, moistening her mouth, watching in awe.
But Alex knew something that she did not as she, rather than he, settled into her dragon form, the pull of something deeper calling within. She twisted, trying to understand, yet…what was it that she had to understand, beyond being a dragon?
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“Sandra…”
Alex winced, shifting her weight, her tail flicking back and forth, though it felt such a silly thing to say. Even as her wife looked on, she stood and looked back under her tail, the vent there decidedly separate from where waste must have passed through.
She blinked, drawing her head back, her lower jaw falling a little slack in a comical manner.
“Er… Sandra? Could I? I mean… Would it be rude?”
Sandra shook her head.
“You want to see what I look like there?”
Alex would have blushed if she had still been able to, but scales didn’t seem able to do that.
“Yes, please, dear. I’m sorry, I know this is awfully intimate.”
“I’m sure we’ll manage.”
With the two of them, Alex could swing her head from one vent to the other. That meant something...and the way that it was positioned. With her wife, she pushed her nose in very close, seeing no difference and smelling no difference either between the two slits. Her nose was more sensitive and eve though she could not identify every scent, she felt as if she should have been able to tell if there was a difference there, something in the identifying scent of what was male and what was female…
Oh, my…
It was an intimate inspection that Alex was grateful for having happened in private as she poked at herself, Sandra questioning what she was doing – until the woman turned dragoness realised that, of course, there was something different there. Well, not different. Their slits, where their genitalia must have been held, smelled the same, their delicate nostrils quivering, though it should have felt far stranger to them than it did to inspect themselves in such a way.
Not animal-like…but something more, something different. A blend of intelligence that, even then, could not quite be defined so easily.
Alex, however… They had to admit that there was something different about how they relieved themselves too, still not imparting to her wife that she suspected something rather different awry, something that made her and her wife the same. Of course, as a man, they would have urinated from a penis, but none of the dragons did that, instead squatting and using a slit, a small opening. But the slit seemed too large to simply be for urination, even though when they had done that it had come from the same place that they defecated from… It was not right.
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They… He… She… Alex growled and swallowed hard. She had shifted to female pronouns in her head so easily, yet…she didn’t think she was the only one there. There was something inside her, something that pushed and pulled, a warming in her loins that had not been there before.
Even if she could be sure there was no maleness left to her physical body…there was something there that she could not deny. She’d looked at her wife, how the sleek lines of her body adorned her like a garment, scales glittering, and felt…well, as if they were back in their bedroom at home together, stepping into one another’s arms. To put it very delicately. But that arousal had not brought forth a sense of needing to push and to thrust, the pleasure they had shared together, but to sweeten and tease, to use a tongue and to roll her hips back.
Alex shuffled her weight, tail curling back and forth uncomfortably. She wasn’t sure yet…but maybe her wife would know.
“Dear…” Alex ducked her head, but she could not technically blush as a dragon anymore, even if her body remembered the warm prickle in her cheeks, the creeping memory of heat. “I don’t think… I’m not a man, am I?”
That wasn’t what she meant but Sandra understood, her eyes wide.
“A dragon…ess? A dragoness like us? The females? Women? I don’t understand, how could this be possible?”
They had to understand that, but not before one more was due to change, Santino crawling back out of the caves with a grumble and a shaky sense of bravado. His change, it seemed, was coming too.
Alex hesitated, one foot raised.
“Um… Santino… Could you come join us? All of the…guys?”
No one quite knew what was happening as the “males” (well, only some of them remained male, if they were human) gathered, a little apart, even though it was foolish to worry about such thing, considering what was to come.
The words came slowly, awkwardly, fudging the moment, though some had realised what had occurred and others did not. One thing was certain and it was that they would struggle to realise just where their own pronouns lay and what they were comfortable with for a good while yet.
“It’s…” Alex sighed, tilting her head. “Look, there’s only one way to say this and someone else must have noticed something strange too… But I’m not a…male anymore. I’m a dragoness. I’m like my wife. Did this…happen to anyone else?”
Something in the pit of her belly told her that it was so, the others tilting head, rumbling, half-raising their wings. Only Kelvin was silent, eyes wide, staring, her tail curled tightly around her body.
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“Me…” Brent said, grunting, acting as if she was trying to cough into a hand that was no longer there to cover her mouth. “It’s… Hm. I just…knew? Then I could see when I had to urinate. I tried to look at things there, not easy, you know… But it’s just not there, right? Our…”
She waved a wing helplessly, Santino spluttering.
“Wait, wait, wait, so you’re saying… I’m not just turning into a dragon too, but I’m going to be a lady? What?”
Thus, it was so, the revelation made, everyone comparing experiences and coming up with the same conclusion, though Kelvin retreated further, even after Brent laid a comforting wing over her back and Alex protectively sandwiched her from the other side. She was the one struggling the most, opening and closing her mouth several times as if she was going to say something in the little rocky overhang they had chosen to speak under, rain pattering down outside. But no words came from her lips, for the certainty was there, the knowledge that something had changed and could never again change back settling into her being.
“Ah, yes, I suspected as much,” Alan said with a nod, though even she had the modesty to look a little embarrassed to be talking about such things, even though she could look at things through a more clinical lens. “It’s… So, you do believe that all of us are female? The women too? I think we expected that, but it’s not as if they have, ah, grown extra parts of themselves, to put it as delicately as possible…”
Alex nodded and Santino grunted, sitting back, sweating, his head in his hands. Though with the revelation in mind, he could never take back the knowledge that he would never again be a man.
“Oh…” He winced, his mind casting back to someone he had left at home, back where he’d been studying. “This… This is going to screw everything up…”
No one knew what he meant, even as he laughed, trying to make light of something, though the tremble of his fingers was only quelled by Brent leaning against him, steadying him with her solid body, stable and comforting. Together, they would face it, even as the last of them became dragonesses. It was better to have it all out in the open.
The transformation swept over Santino like a second skin, the man gasping, trying to laugh, though any chuckles of faded mirth that came from him were a mockery at best of what he could deliver. He shivered where he stood, observing his body, heart pounding, head spinning, though he knew too that he had to allow it, had to let it come through. The others had not been able to stop it, not even Kelvin, and what did that tell him about all of it?
His scales tinted through with deep purple and lighter violet, no two the same shade – at least to her eye. His irises became a lighter shade still, almost white, though Kelvin commented that it was eerie, even if Santino would not think so later. His horns were the finest and most delicate of all, angled back from his face, his cheeks soft and his jaw fine as if his teeth were there for more delicate prey still than the others. The tuck
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of his belly pointed up towards his hindquarters, slim and fetching, and if he could have blushed he would have as he pulled in his wings against his back after flapping them experimentally. The folds of them didn’t seem strong enough yet, rubbing against one another, the tease of sensation oddly familiar to him.
Santino’s struggle against his transformation, though it was debatable as to why he did that, concern and worries twisting in his gut. He put on a brave face and a smile for everyone but, well, what more could he do? It felt hopeless, his mind back with his family, with someone else, knots of fret writhing in his belly. For once, he did not voice what was on his mind, muted in worry, but there was someone back home waiting for him that he wanted to see, even if he had seen Kelvin fight the changes more and more.
Santino distracted herself from the knowledge that, with her change progressing, she had become a dragoness and not merely a dragon, with work, helping better with her claws scooping away dirt, seeking out purpose, anything to keep her grounded, before her transformation was even complete. That only left Isla-Rae to allow her slowest, most patient of transformations to ease through her body, her hair falling away and leaving a beautifully shaped draconic skull with lightly curved, delicate horns in its place.
“Relax, it’s okay…”
“Arya, you should be helping them with the tunnel.”
“But you need me now.”
They had to stick together, keeping close, supporting one another, though it was easier for them to understand each other when they were dragons, or speaking dragon to dragon. It was possible for the humans to understand what the dragons were saying, of course, but it was a different language, the same words carrying a different lilt. Only in time would they come to understand that the hisses and growls and grunts and even their facial expressions, however minute, were all part of that quiet language shared between them.
Isla-Rae became the smallest dragoness of them all, but what she lacked in size she made up in her nimbleness, her agility beyond even that of Brent. Light and fine, her body gave one the impression that a breath of wind could knock her over, even her horns small and appearing fragile, even though that was not the case. She could dart and zip about – as she got used to her legs, of course – but wings were another challenge entirely for her that she had to meet and conquer, grunting heftily as she struggled to heave her body off the ground.
“Come on!” Arya and Brent cheered for her, the dragonesses leaping and shaking the earth with the force of their bounds. “Up, up, up! You can do it!”
Shouting her on gave her strength and she squealed as she finally took off, spreading the pale membranes of her wings for the first time. With delicate, petite features, she could be more agile than all of them put together, something that would, indeed, be a
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problem until she had built up strength in the muscles of her back and shoulders that, going forward, would allow her to fly as freely as they all should have been able to do.
Yet her most glorious feature was her shimmering scales, always giving a wet look to them as if she had just plunged underwater and emerged, dripping. They were pearlescent in their hues, white and pearly pink, yellow, purple, blue… Oh, the eye could have spent hours adoring them, enjoying the shades, the beauty in her slight body coming through in other ways too.
With her scales showing every shade of the rainbow in those light hues, Isla-Rae was a sight to be seen, finding herself in her stance and stature, her posture almost giving the appearance that she was an Eastern dragon, though it was merely the fact that her body was longer than the others. She was slim too, her tail with a delicate spade at the tip that was more elongated than the others, able to fly higher and quicker than the rest, perhaps as there was less bodyweight for her to carry along with her.
She pumped her wings, delighting in darting through the clouds, a smile on her lips, jaws parted, though it somehow was a lighter, friendlier look on her muzzle, as if she still had some of her human smile. She flipped, turning upside-down, though had no worries about falling, not as she completed a loop to Brent’s cheers and Alan’s careful documentation. Did they ever stop recording things? Even if it was only with Alan’s scratches in the dirt, lacking, well, hands or paper to write things down with. They would all find a way and flying, well… She’d always thought it had looked fun!
Maybe there was something more to what had happened to them, the enormity of it, letting out a raw, ragged cry as she tipped into a dive, the wind whistling by her, than Isla-Rae had realised. But that was all right, as there most likely was no time limit. That should have frightened her more than it did, though…things just felt easier. Did that even make sense?
She didn’t mind that, though would only understand why later, much later. When she walked or simply stood, she held herself more regally than the rest, matching Sandra for a maternal stature, slipping more easily into the old caring roles that she had taken on before.
It had been strange, after all, for her to not look after her younger brothers and Isla-Rae would have been sorely amiss to say that she did not miss them dearly. They had driven her up the wall and that was simply part of looking after them, watching how their personalities blended and even, in a way, bounced off each other too. They all complemented each other and that gave her a better understanding of how people worked and how she could help them.
They sat together, at the end of a day of work trying to figure out how and where their lives were going to go, the males who had transformed into dragonesses forming a closer bond than ever. They needed one another for support, to put it quite simply. A fire crackled, luring them closer with its tantalising warmth.
Brent, Santino, Alan and Kelvin sat before Alex, though Santino’s head hung. Urination had been a new thing to work out and she had thought that, perhaps, what had happened to the others was not true for her. She hadn’t said anything, even if she had
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hoped it was so, watching the other “males” who weren’t really males go about their business, though she hadn’t been able to see Brent.
“It’s strange like this,” Santino said quietly, her nose touching the ground as if she did not have the strength to lift it. “I don’t feel like me anymore. I’ve always been a guy, always felt comfortable like that. And now I’m not.”
Kelvin blinked at them, turning her head from one to the other. Although she swallowed hard, she did not find the courage to speak. The others seemed to accept their changes with more grace than her, though any angry words, on her part, were spent inside, roiling and seething against herself while she didn’t have anyone to rage against.
She didn’t want to be a dragoness. She didn’t want to be a dragon at all. And yet everyone else had seemed to be already one step ahead of her, knowing what they were, one way or another, after transformation? That it had taken them different times to understand, of course, evaded her in her curdling frustration, the injustice of it all closing around her heart.
Only Brent had understood straight away, the others coming to their own conclusions after a while. Maybe it was that Brent had had a lot of attention focused on him during his transformation, so much support that his mind had been apt to wander. But the pull under his tail and turning to reveal it to Kelvin, the fact that there was nothing there to denote her as a male, well… It was self-explanatory even as Alex gently laid a wing over Kelvin’s shoulders.
“It’s okay. We’ve all got to come through this together. Just because we’re dragonesses does not mean that we are less of the men that we are…were…”
For once, it was Alex who was stuck for words, Alan scratching the back of her head, Kelvin letting out a broken roar, the sum of the anger and only a glimpse of it that twisted and writhed in her gut. The dragoness, however, was not to be consoled, Alan frozen in place, stiff and rigid, her tail twitching back and forth as if there were very few muscles left in her body that could at all be moved.
“So, everyone here is a dragoness. This is…very interesting…” She breathed. “But what can it all mean?”
Of course, she should have realised, looking for her notebook, all the little things coming together all at once. Finally, it made sense why urination had been different, why there had been a pressure to squat and it had felt like it was coming from the same place as defecation, though Alan really had not thought to peer, not in that case. She’d tried to make notes about her new body, but hadn’t worked out how to use her claws yet, even if there was something more of the engravings and etchings in the caves that she wanted to copy. She’d have to record that too, have to record everything, thinking that, surely, she must have known without knowing.
Every male turned female experienced the change in a different way. However, that would be the most difficult part of their adjustment in leaving what they had known behind.
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*
Feeding. Ensuring they had water. Raw meat was a tricky one to get used to at first but the part of them that was draconic instinct soothed it. Strangely, it was Santino who was the hardest to convince to eat deer, looking mortally wounded even after she built a fire, laboriously while she was still becoming used to moving her new body, and cooked him a haunch until it roasted perfectly.
“I can’t eat that!”
“Santino, you’re making a fuss here…”
But the dragoness was not to be persuaded as she fell back, squalling and squirming, thrashing as if she was a hatchling and not the adult that Santino had still transformed into.
“No! I couldn’t possibly! Not Bambi!”
Isla-Rae blinked but it was Sandra and Alex that burst into uproarious laughter, slapping their tails into the ground with their mirth.
“Do you remember how Julia hated that film?” Alex chortled. “She always made me change the channel if it ever came on TV! And always around Christmas! Since when was that even a Christmas film?”
Santino may have been loud and pulling at their limits of annoyance from time to time but there was little that he could do to interrupt such a thing, their laughter contagious. Whether or not it was planned by the more experienced couple to quiet him was a question they would not get an answer to anytime soon.
Everyone may have been a dragon, but they all dealt with it in different ways. Anniyah and Jenson commiserated with the family and friends they had left behind, what they would all think about what had happened to them, whether they would be worried, everything coming together for them in a muddled blur of worry. It was less of a concern about themselves at the forefront of it all, to be fair, but wondering, just a little, what others would think of them.
“We’ll never be allowed back into the church like this.”
Jenson shrugged, nuzzling the top of her wife’s head. Were they both just wives now? That would make more sense than her still considering herself to be her husband, after all.
“We wouldn’t fit through the door, you’re right,” she teased, bringing a smile to Anniyah’s lips. “The thing is though…maybe they should have let more people through the doors. I know we never actually stopped anyone before but there was nothing wrong with…different people coming in.”
Anniyah pressed her lips together, feeling the edges of her teeth with her tongue.
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“We weren’t as accepting as we could have been, were we?”
That may have been true, very much so, even if they had never done anything against others. Sometimes, the problem lay in not doing anything to be welcoming and assist others in joining their way of worship – and other parts of their life too, though that was something that would take deeper consideration still. They would have to look into that more and more but the young folk there, they were sure they would not understand. They did not know, in their lives, what it was to follow a set path in life until old age only to have a world view completely turned upside-down, forced to confront the bare truth of a narrower view.
Yet there was something to be learned from them too as Isla-Rae sat with them, softly listening to their tales, only the very tip of her tail twitching back and forth, contemplative the whole time. She wanted to know and wanted to learn and listening to her elders had been something ingrained in her from a young age. She had to consider it, had to think about it, had to take her time and mull things over, even allowing them to process while she was fast asleep. There was much that she did not know and there was much that she could pass on.
Kelvin shifted uncomfortably, down in the caves with Alan as the scientist among them studied.
“You know, I could teach you about this, if you like,” Alan said, her lips parted but not showing her teeth in a friendly gesture. “You don’t always have to be on the outside. We all want you to be part of this.”
Kelvin gulped. Did she even want to be a part of things? Her heart pulled for the life she had left behind. She had been poised for her third year of studies, everything that she had spent her life working for…shattered. That she was a dragon should have given her great joy, lifted her heart and sent her soaring through the clouds. She’d always wondered what it would be like to be a dragon and yet, now that she was one, it no longer seemed like such a pleasing fantasy.
Fantasies did not come with such loss.
“I don’t want to learn about it,” she said, at last, shaking her tail instead of her head. “There’s nothing here to learn, nothing that I need. I just want to go home.”
Alan cocked her head.
“If you study here, maybe we will find a way to go back, to change back?”
But not even Alan believed anymore that there would be any possible way for everything to simply go back to normal. The path carved through the rock in itself was a testament to that, something that could not be reverted to the natural state of the caves. There would forever be evidence that they had been there, that the dragons had been there.
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Arya worked with Brent, challenging herself to beat him. She could not funnel her ambition into something more familiar to her anymore, not her athletic abilities in rowing and archery nor her studies, and would have been adrift without someone like Brent to ground her. Why, she might not even have thought about trying out her wings properly without him to encourage her. And that he was the best flyer of them all only gave her something more to aim for, something that she could grit her teeth and bear into, pressing on as her wings strained.
It was not digging the tunnel and smoothing out the path with their claws, but it was something else, something more. She could hurl herself into the sky and pump her wings, feeling out how the updrafts could lift her higher and higher, passions rising. It was a drama in the flight that put her right where she felt that she needed to be, even though she did not know that, relying heavily on instinct to get her where she was needed.
“Brent! Ease up!”
Yet that was a ploy as she obligingly slowed down ahead of her, leaving Arya to cry out ferally and whip by, a blur of scales that Brent reeled from.
“Hey – no fair!”
Yet Brent was too good-natured to hold a grudge and took on the chase with a chortling laugh, the sound rumbling up through a growl in the pit of her belly. With her eyes alight, she put her new, strong muscles to the test and cut through the air like a blade, as if she was one with it and they had never been separated.
As she flared out her wings, silhouetted darkly against the early afternoon sun, she trembled with joy, poised there for a moment.
Was that what it meant to be a dragon?
46
Chapter Four
47
Anniyah sat them down one evening, fidgeting while Kelvin scowled and hunkered down at the back of the cave, sadness enveloping her. Her sleeping sack had been ripped up at some point in a fit of rage, sad at even the fact that she felt, even as a dragoness, that she did not want that humanly comfort anymore. She didn’t want to change, not that much, regardless of how much more capable her body felt.
“I have some news for you… Well.” Anniyah exchanged a look with Jenson. “We have news for you. We…are pregnant.”
Alan’s head shot up.
“What? How can you be pregnant? All of us are females! We only went over this, what, a week ago?”
Anniyah showed him, letting him document with scientific curiosity the changes that she’d presented in her body, beneath her rusty orange scales, that had led her to that conclusion. The maternal notes rising through, the feeling of wanting to build a nest, how her abdomen was not quite as flexible as it had been.
“The feel of them inside,” she said, resting the tip of her tail against her belly, as if she was cradling her young even then. “You can’t mistake it, being a mother. There’s a heaviness to it, though…I would think it is still early days.”
She smiled, her mind drifting to a few days ago, though it could have been a lifetime. It had been strange to have that stirring, a sense that was something like discomfort without truly being so. She only knew that something had shifted inside her, despite not being sick like she had been as a human. That was good, that was something that she was very grateful for as a dragoness, even if Anniyah thought that she would have pushed through it anyway for the sake of her young.
It simply felt right, nestling up to her husband dragoness, Jenson quiet against her. It had been more difficult for her to adjust to it, to be quite fair, as she was still getting used to the fact that she was a female. Alex had not needed to tell her, earlier, along with the others, though everyone else had assumed that Alex had told her privately. They’d just “known” without knowing, exchanging a look with each other and understanding.
Maybe that was a part of motherhood, or at least what motherhood was to dragons. Jenson did not have to say anything while Anniyah talked, the dragoness that had been a woman far better versed than he in the ways of the world, the ways of a female’s body. The shift and discomfort in his flank had been strange to him, only a tiny note. Anyone else that wasn’t wrapped up in learning how to best use a new body may have missed it entirely but he had known and felt every last bit of it, how there was a little more stiffness in her gut.
She hadn’t wanted to worry Anniyah either, as close as they were. One could have said that they were even closer as dragonesses too than they had been as human beings, though that was a strange thing to consider indeed. Anniyah had come to her while she was lying stretched out in a forest grove, one of those on the lower slopes were there was a little more vegetation to cover the ground. It was a rich kind of place,
48
a fertile kind of place, the sort of place that made one want to lie down and simply soak in the day.
It wasn’t a wriggling or a kicking but a sense of settling. With a sigh, the dragoness, silver in the dappled light of the gentle grove, relaxed, letting her tail drape over her body. Without even knowing what she was doing, she raised her wing, sheltering her belly, the eggs that she did not even, as yet, know were in there. It was natural to do so, the protective sense of being motherly rising where it had never been before, nothing at all in the set of her body and belly at all suggesting that she was pregnant.
And yet… Oh, she could not have said how she suspected that there was something in there but she remembered all too acutely, lovingly, just how Anniyah had held and stroked her belly when she had been pregnant. All of their children were grown but she remembered sitting with her, putting her ear to her wife’s belly, the squirm of a little one inside. Even though they were not born, the energy and presence of them could still be felt, despite everything.
It was a good memory. And that was just why, when Anniyah had told her that she was sure she was pregnant, Jenson had been able to say the same.
Starting, Jenson snapped back to reality, her wife shifting against her side.
“Maybe we were pregnant from the transformation itself, part of it,” she suggested, watching as Alan “wrote” the best she could with her claw dipped in ink made from berries, the best she could get out in the wilderness. “But that’s not all that I meant… We are pregnant.”
She paused for a moment to allow that to sink in and yet it was a moment that would change the course of their paths forevermore, even if they may have thought that there was nothing more that could possibly surprise them.
“This is unprecedented…” Alan muttered, eyeing up the direction in which the caves lay, far more accessible than they had been. “We must go back down, see what the carvings say…”
For she had already uncovered something that she had held close to herself and needed to delve deeper again to see just where that piece of the puzzle fit in the mad jigsaw of their lives. There was something there that she did not understand, though she had to make sure she understood first of all, that everything was lined up exactly as she wanted to see it.
She was, if nothing else, dedicated to the science of explanation.
*
She was right, though Alan could not be too hard on herself for not understanding what the changes in her body meant, no matter how much time she spent going over her body, the differences in her red and green scales, trying to find some sense and logic in it. It didn’t even seem to match up with muzzle shape or jaw size, frustrating her with the lack of pattern she found. After all, she had not expected to find herself pregnant
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either. She had had to sit down with both Anniyah and Jenson to understand it better, the feelings and sensations that led them to believe they were pregnant, even though it matched up with what she had found written on the clay tablets. She had not understood just what the tablets were there for, piled and set out as if a manual, some kind of instructions, but a record did not always reveal its true purpose until one had dug deeper into the meaning behind it.
Not that she understood all of it as yet, still learning the language, an ancient text and marking… She wasn’t so sure that she would ever fully understand it, but for the sake of her coven of dragons and her own curiosity, Alan certainly had to try.
She’d felt quieter and quieter, however, even before her pregnancy had made itself known to her, as if she was slower and more lethargic. All she wanted to do was to sleep, yawning as she worked away in the caves, studying, nose dipping, wings drooping. It was tiring, surely, to carry a clutch of eggs (was it a clutch? There was no way, yet, to tell) around and she could only empathise whole-heartedly with every other female in the world that went through the same. Males, surely, didn’t understand how lucky they had it sometimes.
None of the confirmed pregnant dragonesses (Anniyah, Jenson and herself) had had anything happen that could have induced a pregnancy, unless they were carrying unfertilised eggs, which was always a possibility. It was not Alan’s area of expertise but she had heard about instances of reptiles, like dragons, she supposed, laying clutches of unfertilised eggs to act as decoys from the real clutch. But would that in itself mean that another clutch of eggs was coming regardless of what they had gone through so far?
No… No, that did not make sense, no sense at all, not with them all being dragonesses. She’d read the carvings, the etchings, the engravings, the lines of paint inked onto the walls. There was so much to decipher there that she was sure she could have spent several lifetimes over studying them. No one was as interested as she was but she had science behind her, leaning heavily into further studies as if she had wanted to bring them into her life going forward too.
Alan smiled. Maybe she could be a teacher? She’d never thought of herself as a headmistress type but the look could be a good one on her. If she could not progress her career anymore as she had planned, studying and passing on that knowledge would be a good second-best, though she was hardly one to give up on her hopes just yet.
There was more to be found in the cave as she bounded about easily in her draconic form. It didn’t seem so expansive, though she was careful of her stomach, not knowing how much at that stage could harm the eggs, if anything at all. What field of reference did she at all have to pull from? There was nowhere to go to ask questions, leaving her to dig deeper, to find the answers for herself.
“The start of a new civilisation, new birth…” She muttered to herself, pouring from one carving to the other, ground deeply into the rock of the cave walls, leaving the stacked tablets for the time being, which were more difficult to decipher. “I read that wrong, didn’t I? New birth comes with egg laying…with us.”
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It was the start of something new, most certainly, but she did not know how much she was inferring and what was basic fact. Pictures there only showed so much, though a coven of dragonesses gathered around a pool of orbs could only be dragonesses and eggs. She pressed a clawed “hand” to her head, groaning. Maybe that was one that she would have to come back to a little later on.
For the moment, she had someone very important to give the news too, seeking out Sandra and Alex with a strange curling in her stomach and chest. Maybe them more than anyone else would be changed by the news that the eggs, to say the least of it all, would not only be with those that were of an “age” to become pregnant…
*
Finding Sandra and Alex out on an outcrop of rock, discussing something about how they could find their friends again, whether they would be able to talk to them and let them bring dragons into society, she set herself down lightly. The huge dragoness with her blue scales turned to face Alan, Alex’s patterned wings folding in lightly against his body from where they had been spread.
“Oh! Alan!” Alex said with a smile, spreading her wings wide in welcome. “To what do we owe the pleasure? It’s been a while, you’ve been busy.”
The look on Alan’s face sobered them, the two pressing in close, taking comfort from the feel of each other’s scales pressing against each other.
“I think I have something very important to tell you,” she said as gently as she could, touching Sandra’s face lightly with the edge of her wing. “It’s going to be a shock…knowing what you told us before…about your family.”
Although she had changed, Alan was still not the smoothest about bringing up things from the past – painful things. Alex growled a little but Sandra was more than capable of thinking about it by then, stalling her as she gestured for Alan to go on.
The dragoness fidgeted.
“It’s… Oh, I do not mean this to be personal, but I think your daughter would be smiling down at you right now.”
She paused, understanding the gravity of what she was about to deliver, despite her young age. She knew she could not match up to Sandra’s wisdom, the time taken in her years, but there was still a difference between them, some good news that she could give her, as life-changing as it was.
Sandra stared, hardly even blinking. But Alan had to press on.
“You’re pregnant, Sandra. Again. And you too, Alex. All of us are. It’s not just Anniyah and Jenson!”
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She rushed the last words as if she had to hasten to get them all out where she could best make use of them. But Alan may as well have not been present as Sandra sat back, her lower jaw falling slack. Alex tried to clear her throat, tipping forward as she worked at the lump there, tail curled tightly around her haunches. It was shocking, something that no one could have anticipated, though surely it was enough that one couple had become pregnant…surely?
“Alex?”
Alan dithered, not sure what to do, using her tail to touch Alex’s shoulder and then pulling back.
“Are you okay? I’m so sorry to spring this on you, I know it’s a sensitive subject”, Alan said awkwardly, half-hiding behind a wing. “I didn’t know how else to tell you, anything was going to be a shock at this stage. Are you… Are you alright?”
Dragons could not cry, not in the way that humans did, but the way that Sandra turned and pressed into her wife-husband could only be taken as an expression of pure joy, their long, draconic necks winding together as they crooned. Their sides trembled with the strange force of those crooning cries, huddling together, though it was the force of their delight that had them engaged in such a tryst at that moment, not upset by any stretch of the imagination.
Alan smiled. She knew when to take her leave. And the caves, later, would have even more to offer her.
“I knew…” Sandra whispered, eyes closed as if against the threat of tears, though dragons did not expel tears through emotion, not like humans. “I knew, Alex… Alan… Alan, you… How did you know?”
“My studies and, well, I suspected that there was something more at work after speaking with Anniyah. Are you two okay?”
Sandra smiled, her lips parting, showing her teeth but hardly in any kind of fearsome manner.
“Yes… Better than alright, sweetheart. Oh… Oh, I never thought that I would ever feel this again. I didn’t want to tell you yet, Alex, because I wasn’t quite sure, not quite, even if I thought it could not be anything else.”
Crooning to her wife, Alex rubbed against her, their cheeks pressed together and horns knocking lightly, trembling, necks still interwoven. As close as a couple could be, they leaned into one another, sharing the warmth of their bodies in the rays of the sun, a light wind picking at their scales, though there would never again be a wind that would shake their hold on the love they held for each other.
“I know, darling… I know why you didn’t say. But a daughter? Or a son?” Alex took a ragged gasp, wings lifting, though the tension in his body could not be relieved so easily. “Me too… Why me also? I don’t understand…”
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“Maybe this is just the way it is meant to be. She would have wanted it this way.”
Alex shuddered, emotion welling up, trapped in his throat, the lump there one that she was more than familiar with. She didn’t want to think back to the accident but she had to, the day that everything had changed, the day that everything had become just a little bit more difficult in every way.
Maybe, being pregnant, understanding what had happened inside her… Maybe that would bring them something new. Maybe it wouldn’t make everything alright again but would give them something that they might otherwise never have known, her wife quivering against her, the anticipation in her scales palatable, something tangible that was strung out between them.
It was not a place for Alan to be and yet she could not so easily make good her exit, awkward in the moment.
Sandra and Alex… Together, the eggs growing inside them offered a fresh start and a new purpose in life, something that would keep them going, step by step, as they took flight into a new life. They had lost so much in the accident that had rendered Sandra infertile, though she had not remembered that it was something that she had told Alan about. She supposed it must have just come up at some time, when they were discussing their past lives. It was no matter though as she shuddered against her husband, folding her wings around him, the closeness of touch more powerful than any words that could ever have been passed between them.
“It’s finally…” Sandra took a shuddering breath, unaware that they were alone, that Alan had left. “Finally happening…again. In the right way. This is all the right way.”
Alex nuzzled her tenderly, his tongue flickering out to brush her cheek. It was not quite the dragon version of a kiss but it was something, something that they could share between them, a moment of closeness. Intimacy, after all, was not lost either.
“She would be so proud.”
“Julia would have loved a younger sibling.”
Smiling up at the late afternoon sunshine, how it cast down the valley, greening as a warmer time came to the land, they knew it to be true. The stirrings inside her had heralded new life and, now, she could bring forth all that she had known before, all that she would have taught her darling daughter, if only the world had not taken her from them so soon.
Everything happened for a reason, even if those reasons were not ones that they liked or understood. But they had another chance to teach, to show youngsters the way. Even if Alex would have to learn how to be a mother too, following in Sandra’s footsteps while applying what she knew too of tender fatherhood.
It was the best thing that they could ever have hoped for.
*
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With Santino, Kelvin tried to distract herself, tripping over her own feet as she trotted and jogged. It was harder than she liked to admit to forget about her reality, though she had not taken flight as yet still, running and moving too much like a human as if she wanted to linger there, back in the time when life, at the very least, had made sense. Her blue scales had become more splashed through with white over time, though she didn’t want to focus on it all that much. Arya thought she was pretty, but Kelvin could not think of a body like that, not the one that belonged to them.
“Come on, my man, you have to try out your wings sometime!”
Kelvin rolled her eyes.
“Are you going to fix your language then? Man? Dude? We’re none of those things… You’re better off calling me “lady” after everything that’s happened. It’s more accurate.”
Santino stumbled back but did not go as far as to fall over dramatically, though it was certainly something that she could have done. Chuckling, she shook her head and shrugged with her wings, trying on another human mannerism that, truly, had no place between them as dragons when there were far subtler ways to communicate.
“So cold… But that’s just the way you are too, isn’t it? There’s no harm in simply being like that, Kelvin, you know. We’re all in this together, you don’t have to be so curt and snappish with me.”
She huffed and turned her back on the purple dragoness. Whatever she had to say was just noise, white noise, background noise. Kelvin did not know what she was looking for down in the caves, inspecting an offshoot of the grand cavern that she had had to laboriously and tediously dig out. She didn’t know quite why her mind had locked onto that but it gave her some sense of purpose, something to get up for in the morning.
She had not thought that dragons could feel like that. But no one talked about such things in fantasy novels and tropes, did they?
“It looks like dragons have been around before humans, or at least back in the stone and bronze ages.”
Kelvin touched the wall etching reverently, though it was so faint that she had to press in close and squint, turning her head first one way and then the other to try both eyes, so close was she. There was much to be learned and she wondered at that she could uncover something that Alan had not, simply due to being in a different place at just the right time. There was so much down there that she was tugged on a little bit more, coming out of her shell just a tiny little bit, though she was not so sure that it would not be so easy to slip back into it.
“You think? What tells you that?”
Santino, at least, pretended to be interested. As loud as she was, she was not a bad soul, kind-hearted despite her dramatics. Maybe, in time, that would be tempered, for
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she already did not quite feel that she fit in the shoes that she had worn as a human, so to speak. In the absence of a little of her own noise, she found contemplative thought, even if she still preferred to be near her dragon sisters for such things. Being alone still very much was not what Santino enjoyed and preferred for herself, trying to settle into her new body with all the complications that brewed along with that, her lighter, feminine build not sitting right with her.
And it was nice to hear Kelvin talk as if she was herself again, though she had not known him well back at the university.
“Here… This translates…” Kelvin peered at the notes that Alan had allowed her to borrow. “This is the type of home that they used to build, these mounds of earth.”
Oh, it was faint, but the shape of the imprint on the wall could be traced, ever so lightly, with the tip of a claw. But careful, yes: she had to be careful. It could not be damaged or the path that they were to take might be lost forever in the history of their civilisation.
Kelvin jolted. Just where had that thought come from? That was not her. That was not her own mind.
“Kelvin? You alright?”
“Yeah… Yeah.”
But she wasn’t. She could not be when she was a dragon wanting to be a man, missing her partner, her gentle smile, how her black hair had falling in a straight curtain past her shoulders. Casey… Casey would be wondered what had happened to her, thinking that she was dead. And just what was Kelvin to think about the vaguest, faintest possibility of Casey still loving her when she was a dragon?
What Kelvin should have remembered, however, was that love transcended all bounds when it was true of heart. It cut through obstacles that one may have before considered insurmountable and brought new roads into fresh light, opening up routes that had not been evident before.
Such was the way for dragons. They didn’t have much of a meaning for personal space between them and Kelvin was unnerved more by how it did not bother her in the slightest to have Santino pressed up against her. It should have set her skin – no, her scales – crawling, but to have the other dragonesses there, somehow, felt like the most natural thing in the world as she grunted softly in the back of her throat.
She could not write, not even the bare, light scratches that Alan made. Even then Alan took a very, very long time to do anything, which was fair enough when it was anticipated that dragons were never supposed to write in the human fashion at all. Yet what Kelvin could do was pretend that she was, somehow, back in university, maybe out on a field trip, taking it all in for her course, something new, a sub-course or degree that would add on to what she was studying.
It was only a matter of getting by.
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*
However, what Kelvin had failed to realise in her studies with Santino, digging into the caves and excavating a route to a new cave for fresh information, was that the mounds of earth that she had seen in the drawings had had a far more intimate meaning for them, for their species. Sandra, Alex, Anniyah and Jenson, along with Alan, of course, were pregnant, but what had not been considered was that there was more to it.
Frowning as Santino devoured the carcass of roe deer, blood lightly marking her purple muzzle, Kelvin turned away distastefully.
“Could you eat a little neater? We are people, after all…”
Santino, however, for all her distaste of raw meat before could not stop eating, chewing up great, tearing gulps of meet as ifs he couldn’t get it all down her throat quickly enough. She had to rip it free, had to have its life-sustaining sustenance, growling softly, her tail flicking back and forth. Nothing else existed for her, right then and there, other than eating, not caring that she was being watched. It was not a devolving into a more animalistic state, however, but something that she needed, something that her body hungered for in that moment more than anything else.
Kelvin left her there, a little disgusted. She would have to try to cook meat again for herself if Santino was going to eat like a savage. It was a pity as the other dragoness had bene the only other one of them to enjoy cooked meat still with her, even if they had, in a way, bene clinging to the humanity that lurked deep within still. They’d changed and she supposed she could not count on Santino to stay the same either.
In a pool of late-afternoon sunshine, she yawned, showing her teeth. There was nothing else to do and she didn’t much feel like delving back down into the caves to research more. What more could be found in there? Alan clearly thought there was something but the answers there, well…Kelvin was not all that sure that she wanted to know them anymore. There had always been a warning in her old fantasy books, that one should be prepared for the answers they sought. Or else what was the point in looking for them in the first place? Knowledge was power but it also had the potential to strip one of power, taking it from them.
Kelvin feared losing what little power she had left, even if control, self-control too, did not seem hers anymore. But it was too late for that.
She turned one way and the other, sleepy and yet unable to get comfortable, sweeping twigs off the patch of grass where she wanted to lie, which should have been warm enough. Just what was wrong with her? What did she have to do to get comfortable? She just couldn’t stop yawning, tired and lethargic, nothing at all sounding better to her than a snooze in the sunshine. So why wasn’t that possible?
Frustrated, she slipped off into a pond, sinking into the cool water, letting the cooling ripples flow around her, lapping around her face. She signed, bubbles rising through the water, but still the sense of heaviness within her remained.
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If she had carried young before, she would have realised that the number of pregnant dragons, as much as she might have tried to deny it, had increased already.
*
Motherly instinct was only known to those who had experienced it for themselves or were in the process of experiencing it. Brent growled, pushing Isla-Rae back from the cliff-edge where she was practising her wing strength in the face of a rising wind.
“Ouch! Brent, don’t do that! You could have pushed me over!”
The dragoness glowered, digging her claws into the dirt.
“You were going to fall! You’ve got to stay back until your wings are stronger!”
Isla-Rae scoffed, a little more confident since becoming a dragoness, though still very much finding her feet. Her wings may have allowed her great agility with her small frame but one thing that she lacked was stamina. That didn’t seem any easier of late either with something, she could not say what, weighing her down. Did dragons put on weight? She guessed any creature could.
“Brent… You’ve got to let me do this, I’m strong enough now. You’ve got to trust me.”
The dragoness growled and shook her head but Isla-Rae was neither her daughter nor her sister, not younger than her by any means. But why did she want to protect and look after her so much? Her stomach twisted up into knots as the pearlescent dragoness leapt up again, letting the wind catch her wings, spreading them, cupping and shaping the air so the updraft lifted her higher and higher.
“Be careful!”
Brent couldn’t stop herself but all Isla-Rae had for her was a exuberant cry as she floated higher and higher, learning how to save her energy and make the wind work for her.
“Look! Brent, Brent! I’m doing it! Look at me!”
She squealed as she maintained her place in the air, only flapping her wings very lightly, holding her position. And she’d done it all on her own, brent looking up at her like a proud mother, heart brimming over with a kind of pride that had nothing to do with her at all.
Mother?
Something pulled inside her and she gave a sharp intake of breath through her muzzle, though that was not natural for a dragon. Her wings stiffened against her back, something settling into place inside her, a niggling scrap of knowledge that had been knocking around her mind for too long already.
Oh dear…
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The funny thing was, as she turned to look at her ever so slightly larger stomach, flanks pushed out a little more than they had been, as if she had had a larger meal than normal, she didn’t mind all that much. Maybe she’d known all along, but it was not up to her, as a previous male, to know the ins and outs. She’d thought she’d just been extra hungry of late but that explained, a little, why she hadn’t quite been able to fly as quickly as she had before.
Her eyes drifted to the floating dragoness, who was only then beginning to tire.
Maybe she’d have to have a chat with Isla-Rae too about any “strangeness” that she’d been experiencing…
The others too noticed changes, though they came slowly. Maybe Arya was a little more tired than usual and maybe Santino’s ravenous appetite, her change in how she ate, had to be paid attention to sooner or later. Isla-Rae huffed and puffed going up slopes but came to life in the air, learning how to more aptly and efficiently make the wind and the air that she soared through work for her.
Some ignored the changes, hunkering down, acting like they didn’t exist, even when Arya less than timidly asked if she’d been feeling a bit “odd” lately.
“Kelvin, have you been experiencing anything odd?” She floundered for words, awkward in a moment where she could have really used a guiding hand. “Why… You’re off on your own so much… I mean… You seem quieter…”
Kelvin scoffed and rolled her eyes, coupling the dismissive expression with a flick of her tail.
“Who wouldn’t be different? We’re dragons, Arya. Maybe you didn’t notice?”
Arya reeled, taken aback.
“Alright, well, there’s no need to be so snappy with me. I just thought that there might have been something wrong, that you were feeling…sick…or something…”
The growl that ripped itself from Kelvin’s lips was entirely genuine as she rounded on Arya, both of them easily matched in size, though Kelvin was most likely the more delicate of the two. The scar on Kelvin’s foot itched and, without thinking, she covered it with the other, lips trembling with a deeper snarl.
“And just what do you know? Think you know everything because we’re both dragonesses now?”
Arya scowled, clicking her teeth together, her own anger rising.
“No, it’s because – hey!”
But Kelvin was not due to stay around for the fallout of her outburst as she grunted and launched herself into the air…only to land again awkwardly. Her wings were not
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strong enough, not even then, to obey her command and she cursed under her breath, storming off on all fours instead.
Arya shook her head, sighing softly. She’d thought Kelvin would be one to ask, one who may have known just a little bit more, but, alas… Some things did not come so easily. She had to understand that she was probably having the hardest time out of all of them.
“Arya, are you quite alright?”
Sandra appeared from around an outcrop of rock, the slope where the two dragonesses previously had been talking quite open otherwise. She half-shrugged, touching her forehead briefly to Arya’s in greeting.
“My apologies, I was basking and I didn’t have a chance to move on before you began talking.”
Arya sighed again, more heavily that time, her sides seeming a little rounder afterwards, not quite settling in the same way. Maybe they were imagining things there though, seeing them all as bigger than they were…or maybe she was overthinking it.
“I thought Kelvin might not have been well too but…”
Oh, it was hard to say, scuffing a claw through the dirt, not wanting to give any more weight at all to the knot of anxiety in her belly. It was too soon for her, much too soon, and she could not help but feel that she had so much of her life left to lead and then…her stomach started to grow. Not much, so little that it should have been imperceptible, but she knew when her movement began to shift, ever so slightly, that something was different. And there were already others there, among them, that were experiencing the same.
“It’s okay, Arya, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want it.”
“It’s not that… I…” She sighed again. Best to have it out. “I think I’m…pregnant.”
Sandra rested her nose against Arya’s, the two of them, just for a moment, taking in the scent of the other. A moment of peace stretched between them, settled in certainty, as much as the trepidation did not soften easily in Arya’s heart.
“I know, sweetheart. But it’s going to be okay.”
Arya quivered.
“It’s going to be all of us, isn’t it? How did you feel when you knew you were pregnant? What were the…signs?”
Sandra told her, though there was no nausea to contend with. Settling Arya down somewhere more comfortable, a small cave that allowed two dragons to converse more comfortably, she draped a wing over her back and they watched the day grow old. Their eyesight allowed them to see just as well at night as they delved into
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darkness, matching up little hints and symptoms, things that pointed the whole coven of dragons towards something that neither of them could have imagined. For there was something, something deeper, linked between them all, something that would render every last dragoness there carrying and expecting in time.
They had no proof, but the proof already seemed to be right there before their eyes. They’d only been blind to it until that moment.
*
The dragonesses had the day to day to get along with, bit by bit, though some days were, by the very nature of the beast, easier to get through than others. Some, however, managed better than Kelvin, even if her time too would come to spread her wings and delight in all that had come to pass.
Sandra and Alex… They had a reuniting, of sorts, to bring them closer again, closing the distance that had opened up between them after the accident, her infertility, Julia’s death. It was all bundled up in a tangle of pain that had only been unravelled by the shedding of one skin for another, embracing the change, the difference that eased forth. She’d never thought that she’d feel whole again. A womb did not make a woman but the absence of such, as her abdomen was too badly damaged, was something that she felt acutely, day to day.
But as a dragoness…she had another, already ripe with the promise of new life. Smiling, she nuzzled at her stomach, Alex pressing in, his tail sensually and softly twined around hers.
“Alex… I think things have come right in the end.”
“All as Julia said.”
Dragons did not kiss and yet there were other things that they could do to demonstrate love for one another, the passion that brimmed over in their hearts. As if they were transforming all over again, their scales tingled and itched as they pressed in closer, breath catching.
They were dragonesses though… Were they really going to do it?
There was no one around, not that that would have mattered to dragons, such inhibitions and light modesty cast aside in lieu of something more passionate. It was not true to their beings exactly as they were to hide away such a potent, tangible part of themselves, something that they too intrinsically needed in order to be healthy and whole.
“Let me show you…”
Alex shivered, not knowing quite what her wife had in mind as yet but she was keen to see, something stirring deep inside her. Although she had, of course, admired Sandra’s form, loving her all the same, she just hadn’t known where to begin with a dragon’s body instead of a woman’s!
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Luckily, Sandra had more of an idea on that than her, letting her body rub up against Alex’s, twining and winding around him as if she was a domestic cat purring and murmuring.
“Relax, honey, this is going to all be at our pace…the only pace we need…”
What that meant did not matter as their noses touched, shivering in place, taking in each other’s breath, the soft, life-giving force that was always present. Alex’s warm exhalations eased over her scales, prickling along the edges as if the very essence of his being was slipping into her. Maybe that was how it was for dragons but that was for the two of them to find out, tails tangled, their limbs pulling together so that there no longer was any kind of distinction where one dragon ended and the other began.
Sunset marked their scales in a glow of crimson and russet, illuminating them softly, the lines of their bodies as they moved together, ever so lightly. Blue and red came together as they had before, yet things would never be the same between them ever again, but even better for the partner dragons. Tender parts that Alex had never considered pressing up to anything or anyone in that matter proved to be so much more sensitive, the dragoness gasping and trembling, her eyes half-lidded as if she did not have the strength to open them widely anymore.
“Relax, darling, I’m here for you… I’m always here for you.”
They twisted together, rolling. There was no mounting, no penetration, not between dragonesses. It could have been crude but sensuality was what twined and twisted around them in the setting rays of the sun on a day that had been one of many that could have been considered the best ever. For they no longer needed to escape their reality with vices of choice when everything had come right, their Julia sending them a gift that they could hold near and dear to their hearts.
They pressed together, breath catching, flanks shuddering with it. They had never gasped like that before, not as dragons, panting for air and yet still drinking down everything that they could have ever wanted and so much more. The two of them changed positions, Sandra showing Alex, lovingly, the way, leading the way only because she, at the very least, understood more of the ins and outs of a woman’s body when it came to that kind of shared bonding, that pleasure.
“Easy… It’s not…about being rough…”
Gentle was the way and she showed him just how a flicker of the tongue in just the right spot could bring forth shivers of delight, Alex’s body trembling without her consent. It helped Sandra too that the vent under Alex’s tail was strictly for waste removal from her body while the one lower, supposedly in an easier position for a partner of the opposite sex when it came to anatomy, was purely for reproduction. It was within that sparking joys lay as she teased her tongue forth, her tail flicking up against Alex’s muzzle while the two of them lay end to end.
“Oh… Sandra… Ohhh!”
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But Alex could not hold back as passion gripped her, her body no longer within her control, though it was not like anything that she had experienced as a human. Muscles twitched that were purely draconic in nature, even her wings flapping, twisting onto her back, wings flapping, though it was hard to take care not to trap them under her body too in her contorted writhing. There was no sense of having a handle on her body, maybe like the freefall that she had taken under Brent’s misguided advice, everything rushing by her so quickly, feeling like she could not pull up out of the freefall even though her wings were right there, waiting for her.
Such in the same way, Sandra was there for her, licking off her muzzle with a decidedly smug look on her face, though just how a dragoness managed to appear smug was beyond Alex.
“Hah,” she groaned breathlessly, tail curling back and forth, the slender, winding tip so flexible that it kept drawing the eye over and over again. “You know…it feels like that every time?”
Alex purred, lips trembling, the croon rising up from deep at the back of her very long neck and throat.
“Well, darling, I must return the favour then.”
There was no one-way street when it came to the two of them, giving everything passionately even as the sunset eased into twilight. The mountains, rocky crags and stubborn conifers too, cast into a dim, blue that could never be considered a gloom, shading and shadowing them faintly from prying eyes. That was, of course, if dragons could not see as well in the dark as they could in the daylight, one dragon higher up watching them from afar.
Kelvin tried not to look, she really did, but it was hard not to be drawn to such an outward expression and vivid outpouring of love. She’d heard some of the misfortunes that had befallen them and yet all Kelvin felt was sad and jealous that she could not have that love for herself. The bodies twisting and writhing beneath her did not appear like they needed any more privacy for themselves, though she was vaguely aware that she would have looked away and gone somewhere else if she had been watching them in her past life.
Oh, it seemed so far away. Kelvin swallowed hard. Maybe it was better not to look at what was happening too. She knew that she was pregnant already, even with Alan revealing it to her too, though Alan had been about all over the place trying to corner her. That was something that Kelvin could do without, even as the weeks passed and it became almost comedic.
Brent was less discreet, browsing the shrubs for berries as she caught wind of their enjoyment, soft, sensual groans rising. It did not take a genius to work out what was going on down there as they twisted around one another, a tangle of limbs and tail, Sandra panting in a flutter of pink tongue pouring over the edge of her lips while Alex explored under her tail. She watched for a while, curious without wanting to know too much, for it was as simple as mating, even if it was between two dragonesses.
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Maybe I am changing.
Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the physical changes were the extent of all that. But she had no way to tell until they happened, even if she revelled in flight.
Spreading her wings, she soared serenely into the darkening night.
Sandra and Alex did not know that they had been observed and neither would they have found it in themselves to care. The moment was a reawakening for them, their true moment of rebirth, trying to kiss one another and laughing, for it was not something that dragons did. Their instincts and feral natures were still coming through as they curled up around one another, letting the tease and pulse of their bodies, so sensitive in the heat of that moment that they were able to feel each and every individual scale in shocking detail, do the work for them.
“I love you so much.”
“And I you, darling. Always and forever.”
They wound their necks around one another, as close as any two beings could be and not wanting to be anywhere else at all. They needed that moment, the tenderness stretching sweetly between them, letting the night take them as they explored one another’s bodies more and more.
They may have been pregnant and they may have been wives, but that did not mean in any way that they could not grow even closer together.
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Chapter Five
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Surprisingly, it was Isla-Rae, the smallest and slightest of them all with her neat, short horns, who found out why they had transformed initially. That was one thing that Alan had not been able to decipher, though everything that they did they remembered – which most likely answered the question as to why there were not more records from dragons from all those years back. Beyond that cave, it was very likely that there were few to none of the treasure troves of knowledge left to be passed down to those to bring forth the rebirth of civilisation.
And heaven knew that humanity sorely needed it.
“Oh…”
She saw things better from a distance, the type of dragon who liked to take in the big picture. Her heart warmed as she rested a foot (sometimes she used the front ones more like hands – in a way, they really were interchangeable) on her stomach, though it was not large enough to show her pregnancy. She doubted that it would show her pregnancy in the later stages too. Regardless, knowing that there was new life int here made her warm through, tingly and crackling ever so lightly through her body with a warming prickle of delight. She could not have put a name to it but, simply, it was soothing to feel at the best and the worst of times. And there were not many bad times to be had at all those days.
Maybe there would be no need to keep looking for her old life after all. Not after what she had found.
She brought Alan down to see the big picture, the pattern that the paintings across the span of the cave showed. It had just needed a step back, a step in the right direction, to make things clear again.
“See here… This is us. This was always meant to be us.”
The colours were faded but, still, they could not be denied: the exact colours of their dragon forms lay over a circle of dragons that had been painted onto the wall as if viewed from above. She paused there, pressing her paw up to it, her claws so light on the wall that it was quite as if she was, potentially, cradling a little one in close to her.
Isla-Rae swallowed, shaking her head. That was a strange thought.
“Here, we were meant to come here,” she said again, repeating herself as she tried not to dwell on the strange thought for too long. “It was always meant to be us, just like this. This is the changing of the world, the return of dragons. So much has happened to the world and I think what the inscriptions here and what was found by you on the clay tablets earlier too are showing is that the new age is coming.”
She took a deep breath, gazing at the pile of eggs, nestled into the mound of a nest on the wall in the engraving, more longingly than she could have ever thought possible.
“It’s for us to be the mothers…of this new age. I didn’t think that I was…well…”
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She trailed off, swallowing hard. One part of that utterance was harder for to say than the other, but she could not have anticipated just which part it was. But was that not true of all of them? Everyone had changed there, in a way, and the changes were most certainly not just physical when it came to the dragonesses. The changes were not even the most extreme for the men who had become dragonesses but something subtler, something that came into the forefront of her mind more and more with every passing day.
Alan had to research further, her studiousness coming together with her soft intent quietly, though she had to be careful, in the caves, to not let her slightly rounded, curved horns knock the walls; they seemed to change shape as she grew, still, after the initial transformation. She did not write much anymore, instead trying to learn how to make carvings with her claws, as they had seen on the clay tablets and throughout the opened-up cave systems on the walls. It was better for her, although everything that she learned was left in her head: perhaps another feature of being a dragon that Alan could not have anticipated.
“Interesting…”
Very much so, but she was changing too, her interest in passing things on to the next generation keen in her mind. It had never been something that she had thought about before, too intent on learning to think about a family, but she wanted that learning, now, to be passed on. And the only way to do that was to leave records, even though she did not know whether it was dragons that she would have to leave her studies for or humans. The changing of the world and the age of a new civilisation, perhaps where dragons and humans lived together in harmony, was hers to record.
She would have to do more research, but from that point on, everyone knew that they were carrying eggs, that they were pregnant as dragonesses, whether they were born male or female before their change. They showed them just what had changed, why they had been so hungry, so tired, so anxious, so fidgety… Everyone showed their pregnancy differently, though Kelvin said nothing even when Alex and Jenson tried to support her.
Brent cocked her head and laughed out loud, wings lifting. It was, for her, a small gesture of surprise, highlighted by the tilt of her head and how her ram-like horns pulled her head a little more to the side than would have been normal whenever she did it.
“Oh… Is that why I’ve been missing all my saves in pine-cone-ball?”
Arya laughed and bumped her with her shoulder.
“Maybe… Or maybe you’ve found one sport in which I’m simply better than you.”
Santino sat quietly, turning to Alex, though the older dragoness knew intrinsically and understood that there were some things that could not be solved with talking it out. That was not in Santino’s nature, in what he remembered, what it had meant to her, before, to be a man. Some things were wrapped up in culture and there were few cultures, regardless of where one was in the world, that accepted men more openly speaking up.
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Therefore, quiet and peace helped, but it was good to have that regardless, Santino shuffling her weight a little as she, a little more meekly than usual, asked Anniyah if she might like to go hunting later.
“I think it’s obvious that I’ve been a little hungrier than usual…”
The dragoness chuckled and shook her head, mirth tickling the edge of her spirit, lifting her heart a little more.
“Oh, of course… But do you think that just the one catch will be enough for you?”
They laughed and it was good to laugh, breaking the uneasy edge in the clearing where they’d gathered. Maybe they’d all, deep down, understood that something more was different with them, but knowing that everyone was “in it together” could help them as much as it could push them apart. It could make or break them, the coven that they had gathered there, all that made them who they were, even if they were still working it out, some reeling more than others from the realisation that new life, somehow, was brewing inside their wombs.
One could only hope that it was the former. There was too much strife in the world to worry about anything else, to add one more to the never-ending list that went on and on and on of things to press concern over.
Isla-Rae struggled, a little, with the changes in her body, how her breath caught a little more, turning and nudging at her flanks. She would not have seen that there was a rise there if she had not been looking for it, but it helped her too in a strange sort of way to reassure herself that her eggs were in there. They didn’t quite know how long it would take for the eggs to gestate but there was a part of her that was a little disappointed that it was not more obvious that she was carrying unborn life inside her.
The swell may have been comforting, not enough to affect her flight or her walk, but no one who did not know that she was pregnant would see it as such. Isla-Rae murmured, talking to her eggs, though not even she could say what she had said to them afterwards, comforting words with only motherly substance behind them. Would she grow more in time, showing more? She’d always wondered what it would be like to be pregnant, back when she had been human, though that time, well… She’d expected it to come, of course, as a human being.
Eggs and not a little one, a single youngster, inside her too. That was different, very much so, sending her mind reeling even as she crooned to her belly, more settled now that she understood the extra weight inside her, why it had felt as if something was dragging her back. It was clear after what she had researched with Alan that they were eggs, of course, but she hunted through the brush and scraggy undergrowth, the summer season offering her a better time to hunt down where would be a suitable time for her eggs to incubate.
Was it the right time of year for that? Motherly worry gnawed at her. Was that how her mother had worried about her in years gone by? Isla-Rae may not have been a little girl anymore but she still remembered in softened, blurry-edged detail the feel of her
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mother’s hand brushing her hair out of her face. It was a far cry to her pearlescent scales, the quiet strength in her neat frame.
Her mother had always looked after her, made her bed for her, taught her, and it was up to Isla-Rae to play that part too, checking back down in the caves to uncover just how dragons nested. Truth be told, she could have relied on instinct alone but she wanted to be sure about it, for she carried far too precious a cargo within her to let it go wrong. She wanted to do her best for them and took Brent back down with her to study, though studying and learning, to be fair to her, was not quite the favourite activity of the other dragoness.
“Won’t we know what to do?” Brent said with a yawn, showing off a flash of sharp teeth in her rich green scales, blue more over the bulk of her body. “It’ll be fine, Isla-Rae. You don’t need to worry about this.”
Affectionately, she nuzzled the other dragoness, though that was hardly something that Brent would have ever considered doing as a man. But she was far from that and perhaps one of them that had gotten the most used to their changes, enjoying her wings and everything that her body could do. Without a career in sports ahead of her, as her time in her “studies” had ended without something lined up that would propel her higher in the world, she was far more than simply “content” to stretch her wings and soar in that regard instead.
Isla-Rae shook her head, clicking her tongue within her mouth, the slender appendage tickling through the light saliva that pooled between the lines of teeth on her lower jaw.
“No… Well, yes. Yes, I think we’ll know but don’t you want to know ahead of time too?”
Brent smiled.
“Yes, I know what you mean. But this isn’t something to stress about or fret. Why don’t I help you dig a nest later on? It’ll be early but if it’ll make you feel better, I’m happy to help.”
Brent had always been one to help and, in a way, it was reassuring to her to know that that much of her old personality had come along with her. She wanted to test out all that life as a dragon, for she had no hope of ever becoming a man again, had to offer for her, tackling it with the same relish she would a soccer ball, the tip of her tail curling back and forth, playing out prospective moments before her eyes.
Her dragonets playing, baring their teeth in a playful “battle”.
Showing her dragonets, all of the dragonets, how to spread and strengthen their wings for flight.
Curling around them on a cold winter’s night, letting them nestle into her while she tucked them away in a bed of leaves to stay warm while their bodies grew.
She shivered softly.
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“Come on, Isla-Rae, don’t fret.”
A mother always knew when to lead and, to say the least of it, a distraction helped the cause, rising to her feet and shaking herself off, linking the tip of her tail with Isla-Rae’s. The main tunnels, over the course of their passing, had been widened enough for two fully grown dragons to walk along side by side and they took comfort in each other’s companionship. More than comfortable to brush up against one another as sister dragonesses and mothers, the contact grounded them in a way that their feet, even in contact with the soil and earth, never could.
When they were with one another, they simply were home.
*
While Isla-Rae busied herself finding the perfect nesting site for all of them, increasingly broody, Santino tried to ease Kelvin out of her shell. However, that shell may as well have been the exterior casing for the eggs that the other dragoness was carrying inside her: strong and willing to bear up to exterior force better than one could have imagined. An egg had to be strong to protect the unborn soul inside until the time for their hatching and Kelvin had not yet “hatched”, not truly, into her new form. She may have looked like a dragoness, but there was a guard up and a line of protective scales that, one by one, the others had allowed.
“You know, it’s not like this life is so bad,” Santino said, sharing, delicately, a haunch of deer with Kelvin. “You need to eat more, come on. Try this? It’ll go to waste otherwise.”
Kelvin jerked her nose up. She’d realised that rolling her eyes wasn’t something that dragons did, as much as she kept trying to do it, something human that she thought she could carry on with her.
“You say that but I know you’re going to eat it anyway. Who are you, my mother, to tell me what and when to eat anyway?”
Santino gulped but grinned widely, pushing by any discomfort with her old bravado.
“Well, maybe I’m practising! You’re going to be a mother too soon so we need…to get used to it…”
Yet she could not be as loud as she usually was, the words fading on her lips as a lump that she was not so easily able to dislodge stuck in her throat. There were those at home, her family, back waiting for her. What did they think had happened?
They were not thoughts that Santino had ever been comfortable with.
“Kelvin.”
The dragoness turned to look at her, curiosity grabbed, at least, from Santino’s suddenly quiet, muted tone. It was as if someone had suddenly dialled down the volume on her, though she was often so outspoken that one forgot that she could pull
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herself back. The problem with Santino, however, was that, since becoming a dragoness, she didn’t have her old experience and fields of references to pull from. Everything there was as new to her as it was to Kelvin and the rest of them. That in itself put her at a disadvantage.
Santino inhaled slowly, taking a deep breath. Kelvin’s blue and white scales obviously bristled.
“What?”
“It’s just…” Santino preened a wing, distracting herself from what stirred beneath the surface. “You want to go home, right?”
Kelvin stiffened.
“Yeah… Why?”
“Why don’t you just go then?”
Kelvin started. What kind of question was that?
“I can’t fly yet,” Kelvin said, though it came with a tinge of guilt: it was not as if she had even tried to fly. “I don’t know how to leave. And, besides, just what am I meant to do? You think the police would allow him to just walk into town looking like this? And she wouldn’t…”
Kelvin shook herself and backed off, breath catching.
“No, sorry, no, I didn’t mean to say that.”
“What’s wrong?”
Santino’s maternal tendencies may have been growing, tending her more and more towards caring, for that was why she was out on the rocky scree with Kelvin in the first place, but that did not mean that she was no longer clumsy. She was as apt to put a foot in a hole as she was to put the same body part in her mouth, despite Brent’s assistance and tutelage in how to walk, how to move.
Kelvin backed off, shaking her head, wings pinned down against her back as if, even then, she was afraid of spreading them. For if she took to the air – what did that make her? Would that mean that there was no going back, no life left for her? Isla-Rae had gushed about something that they were meant to do but, frankly, she didn’t want to hear neither hide nor hair about any of that. It wasn’t what she wanted and she’d thought she’d made herself more than clear on that matter!
“Get away from me, Santino,” she growled, gnashing her teeth even as she beat a hasty retreat – not as threatening as she may have liked to be. “I don’t want to talk to you – I don’t want to talk to any of you! And you’re right – I don’t want to be a dragon! So stop trying to make me be on!”
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Thus, Santino was left sitting on her violet haunches, her voice at a loss while Kelvin disappeared down the slope, skittering and grabbing, using her front feet like human hands, not letting go of where she had come from. Not that she needed to release it entirely but a little loosening of her grip may well have set her heart a little more at ease.
Santino sighed.
“If only it was easy…”
But she did not settle into life as a dragon all that easily either.
*
“You seem caught up in your own thoughts, Arya.”
“Oh!”
Arya smiled and made room by the fire for Anniyah, the dragoness settling herself down heavily beside the rich green scaled dragoness, a similar companion. The older dragons, though they were all mature and comfortable, seemed to be larger than the students, though whether that was due to age or something else entirely, maybe even chance, would only be seen later. The fire was not needed to warm her but Arya liked looking at it still, the flames leaping and dancing and snapping up kindling. In a way, it reminded her of her childhood, all the camping trips she’d taken with her family. Would she give her offspring the same joyous experiences, quiet and yet poignant, too? She could only hope.
“No… Well, yes, I am thinking, but not in a bad way, Anniyah.”
“Mhm…” The older dragoness smiled, a hint of wisdom behind her eyes, betraying her elder years. “You say that but I’ve seen much of this before, Arya. You may be a dragoness but you, like so many others, cannot simply hide from what worries you.”
She sighed.
“You’re too astute.”
“You must have gotten that word from Alan.”
“Who else?”
They giggled, throats trembling lightly with laughter, though the moment still held a serious edge to it, night clawing at the edges of their vision, though they rested half inside the cave mouth, comfortably out of the wind. Shifting her weight, Arya leaned against Anniyah, the dragoness moving too so that their bodies melded softly into one another, russet and green complementing one another. There were no rough edges of scales to be had in the lines of their body, taking comfort from one another’s presence.
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“But you’re right. There is something on my mind.”
She scraped a claw through the dirt, swirling it around, making mindless, aimless patterns that had no meaning.
“It’s only… We’re dragons. We think we know why. But that doesn’t make it right, you know? I’m not the only one whose life was left behind. Brent doesn’t seem to struggle so much and both Sandra and Alex seem like this was the best thing that could have happened to them…but what about the rest of us? How do you even feel about it? To be pregnant again – at your age?”
It was blunt and direct but not rude. It was difficult for dragons to be rude when their body language told so very much too. Curiosity teased in subtle lines down her spine and the curve of her muzzle and Anniyah could no more be upset with her than she would ever be with the rest of their coven. Touching her nose gently to Arya’s, the two briefly shared breath.
“It’s quite alright to be comfortable as we are and still wonder what we left behind.” Anniyah’s eyes came tinged with sadness. “My daughters and my son. I don’t know what they think. I don’t know if they’ve had my funeral or not. But all of this is a chance to live a new life. I think we can rest assured that, at some time, our families will know what has come of us, our friends and loved ones. Only when we are ready for it and have the means to let them know, of course, but they will know.”
Arya smiled.
“I don’t have a boyfriend but I don’t think I would have wanted to have the worry about one anyway.”
Anniyah chuckled.
“I thought the same thing before I met Jenson, I assure you. But it’s different when you meet the right one. Maybe there will be a path in love for you as a dragon? Heaven knows I’ve been forced to confront things, ways of thinking… Well, let me say that they do not match up at all with how we are as dragons. They are difficult to put into any kind of words that make sense, even to me.”
Arya’s tail twitched but there were no more words to come, just quite companionship, peaceful and light at the eve of the day, between them.
Wanting to do well is one thing, she thought, laying her head down, too comfortable where she was not to save some energy in a nap. But the studying, all the volunteer work I did… To have that all be for nothing… She grunted softly, teasing on the edge of sleep. That can’t be for nothing. I’ve got to make this life, however it plays out, worth something.
Ambition, after all, could be played out in any aspect of life, not simply her schooling and her career.
*
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“I’m surprised that you want to learn to fly!”
Brent could hardly contain her enthusiasm, bouncing on the spot with all of them, even the more reclusive Sandra and Alex, together out on the grass. There were some rougher patches of grass up in the mountains that flourished more in the summer than in any other month, rich with growth and enticing other prey animals up onto the steeper slopes and the like to graze untouched strands. It meant that prey was plentiful and nearly everyone had become accustomed to eating raw food, even if they still had their favourite parts and enjoyed a touch of variety too.
Kelvin shuffled her feet. Just how long had it been since she’d been turned into a dragon? Maybe a month? Six weeks? Her body did not follow the rhythm and scheduling of calendars anymore, not as she had before, and she groaned softly, shaking her head, not wanting to reveal that there was more in mind. It was her pregnant belly that gave her more rhythm and softening sweetness, despite how she rebelled against the want to take things more slowly and easily, at a pace that better suited her at the eve of the day.
“Yeah…” She didn’t say why she wanted to learn to fly. “I want to learn to fly. You’re the best. Will you teach me?”
“Hey – I thought I was the teacher here? Or lecturer? Professor? I could make a tie out of some leaves…”
Alan shook his head but was half-serious about the tie, even as Sandra laughed with Anniyah.
“I think Jenson is missing his tie too, but not the work that he used to do. What do you think, Jenson?”
Jenson smiled and shook her head, but there was a twinkle in her eye that betrayed mirth hidden under the surface. Words came more easily to her as a dragoness, though she wondered that she had ever held them back so closely and fiercely before. It did not seem fitting when, truly, there was a never ending supply of words in the world, all so very willing to be spent.
“I said it before when I retired and I’ll say it again: I’ll never want to set foot or claw in an office again!”
Santino bellowed out a roar of laughter, overdoing it, trying too hard as she reared back onto her hind legs, wings flapping and beating the air. Isla-Rae flinched and tried to quiet her but the rambunctious dragoness was more a hatchling than any of them. Was Santino even maybe the youngest?
“Even if you think you’re going to be the best flyer of us all, Kelvin, chica, no one is better than this dragon! Do you have wings like this?”
She proudly extended them, allowing the light to shine through the softer, lighter purple membranes, though it was her height on her back legs, standing as she may have
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done as a human even if her anatomy was different, that rendered the image impressive. She could have been transposed from an illustrated novel in that moment, her silhouette standing out against the brow of the hill, the grass there so chosen as it would be soft and light for Kelvin to, well…potentially crash-land on. No one said that learning to fly was an endeavour for beginners.
Brent chuckled and bopped Alan lightly over her head with the edge of a wing.
“No, no, your student is over there – I think she looks keener to learn than mine so it’s me, really, that has the raw end of the deal. You sure you don’t want to trade?”
Alan stuttered, caught off-guard, Santino loudly protesting her innocence.
“Anyone would be lucky to get me as their student! I’d be the best student that there ever was here! Flying: no problem! Piece of cake!”
Alan grunted, lips pressed into a harder, thinner line. Only the light in her eyes softened her expression where muscles drew tauter – but not perfectly so.
“Ah, no, I’d rather…”
But Santino was too loud, spinning around with her tail whipping after her. She dominated the moment with bolshy moves and lunging attacks, supposedly showing how she would come down on a herd of elk or similar from above, even though there were distinctly different hunting tactics to be had for every species they took as prey. It was, however, a distraction so that not everyone would be looking at Kelvin, Santino only pausing once to check that the lesson as going ahead for her while she enjoyed the spotlight for a little while. It was a show that benefitted more than just the one dragoness.
“So, what you need to do is…” Brent frowned, not a natural coach but willing to learn. “Wait, did you do your wing exercises like I asked you last time? Or did you not start those yet? You’re not going to go anywhere if you haven’t built up any strength yet.”
Kelvin winced.
“Maybe every second day?” She lied, though she had done them to a little extent. “Not always. I feel stronger though.”
That much was true, even if that strength was partly due to the fact that she had a reason, at long last, to want to fly. Her stomach twisted with guilt over the eggs held within her but she was not planning to hurt them, not at all. After they were laid, she would put the links of her plan into motion and then, finally, everything would come up as she needed it to at long last.
Finally, after all was said and done and the eggs were in the claws of someone who actually wanted to be a mother, she would find her girlfriend and explain to her all that had happened.
She’ll understand.
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Her heart warmed, though it was not with love for her clutch of eggs, so softly nestled within her, but the woman who had challenged her to be so much more than herself. Sure, they’d met while gaming but it was their love of fantasy novels that had linked them together, the foundation of the relationship that had grown over the last few months. Most certainly, Casey would know that she did not mean to stay away, even as her heart pounded, her blood running hotter just at the mere thought of the woman who had pulled her out of a dark pit at the worst of times. The funny thing was that she was not even sure that Casey knew at all what she had done for her.
Sometimes things like that worked out. Sometimes they didn’t. Kelvin was one of the lucky ones.
“That’s something at least.”
Brent was not all that pleased with how she had studied and practised, digging a grey claw into the dirt as she tried to assure Kelvin that all would come right soon, but that would not be Kelvin’s concern for too much longer. They would know, later, what she’d planned but, by then, it would be too late. She stretched out her wings on command, even allowed him to inspect the muscle there. And wasn’t it strange how physical touch and contact no longer bothered her as much as it used to?
She didn’t worry too much about that. A goal gave her focus. And it was that focus that would have to carry her forward, step by step.
She flapped her wings, showing off the muscles that allowed her to work them, beating them so strongly and so powerfully that her feet left the ground. She could hover, in a fashion, but that was merely because she couldn’t get herself up any higher, as much as she wanted to.
“Urf!”
Kelvin strained and strained, her wings pounding a beat that only she could hear, deafened by the strain of them. The membranes cupped and shaped the air, powering through it, yet it was the downdraft that lifted her off, the air simply needing somewhere to go. If the ground blocked it, her wings held it and she was, thusly, lifted. It was simple, in a way, and yet the strain burned through her fiercely, tail twitching with pain.
“Easy there, don’t go too hard.”
Ever the teacher, at least when it came to feats of athleticism, Brent walked around her, allowing her enough space and still remaining close enough to deliver instruction.
“You don’t need to lean forward so much, let your wings do the work.”
Alas, wings were hardly a natural limb in the slightest for a man to control, even though she was a dragoness and should have known how to do it. Kelvin’s frustration grew, stirring up dust in a heavy cloud, the ground hard and dry, though there was a taste of something different in the air: the oncoming change of the seasons.
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“Harder!”
She had to try, had to do it – no other way would lead her to her destiny. Kelvin strained and flapped but she did not have the strength as yet to lift herself from the ground in such a manner. Few dragons could, Alan hypothesised when studying, but there was still something that made her want to do it, to make it so.
Maybe if she could lift off, take flight, straight from the ground, everything would be okay again. Maybe even the small act of doing such a thing would give her purpose, something more to think about than the weight of the eggs in her womb. Maybe even it would give her the escape that she craved so badly.
She did not know. But she had to try.
“That’s it! You’re doing it!”
Up and up and up. One wing-beat after the other gained her scrap after scrap of altitude under she pummelled the air with her wings a few metres up. She had to do it, had to keep going, muscles burning, the sun shining down, though it only warmed her scales without overheating her in the slightest. It would take a lot more than even the baking heat of high summer to scorch her through, other draconic abilities present within that had not even come to light as yet for any of them.
In time. But not yet. They had to learn what it meant to be dragonesses first and that was a tall enough order without adding in the greater force of life within them into the mix.
She grunted, wings trembling, starting… The break in the pumps of her wings was enough to drop her heavily back to the ground but Kelvin was ready for that, her legs slightly bent to take the impact of her drop, tail lifted so it would not slam too heavily into the ground.
“Nice landing!” Brent grinned, the light in her eyes seeming more proud than she had any right to be: it had been Kelvin, after all, that had managed to hover like that, strengthening her wings, for so long. “You’ll do just fine, it’s just a case of practise. You don’t know how many hours I had to put in for rowing back in the day but it’s all worth it. This is so much better than rowing!”
With her jaws parting in her widest grin yet, Brent bellowed out a roar of triumph, the flesh around her maw quivering with the force of her cry. But such cries of pride did not do to be held in so, even if the warmth brimming over inside her was not something that she was used to at all. It was fresh and new and came with a glow to it that Brent instinctively wanted to lean into without even knowing why.
Did she always have to know why? Instinct had served her well before and it could be no different, surely, as a dragoness.
Kelvin started and shook her head but the others were already cheering for her too, swinging their tails and heads back and forth as they laughed and cried out their praise, though she didn’t even think that she’d done that well. Was what she had achieved
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that much of a good thing? She stepped back uncertainly, her weight leaning over the hind end of her body, tail hanging down, sweeping through the dirt.
Around her, the dust settled, ground down rock that had faded into something insubstantial over time. And yet it could be just as powerful when whipped into a whirlwind by a dragon’s wings, the strength even in Kelvin’s body, which was still very much being developed, greater than she could have imagined.
“I…”
Her lips twitched. Was she trying to smile?
“Thanks… For helping me, Brent. I appreciate it.”
They felt like the right words to say and yet she could not get them out easily, the thickness in her throat something that she had to push through, even though it felt heavy and cloying, like eating and swallowing something that was too large to pass down. The dragoness tilted her head back and forth, a fool on the spot, though the hot flush of old embarrassment did not sweep through her that time. Whereas she could feel embarrassed, she didn’t get the heat of it anymore. Kelvin was not sure whether she should ask the others about whether or not that was a dragon thing or a something wrong with her thing. Such was uncertainty, simply as it was.
But her wings were stronger and her mission, however misguided it may have been, lodged firmly in her head. Once she was strong enough to fly and fly for a long span of time, she would return to the city, finding them and making it right again.
It was all that she could hope to do.
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Chapter Six
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They knew that it was unlikely that they could remain undiscovered for long, Alan and Santino flying together, comfortably wing-tip to wing-tip. It was strange to be so close to one another in the air and Santino wondered if she should have swung to the side, taking up more open-air space for herself, but, well, she could not deny that it felt right. Maybe they were designed to be close to one another up there, easily in control of their bodies. Sometimes she didn’t feel as if she was made for flying, however, her hips shifting a little in mid-air, her tail feeling too thick at such a time, swinging back and forth, acting as a rudder.
Brent soared overhead, easily the most agile and athletic of all of them. Of course, she was, being the sporty type, but the swing in her blue-green tail could easily be followed at least.
“If you angle your wings a little more,” Brent said, her shapely jaws parted in a friendly, dragon smile. “It’ll be easier like that. You can fly more freely then, saving energy.”
Smirking, Santino flicked her tail up, catching the other dragoness in the belly.
“You think you know it all! But who’d win in a race?”
Brent laughing, buffeting her with a gust of air from her wings and easily flipping out of retribution range.
“Me, of course! But…what…”
She quieted. There was something wrong, something very wrong, though just how it stirred up and churned her stomach into strange knots was not something that she honestly recognised or realised could happen. It was disconcerting, almost a human sensation, though something that could not be played off so easily.
Humans. She didn’t even think of herself as a human anymore, the shift in the set of her body alerting both Santino and Alan that something was going on below. They followed her line of sight, where her eyes pointed, the brightly coloured flags and backpacks standing out from the rocky slopes where they eased down into rougher grassland.
“So close…”
Alan gulped and shook her head, though it was strange for that to be strange to her, her head swimming, light-headed at an altitude where that should not have been a problem. Of course… Of course, people had come looking for them. But what were they to say to people when the dragons simply could not be called “people” anymore? Not in the way they had before!
Santino wavered, purple wings tipping back and forth, but she had to stay steady. What if he was down there? No, no… No, he wouldn’t know. Well, he had known, kind of, but all the thoughts of her past were mixed up in her head, twisted with her present. She wasn’t so sure what she wanted anymore but her scales shuddered, hide quivering to slink away, her tail tucked well and truly between her legs.
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She didn’t want to face the world just yet.
“We can’t let them see us.”
It was Brent that took the lead, though it was only the three of them up there to make the call for all the dragonesses that made up their family, their coven. They had to make the best decision that they could, under the circumstances, for things could not be so simple and smooth when their lives had changed so much. Alan peered curiously down, perhaps the least perturbed, though that was not saying much, knots of anxiety twisting into the pit of her stomach.
The cloud cover offered them some seclusion, but it was not so easy to hide away when they were as large as they were, the day only half overcast, the sun slanting down through breaks in the cloud. They were too large to conceal themselves easily and were never meant to be so hidden away, though they could not uncover what had come of them, not so quickly.
Brent smirked, a glint in her eye.
“Hey… There was this one thing I did back in school… I think it’ll work here. Follow my lead!”
She was a natural leader, though all they had to do was take turns taking the lead, whoever was best at that moment guiding them as one. It was something that they were only just starting to understand, a different way of being and most certainly something that was a far cry from one always being in charge and a strict structure of hierarchy that was most noticeable in the working world.
Alan sighed, the mountains beckoning, foothills sweeping up into rougher, harsher slopes. What was Brent thinking? And how were they going to keep people away from them? If they got anywhere near the caving site, if they even knew that that was where they were heading, the dragons would be done for. That would be it – and what would happen to them then? Sure, they could talk, somewhat, but did that even mean that humans would be able to understand them? They had their own language, it was written on the clay tablets, inscribed by loving claws so many years ago. Humans… Well, they would not understand. Alan would have been just like the rest of them, looking entirely to science and how dragons could progress the future of the world.
Maybe that was not the path she wanted to follow anymore. Maybe progress for the sake of progress…was a kind of regression.
Brent growled, a tremor that rumbled through the air, but the others were close enough, Alan shaking herself out of her worry. There was no time for that!
“There are only so many routes up,” Brent hissed, her voice low, tail anxiously lashing the air. “It will be fine… We just have to make sure that they are blocked.”
“We’ll have to come back and check that they aren’t moving whatever we block the route with out of the way too,” Santino chipped in, thinking ahead. “If they find
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something too obvious in the way, they’ll just think that something’s happened to us even more.”
“You think they’re looking for us?” Alan probed, though the answer, really, was obvious. “We haven’t been gone that long…have we?”
Brent sighed, shaking her head.
“Think of the lives we’ve left behind… Well, I don’t want to either, but you know some people must be missing us, looking for us…”
It was hard for her to think back, the image of her grandmother, how worried she must have been, flashing up into the forefront of her mind. No… No, it was too much. That was something that she had to set aside – at least until they worked out what had truly happened to them, what that meant for their future. Changing back, well… It no longer seemed all that much like something that could happen. It was too painful, her tail flicking back and forth, as she chased the thought from her mind.
“Anyway – they’re here and this is what we do about it.”
The search teams, if that was what they were, which seemed most likely, would have to be put off. The dragons split up, covering three paths before searching for the less hospitable routes, the ones that would require more tools and equipment to traverse, having to be tactical. There was no time to work on strategy, acting on protective instinct alone.
A rockfall first, something natural. Brent worked quickly, standing on her back legs to push rocks off a cliff with her front feet, starting with a boulder that would have been huge to her as a human but did not pose all that much of a trial to her as a dragoness. Still, she was glad of the new muscle that she’d built, grunting deep in the back of her throat, flapping her wings, sending smaller rocks skittering and tumbling in a rumble down the short decline. The cliffs rose more sharply on either side there and it took little effort to set off a landslide, dirt shifting along with the tumble of rocks and pebbles.
Brent winced. It was not discreet, but she could only hope that the humans put it down to a rumble of thunder, somewhere else, somewhere more distant. But no one, surely, no one, would have ever suspected dragons to be the cause of it. She would never have even, not in her wildest dreams, thought that dragons could have been real – not before becoming one herself.
It had come time to trust that her instincts were right.
It was Santino’s role to bring down trees, though she knew just where to go. There was a place where beavers had gnawed away at trees – fantastic creatures, really, but not ones that she was all that familiar with. It spoke of her knowledge gained up in the mountains, however, that she could make something like their dam but…in the wrong place.
“Aha!”
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Grinning, she swung her tail at the trees, the strong appendage as good as any axe – well, a blunt one, to be fair – at knocking them down. Pine needles scattered in a green and silver shiver, live needles that had not yet browned in the wasting of time, but she could not wait for that, dragging them down, hustling along her way, blocking the way. Long ago, a riverbed had flowed down a V-shaped valley but had dried up: blocked by those very beavers. It was plausible enough that there would be a damn there, but she had to hasten on, chewing and stomping, ripping up wood, blocking the way in as dam-like a way as possible.
Her sides ached but she had to push on, had to try, had to see what it was that her body could do for her. Fierce protective instinct swelled within her, drawing itself up as if from the pit of her being, thinking only of her coven, those that she loved, those that she both cared for and, of course, cared for her too.
She had to make sure they were safe, all of them. She had to look after them as they had looked after her.
With most of the trees stripped of their branches and the way shut for another route, she had to trust that the “dam” was plausible enough to put them off.
Alan’s task was the quietest of all, using one natural obstacle alongside another. There were treacherous slopes and screes of slippery rock that flowed like water if one put a foot on it: perfect for warding off curious humans where they were not yet quite needed. And all she had to do was make use of the natural elevation, using her wings to spread it out, to make it look like even more of the slope was dangerous than it was, even turning her head to push at it with her lightly rounded horns, to roughen it up even more. Some sections were rougher with scraggy plants and rocks, betraying its use as a path, though it was most likely the most dangerous one of all. No one would go up there without due need and the appropriate tools, but it was her role to make it seem like it was entirely unpassable, the road shut to them and all that may come later.
“Come on…”
She groaned, her wings not as strong as Brent’s, but she had to do it, something pushing through, heat searing through her. That was strange, very strange, but she could not break for a spell to consider it, the need to protect her coven driving her on and on. It was all she could think about, the need to be there for them, to lead them out into the light – oh, had that not been what all her studies had been about? All her research, the long hours in the caves…
She snarled, showing her teeth, wings spread to welcome the glory of the day. She would protect them! All of them!
Stones rattled and bounced, the land moving around her, sliding, covering the passable part of the slope in a slick coat of living rock that moved as if it had a life of its own. Flitting back and forth for multiple passes, she surveyed her work, eyes darkly intent. It would do, though they would have to be cautious.
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Brent’s cry drew her attention and, flaring her wings for greater altitude, pumping the air, she joined him and Santino, their escape imminent.
They’d warded off those that sought them out, but not for long.
Only time would tell how long they would be safe up in the mountains where they were.
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Chapter Seven
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“How long do you think you spend down here every day?”
Arya flicked her tail, heart-shaped at the tip, musing over a set of clay tablets that she had tried to take back to the surface, but that Alan had guarded too jealously for her to steal away. They ranged in size and some had been stored in “cupboards” of sorts, that were merely hollowed-out holes in the walls. It was oddly familiar to look through them, as if she was researching something, albeit more historical than the technical field of study that she had delved into back in university. University…college…
Ugh.
She made a face, the muscles in her muzzle twitching and pulling, though they had changed too, needing to balance her more delicate, antler-like horns on top of her head, different to the other dragons, even if they all had very similar shapes to their wings. Things there…her studies… It was all gone, behind her, though a part of her ached for it, the life she had pursued.
Whether she was in the outside world or there as a dragon, she could still push on, could still be who she was, finding that drive again. It was all the same. It was hard to make such differences known between them when all of them there were from all walks of life, words contrasting with each other.
But the tablets gave her something to focus on, even though it was dim down there. Some of the larger tablets had deep engravings in them that looked like they had been carved by a dragon that was newer to using their claws in such a way, the edges of the grooves roughed up and unfinished. That didn’t mean, however, that they were unreadable in any way. It only made them more interesting to the dragoness, though the smallest of them, barely even a couple of inches large, hard and yet brittle to her large, clawed feet that she was trying to use as hands.
She sighed. Everything was difficult, relearning things that she had learned before she could even remember them, back when she’d been human, of course. It would have been far more pleasant to delve into them in the light but she sort of understood her secrecy too. It was something that Alan had been working on for so long that it made sense and she had guarded projects just as jealously when she had been human too.
Despite being in different fields of study, they were similar. That much Arya could respect.
“Hm…” Alan pulled herself out of her musing, so deep in thought that it was hard to find her way back to reality at times, the soft light down there glinting off her red-brown scales. “Maybe seven hours? There is little else to do… It’s kind of you to bring me food, thank you. I want to ensure that I know all that there is to know before the eggs are laid.”
Arya shivered. Ah, yes: the eggs. The eggs were the centre of their lives and yet the warmth she felt towards the precious life stored within her womb was tangled up in worry. Quite fair worry, really, considering that she had never had intercourse unprotected before, too focused on her studies and her career, all the internships and projects that she’d taken on, to want to intercept it in some way. Arya wasn’t even all
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that sure that she’d wanted a family as a human woman, but it was far too late to wonder if she could turn back the clocks. The “deed” of entering the caverns was done. All that was to bear was the consequences.
“Alan…” She said slowly, tasting and rolling the words around her muzzle before letting them fly forth. “Do you ever think about going back to the university? To study again?”
Alan tilted her head, suddenly appearing so human-like that Arya chuckled against her will. Though her horns were medium-sized, they still accentuated the motion a lot more, though none more so than with Brent.
“To study? But isn’t that what I’m doing here?”
Alan smiled, spreading out her claws over the tablets she had, though she was engaged in matching them up to what was on the wall rather than digging up fresh detail.
“To uncover a civilisation… It is a science in itself, considering how it has affected our bodies too, our transformations. To think that this existed and we never even knew about any of it… It’s amazing, truly. It is something far greater than what I could ever have studied as a man.”
“And the eggs?”
She pushed on into the thing that really concerned her, what had her lying awake at night even with Brent by her side, the other dragoness’ presence more comforting than any of the others. She felt them inside her even though she did not show in the shape of her body: she supposed there was more than enough space inside to hold a clutch without revealing that she was pregnant. But she did not know whether the pregnancy had heralded any changes in her too, mental, emotional or physical, as it seemed to have begun with all of them at the point of their transformations.
There was no way to tell.
Alan took a moment to answer and Arya could imagine her pushing her glasses back up her nose. She might even have thought it cute before.
A long time before.
“That’s different,” she said slowly. “I… I don’t know what to think about those. But I will know. Once I study enough.”
Arya looked her over strangely.
“What do you mean by that? There’s no answer down here that can tell you how you’re supposed to feel.”
Alan laughed hollowly, stirring up a puddle of ground-down rock with the tip of a claw. That had been worn away more and more by the grinding of her claw as she read and
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deciphered and pieced together what images meant, though not from any stark moment of blissful revelation.
“Yes… Yes, there is. There is so much history here, civilisation details, personal records… They were left for us, Arya. Everything we need is down here.”
She acted on impulse, though Arya did not quite know what she was doing, even then. One moment she was sitting on her haunches and the next she was on her feet, moving in close to Alan and winding her tail around that of the other dragoness. Alan flinched but she was not dissuaded so easily, settling down beside her, sharing the feel of scales on scales with one that, to be fair, she had not been all that close with yet.
“Alan,” she said, gentleness softening her tone. “It’s alright to be scared. I am too.”
Alan quivered, taking a deep, rattling breath as if her lungs would no longer operate steadily. Just how could it be that Arya had known?
“I…”
“It’s okay.”
Quiet spoke louder than some words, even if they did need to be exchanged too at some point. Arya took a deep breath, her lungs expanding out and out against Alan’s side.
“You don’t need to worry… Well, I am worried too, so it may seem like it’s not making much sense for me to tell you that.”
She paused, mulling over just what it was that she wanted to say.
“What I’m trying to say is…you can’t hide down here and escape from everything. We have an open tunnel now for everyone to come and go as they please. There’s nothing that we need to do to preserve what is here, there’s no one near that will concern us. Anniyah and Jenson were even talking about building up some barriers to stop hikers wandering up here, though it’s a hard enough route to get to the caves in the first place.”
Alan nodded.
“They’re not especially popular, I suppose…”
“That’s not what I tried to say, what I wanted you to focus on. I want you to know that we are safe here. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
She nudged the other dragoness’ cheek, leaving her nose there, the contact sending a shiver through Alan’s hide.
“You don’t have to work yourself to death to make things alright. They already are.”
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Alan closed her eyes against the reality of it. No… No, things were not alright.
“You’re scared too though,” she whispered, barely able to raise her voice above that husky tone. “How can I believe you that everything is okay, that it will be alright, when you are scared too?”
Arya leaned in closer, winding her neck just the once around Alan’s. It was a strange gesture but one that had become oddly more and more comfortable to her of late.
“I hope you will. But that’s because I’m scared too that you should believe me. I’m not giving you false platitudes or telling you something that I don’t believe for myself. If I can find a purpose in this, while we work out how to reconnect to our families and friends in some way, you can too. But that purpose is not something that should tie you up every day, even to the point of forgetting to eat unless someone else plants it right in front of your nose.”
Alan squirmed, chuckling throatily.
“I suppose I have been especially bad at remembering to eat…”
“See, that already sounds more like you. And I don’t even know you that well yet, even though I’d like to. We can’t get to know our sister, after all, when she’s buried herself down her.”
Alan shook her head.
“I guess that must seem really foolish to you… I haven’t even really stretched my wings yet, though I can fly a little, just a little.”
Arya stood, shaking off the tension from her green scales, a smile already stretching her lips a little, showing a glimmer of feral teeth and a glint in her eye that promised mischief.
“Then why don’t we go see just what being a dragon might mean to you, Alan? There is more to learn in the doing. A teacher must be well-rounded for the betterment of all.”
Alan laughed out loud, surprising herself with how easily the mirth leapt to her lips.
“I think you picked up that word from me.”
“Only from the best. Now, are you coming or not?”
For, despite the trepidation and all that lay ahead all of them, it was all of them that were going through it. It was new and it was fresh and, sometimes, what they had lost (or temporarily misplaced) didn’t have to be addressed immediately. Being a dragon was about learning and growing in all aspects of life, their memories their most precious treasures. Pushing down the past in lieu of fresh information was not how things were best undertaken.
They would all learn that, in time.
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But the relief of a day was best solved, in the moment, wingtip to wingtip, as friends.
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Chapter Eight
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The dragon coven settled into their new way of life as if they had been doing it forever, although it was not something that came easily to all of them. The two that forged a path most of all were undoubtedly Sandra and Alex, which made sense considering the life that they had left behind. To be free of negative influences, all the same faces, the tilts of the head… Sandra rolled her shoulders and her wings back in raw delight, perched on the edge of the cliff with light in her eyes. It was good, really good. Better than she could have ever thought it would feel to, finally, be free of all of that.
“This is how it’s meant to be, right?”
Alex stood beside them, waiting on her lead.
“I think so. But it’s been so long since we lost her that even I could not say.”
It was true. Even if it had, before their transformation, felt like yesterday. As a dragon, Alex could think back to the accident as a memory without feeling like it was all happening again, the panic, the fear, the tightness around her chest. It was not a memory, however, that she felt the need to revisit anymore, as much as it had intruded on him before.
Some things did not need to be kept in the forefront of one’s mind, even if it was unhealthy too to lock them away and force them down behind a wall where no one would ever find them again, for they would always still be there. But the strings of them that kept them so close could be snipped, one by one, allowing the thoughts to float free.
He’d remember. But she would not feel the acuteness of the pain anymore.
Together, she and Sandra took flight, leaping from the cliff and using the altitude to engage their wings, though there was a nice updraft that swept up the cliff-face itself that helped them pump their wings, up and up and up. It was an easy way to take flight and one that Alan had showed them, apparently having researched birds of prey that lived in mountainous areas before. The problem was that, when it came to teaching and learning, they could not sit down and watch YouTube videos anymore.
“I wish we could show her this,” Alex said, straining and stretching to spread her wings a little wider, exploring the limits of her body. “There’s so much here, so much to explore… She would have loved it. Even if she was a dragon too… Maybe she’d be a mix of red and blue, like our colours.”
“She’s here with us though, in spirit. She always will be.”
That was true, the light of all that had passed on following them, where the tips of their wings and horns touched the clouds. Sandra called out, swinging her head back and forth to scent the air, even up there, but they still had to be wary of aircraft when they flew higher than usual. Few threats came that way, perhaps with the caves that they had delved into being mostly guided by them and no other tour groups or parties, but they both knew that it was only a matter of time.
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Alex stiffened slightly, legs pulling up closer to her body, a low growl rolling forth from her lips.
“Look.”
Humans. It was strange to see them after so many weeks, appearing just as they always had. Though Sandra did not remember a time where she had seen them from above, like ants dotted below in brightly coloured hiking gear. She’d talked to Alex about that, afterwards, of course, but they had to have expected people to come looking for them after what had to have been seven to nine weeks. The first ones were such a blur that the days fused into one, seamless being, but they were not fool enough to expect that so many people could just disappear into “nothing” and not be looked for.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, lungs expanding, though it seemed to be much harder to breathe than it had before. They must have been fortunate, exceptionally so, to not be uncovered already, though times were changing and even with her indiscretion (she could only assume), the loss of them would have been uncovered. Going back through the trails of contact, putting them all together… Sandra’s chest tightened. No… No, she didn’t want to think of the search parties that they must have already missed. They couldn’t be everywhere at once and there was still so much for them, as dragons, to do and learn, so much so that they hadn’t even thought of setting up true patrols to keep them safe.
Alex nudged her gently, pulling her from her twisting, spiralling reverie.
“They don’t look like they’re heading to the caves. And they’re so slow, beginners. They wouldn’t be going all the way up there.”
Alex shook her head, distrust showing in the set of her jaw.
“No… But I don’t want them anywhere near the coven. People will be looking for us. It’s a surprise that they haven’t come looking before.”
Sandra’s stomach churned.
“I might have forgotten to file the paperwork on our location that day and notify the authorities… It had been a hard night before, but I could never be certain. I woke up the next morning with the flask…” She shuddered, though didn’t tell her partner what the flask had contained: they both knew what that lick of acceptable poison tasted like. “It was next to me. And the others… I didn’t want to give false hope when we should have still been on guard for discovery. Before we are ready, I mean.”
Alex understood. Brushing her tail along Sandra’s side, she flapped her wings to take a few dragon-lengths ahead, gaining distance in the lead. It was easy to forget things in that life, allow them to slide when they were not truly as they should have been.
“It’s alright, but…we cannot let them get any further. They might be looking for us, even if they’re not going into the caves.”
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Alex tipped her head, angling her horns cockily to the side. It was so reminiscent of him in her younger days that Sandra could not help but smile.
“Come. I’ve got an idea…”
They were nothing less than pure stealth as they dropped through the air, darting from cloud cover to cloud cover, though they would have to get even closer if they were to put Alex’s swiftly concocted plan into action. Yet all it was that they had to do was to make conditions so averse that the party could not possibly make their way to where the coven slept and lived, not far from the caves. It would have been foolish to stay too close and, frankly, the slopes were too steep around there without digging out massive caves themselves to shelter in, not liking the driving rain anymore as dragons as they had as humans. And living underground was not something that appealed to creatures of the air in any way either.
But their wings. Their wings were stronger than they gave them credit for, flapping and beating the air, shaping it to their will.
“Bring in the rains.”
It was not the most amenable of days for hiking and Sandra laughed as she stirred up the air, damp with rain, cloud covering the sky. There would be no shortage of it for days, the dragonesses sheltering where they did not have to brave the pelting force of it, but the ground would need it. It was only fair to them to deliver a little dose to the humans, while they needed to keep them away for a little longer.
The direction of the clouds could not yet be changed by their presence, but they could scuttle and scurry them along even more, encouraging them to release the bellyful of water that they carried in pelting droplets.
“Come on…”
Alex grunted, working harder and harder, not used to twisting and contorting his body as he had to, trying to keep the clouds going in the right direction. And it was not as if they could get too close either, sending the clouds forth with one last groan, scudding along with due haste. Sandra’s wings stirred up the air beneath, writhing through the trees, sending them bending and creaking, the humans pausing, looking skyward – yet not seeing the dragons as the deluge enveloped them.
They scuttled and scurried away like rats seeking shelter and Sandra flew after them, her stomach pulling with worry for them as they made their way back down the mountain to where their vehicles had been left.
“Do you think we did too much? Alex? Alex?”
But her partner was higher than her, calling her back, and she had to join her, stretching her wings with the prickle of damp clinging there and soaring higher. They could ensure that the people found their way back to their vehicles without any harm, of course, but they didn’t want them to be in any kind of true danger either. She was
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still naturally motherly, as much as Alex may have teased her before things had shifted in their human lives, wanting the best for others even at the expense of herself.
“For now, the eggs come first. Our coven comes first.”
She knew that and smiled, flicking her tail at her where a droplet of water clung. As if she had perfectly angled the long appendage with the slender tip, it splashed right into Alex’s eye as the dragoness reeled, hissing in shock.
“What was that?”
Yet she only had a laugh on her lips as Sandra took the lead, her tail flicking in a flirty jaunt to her back while they returned to the coven.
“Catch up if you can, darling.”
Chuckling, Alex shook her head. It was good to see Sandra out of her shell again. With everything going on, she had not realised just how much she’d missed it.
“We’ll have to run patrols, have the others join us. We only need to keep people away for a little longer, at least until our eggs are laid.”
Sandra nodded along with Alex.
“Yes… Yes, that’s right. Then we can see, we can see how things go. We can see what we need to do. There are missed connections, surely, for all of us and the young ones know that they’ve lost far more than we’ve gained. It’s harder on them to be transformed into mother dragons than it was for us to accept it, and that was difficult enough to re-learn everything about life.”
Alex sighed.
“I only wonder how they will think of us, in time, but I suppose that is beyond our control. Do you remember talking about that? Back when we were trying to go through treatment, together?”
Sandra shuddered.
“Mm… But I’d rather not look back at that time when I’m flying with you.”
They returned as they had left, wingtips brushing against one another, yet the score of the land that they thought they had known had changed.
And it was up to them to re-map it for the good of all civilisations.
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Chapter Nine
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The warmth of looking down onto a nest of eggs did not sit well with Santino, her tail tucked around her feet as she considered, everything tense about her, even her horns that were still straight and pointing back from her head. She’d never even considered being a father, considering her inclinations in life, but all of that had changed. She could not look at any of the dragonesses with interest in that way, but did see them all as sisters.
Yet, amongst her coven, she was, in a way, still alone. She was as she was and the nuances of what her heart wanted no longer seemed to matter.
“What’s wrong?”
Ah, Isla-Rae. She had seemed to take more gently to the notion of being pregnant, though she had admitted to her that she had never honestly considered it before, not back when she’d been a human. But that life seemed like a long time ago, the dragoness nosing at the light, gentle swell of her belly, marvelling at it once again.
“Nothing, Isla-Rae,” she said, settling down near her, though a shake of Santino’s head told the dragoness that her friend was holding more back. “But you look well.”
She smiled.
“You’re quieter, Santino, I can tell. And I was just thinking that it’s strange I’ll never be able to feel the eggs shift in me, like I would have if I’d had a human baby. I guess that’s not something you would have thought about, considering…”
Santino bobbed her head with a little sigh.
“Yeah… I never thought I’d have kids.”
Santino’s stomach had grown too and it was a strange comfort to see it changing, yet a confusing one all the same. Isla-Rae settled against Santino, offering the warmth of her body in turn, though the dragon could not settle, not even with the happily pregnant Isla-Rae, the one of them who seemed to have slipped into their new life so easily.
Could it be that easy for her too? Could it really be that easy?”
“I’m sorry, Isla-Rae…” The rise of her pregnancy would not leave her alone, reminding her all the while what she carried with her, the sweetness and terrifying prospect of new life. “I’ve got to go. I’ve just got some things on my mind.”
Of course, Isla-Rae let her go. But if she knew Isla-Rae, the dragoness would find her again, offering her that quiet comfort and company, even if she was not able to do anything about it. Santino liked that about her and the maternal nature of the dragoness only seemed to come through more and more as her pregnancy showed, the eggs developing inside them.
Slipping into the water of a lake to bathe some distance from where they had made their home, she sighed, relaxing into the water. If she was remembered, she’d find a
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way to put it to rights one day. But the sensations of the moment promised to wash away any trouble that lingered there, regardless of how she felt.
Wing-beats tampered with the air, the peace that she had eased into, and she opened a lazy eye, only her head remaining above the surface of the water. Though she was more surprised to find Anniyah and Jenson there than other dragonesses, perhaps Arya and Brent, who seemed just as close and even bolder than the elders of their odd little tribe.
“I didn’t think anyone else came out here,” Santino said with a yawn, rolling over so that the bulge of her belly showed above the surface of the water, wings extended so that she could remain floating. “But you’re welcome to join me.”
After all, she had not gone out to the lake on a sunny day to push anyone away but simply because her scales itched and had become clogged up with dirt. It didn’t seem to take much to make them feel heavy and ungainly, though they were such small things, intricately layering their bodies from head to toe, and the thought of even taking a bath in the dust made her shudder. No – no, thank you! That wasn’t for dragons even if other creatures found them appealing.
“Oh, we didn’t mean to disturb.”
Yet Santino meant whole-heartedly that they were welcome and allowed them to join her, the couple crooning softly to each other, keeping a respectful distance. Santino watched, observing lightly, though there were not any social conventions at play that made such staring “wrong” in any way. It was only a lingering humanness to her that made her think that, perhaps, she should not stare so.
“Do your horns ever get caught on anything?”
The question came suddenly as Jenson started and chuckled, the water splashing up around his neck as he used his wings to float in a more conventional position. It was a fair question, to be honest, considering how big and bull-like they were. Out of all the dragons, they extended to either side of his head the most.
“That’s a strange question… And, yes, they do. I didn’t think they’d be so easy to hook, what with the round of them…but, yes.”
Anniyah chuckled, sweeping her head back and forth through the water, letting the crystal-clear depths flow into her maw and swirl around her teeth, chortling bubbles.
“Yes,” she added, raising her head with water streaming, sparkling, from her scales. “He got caught on the trees when we were going through the forest, once, but that was not something that you could say that either of us were expecting!”
Jenson laughed and Santino was struck by the belly laugh that erupted forth, the water churning around his chest and neck as he reared a little higher out of the water.
“Yes, that was, ah, quite a moment.”
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Anyone who didn’t know that dragons could not blush would have said that that was exactly what Santino was doing at that moment, a chortle rising forth but behind something else. And Santino could not help but latch onto that brashly, a grin stretching her lips wide, showing off her teeth.
“Ah… Now, I didn’t think you old folks took such private time for each other anymore!”
It was not her old, brash self, not in the way that she had been, tossing crude joke about after joke as if they meant nothing at all – but it was something. It rose in her chest as if her heart was lifting, loosening a little, even though she did not quite know what that meant or what she was supposed to do about it. Maybe in time, she would understand but, for the time being, it was alright as it was.
Maybe that was all that things had to be.
“You shouldn’t jest, Santino, you know we’d have never talked about these things before! This wasn’t done!”
Santino cocked her head.
“Nothing at all? But what about doctors?”
Anniyah covered her face with a wing.
“I didn’t let Jenson be present for that. And only ever a female doctor for anything…down there. It shouldn’t be a struggle to get the words out now, we know differently, but it still is. Have you ever struggled with something like that, Santino?”
Santino could only shake her head. Not when it came to the bedroom… No, that side of life had always come very easily for her since her sexual awakening. Yet her curiosity was perked even as Jenson diligently changed the subject.
“So, Santino, was there anyone back home that you’re looking forward to seeing again? You must have been halfway through your studies?”
“Yes, dear, I’m sure they’ll make allowances for dragons if you want to complete your studies, though I’ve afraid our lives have changed so much that they may no longer be something that you’d like to pursue.”
Santino twisted, rolling onto her front again, but that was only to buy herself time as her heart pounded.
Someone waiting for her? No… No, she wasn’t ready to look at that yet. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“No… Well, family. That’s what you meant, wasn’t it?”
Her tongue seemed to tangle within her muzzle, the dragoness tripping over herself in her effort to get words out, any words at all. Anything would do, as long as she could keep them from going down the wrong path.
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“Yes, my mother, my brothers… When we work out what’s happened, what we can do, they’ll be so relieved to know I’m alive!”
Her words sounded false even to her own ears but, wisely, Jenson cut in before she could rattle on any further, shaking her nerves loose from her very own scales.
“It’s hard to lose family. They’ll be missing you greatly. It should not be long until the eggs are laid though.”
She raised her muzzle, the scales sparkling silver in the light of day, glittering like the world’s finest gem, staring off into the distance as if Jenson saw something there that the others could not.
“I feel it…”
Maybe the elders knew something that the youngest could not understand, something in motherhood tugging at the dragoness, in the pit of her belly. It was an age-old need as she swept her gaze across the lake again, taking in the expanse of sparkling water. Alan and she had deduced that their memories would be passed down to their offspring, if what was in the cave carvings was true. On the off chance that such a thing was possible (and that was very much a possibility considering that they had, well, become dragons), she wanted to implant as many beautiful memories as possible in her mind for her little ones. They would counteract the bad, the twisted truths of humanity, that may have otherwise been overwhelming present.
But there was nothing she could do about that.
Anniyah broke the mood, splashing her in the face, and Jenson took chase in a relishing snarl. Santino was part of their fun too, not quite a daughter but a sister to both of them – a younger sister. Splashing and cavorting, they explored the limits of their body in the crystalline embrace of the lake, twisting and turning, luxuriating in delight that was entirely theirs to claim for their own. There could be time for such serious worries, such serious conversations, at another time – but for the here and the now, it was all for them to enjoy, to embrace the gift that they had been giving with water swirling softly over their scales.
High above, Kelvin watched them bathing, waiting for them to leave so that she could do the same for herself. She wanted to make sure she was clean, clean and fresh, even if she was not about to put her plan into action that night. That would have to wait a little longer, but just a little, so close that she could almost taste it, tongue flickering from her muzzle to lick at the air.
“So close…”
A little more, that was all she had to bear through. And that would be enough for her, enough to change the path of her fate. She could wait that long for Casey, couldn’t she? Her old life would be there for her, in a new way, if only she could enlighten those that were close to her as to what had happened to them.
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If she’d learned one thing from all her time assisting Alan down in the caves, after all, it was that there was power in learning. There was power in knowledge. And she had the knowledge to give and share with others, for once, even if they may not have been expecting it.
The old pang rose again in her stomach, but she ignored it. She expected it was the same for all the dragonesses.
“I’m coming.”
Below her, Santino splashed with the two older dragonesses, their cries of delight echoing forth, water sparkling as the afternoon wore on. Kelvin did not join them.
Little did they know just how close Kelvin was to making the leap that none of the others could have found the bravery to do.
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Chapter Ten
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Fear could not be contained forever. Not when it festered and snarled, twisting and writhing. The dragons were not the beast but the emotions that sought to drag them down most certainly were. Santino curled up, losing a bit of herself, quieting, though no one could draw her out. What they could do was sit with her, reassure her, comfort her, even if their words were not returned. Alan seemed to be particularly close with her, though so much of the chatter that poured forth from that dragoness’ maw was about her research, her discoveries. She wanted to see Santino down in the caves again, focusing on something other than the looming laying, eggs weighing heavily in her womb.
Of course, the others were as caught up in the fear of the unknown as Santino was. The eldest of them, those that had given birth and had a family before were a little better, but a little made a big difference in the grand scheme of pre-laying jitters, worries about the future. Would it even make it so that they could never be humans again? That was bandied around by Brent, even though it was something so strange and foreign to her at that time that she doubted that she would have allowed anyone to help her back to being human anyway. To be a male dragon, perhaps…but even that was up for debate.
“If we take everything one step at a time,” she said, hugging Isla-Rae gently with her wing, the soft membrane falling over the smaller dragoness’ back. “Everything will be fine then. You never know what another player is going to do in any game, do you? But the players react to it, they adapt. That’s all we have to do.”
Isla-Rae smiled and chuckled, checking yet another nesting mound that she had dug up. It still wasn’t right for her, going over and over the same ground, trying to get it perfect when she didn’t even yet know what perfect was.
“I’m not a sports person, Brent…but thank you.”
She could appreciate her attempt at cheering her up, even though Brent was very much on the same page. It was one thing to feel maternal, protective, caring…but another entirely to know that that was going to evolve into laying eggs and actually caring for hatchlings. Baby dragons! Just which of them, pray tell, could ever be considered qualified for such a thing?
No one, of course, not really. But that was not going to stop fate from marching on, time taking them along with it as it always did.
They supported one another, sharing fears, commiserating over worries. Care was their top priority, yet all feared whether it would pain them too. Worries changed, twisting into monsters that their dragon-sisters were not always able to tame, but there was always a large, warm, scaled body there to support them through even fearful tremors.
Most sought help. Not all. There would always be one, or more, spinning, spiralling, floating adrift. And only she could claw herself back and cry out for aid, even accepting all that had been offered to her so far.
Kelvin had been chased by the dragon of fear itself for too long.
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Casey. She had to find her, had to get back to her. Once, Casey had told Kelvin that her parents lived nearby in a town close to the caves. It had been strange to Kelvin, at the time, to think about someone living so far out from civilisation but, in all matter of fact, the road out to the caves had been several hours long: it was not that close. The town, something that could have been called a city across the ocean where such things were done on a smaller scale to the monstrous concrete jungles of the States, was more than large enough to swallow up a person where they could never be found again.
The street she knew, closing her eyes, seeing Casey write it on a letter and a gift basket that she had sent to her parents last Christmas. It was a long shot to think she would be there but…what else could Kelvin do? They’d studied not too far away and their friends and family were wrapped up near (except for Alan). She couldn’t understand why they didn’t seem to want to find those who had spent so much time with them, been their friends, lovers, companions. It didn’t make sense, no sense at all.
And yet she was the one who spread her light-coloured wings in the night air, letting the cool lick at her scales. Kelvin’s claws curled around the edge of the cliff, poised there ready to leap into the unknown, wavering, tongue flickering out to taste the breeze. The cold crispness of the night tickled her scales and she took a deep breath, springing forth in a grunt of effort. It was still a great effort to fly but she had trained with Brent and spent so much of her free time practising that she thought she could do it, keeping the street name in mind all the time.
“Layman Avenue,” she puffed, talking out loud to herself, wings pumping, gaining altitude. “Layman Avenue… Layman Avenue… Layman… Avenue…”
She had to concentrate, yet she had never flown at night before, the darkness soft and gentle around her. In a way, it was less glaring than daylight, giving her the impression that she was secluded away there, even though many creatures of the night could see her just as well in the dark as many others were in the day. The illusion soothed her, however, her throat tight with emotion that she pushed down, locked away. It would have a place later but only after she had found Casey.
If she did not find Casey…she would have to fly for a while longer, all the way back to their university city. Yet she could only hope that she did not have to go that far, as much as the old campus tugged at her heart. There was a pull there, however faint, clawing and sinking its teeth into her heart, the pain acute and biting.
She had to try, had to chance it. Had to take the risk that no one else could.
What if she couldn’t see her parents again? She flew faster and faster, striving to out-fly her thoughts. Maybe if she could only go more quickly, she could leave every one of them behind. She missed their arms around her, even how her mother would purse her lips when Kelvin did something that she didn’t quite like, although that was just the way of a family at times. They’d not been close but, sometimes, one did not know how much they missed something, or someone, until they were gone. And her family was still alive!
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They must have thought she was dead. She would go to them too, after Casey. There had to be something she could do to fix it, to mend the fence that had been broken, the bridge that had been burned. Her resolve strengthened, heat curling in the pit of her stomach. She was a dragon. If anyone could fix the mess that had been made, she would be able to. The bridge could be crossed and the fence no longer an obstacle – not with her wings to spread and carry her forth.
Her wings ached but she could not allow that to stop her. She had to force her way on, the miles sweeping by beneath her. For some reason, she knew exactly where she was going. Was that something that Alan was yet to uncover in the caves about dragons? Maybe they got their sense of direction like birds, always knowing where to go on the paths that had been travelled? Maybe it was something passed down through instinct, a generational thing? But then just who was it that was part of the generation before they all had even come to be?
Some questions were not meant to have answers.
Her wings ached, burning, yet she bore on, cutting through the air, a snarl on her lips. Her chest wrenched and, without thinking about it, Kelvin let out a long, low, forlorn cry.
Why was it so painful? Sadness had never hurt like that before, not even when, so very sadly, her grandparents had passed away. Yet she’d never felt that sad before, as if she was being cut open from the inside, some kind of demon slicing into the cavity of her chest, cracking open her ribcage and exposing her beating, wavering heart to the open air to be devoured. She hadn’t let it out yet and it had to come, such emotion something that was never meant to be forced down and wrapped up so tightly. A volcano was in there, lava churning, bubbling away, and yet the lid could not be kept on it when it fought every second of every day to be released.
Again, she cried, a ragged howl twisting through the night as her body contorted. She wavered off-course. Where was she going? What was she doing? They wouldn’t recognise her, no one would! She was a dragon! Dragons did not simply fly into towns and expect to be known for the person they were before!
Patrolling near the sleeping dragon coven, one of her sisters raised their head, eyes gleaming.
Regardless of her plight, Kelvin had to try, clinging to that even as her body grew heavier and heavier, even her eyelids drooping. What was the point anyway? She was sure they had never really loved her, her love for them all that had ever tied any of the relationships that she was familiar with together. It was a curse and a burden that she had been willing to bear, back then, to keep the peace, to keep everyone happy. All she’d had to do was put on a show, be the loving son, do the right thing, study hard, get the pretty girl. When she’d ended up with a woman that dragged her out of a pit that she had not even realised that she’d fallen into, even that had been beyond anything that Kelvin could recognise or act on for herself.
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She may have had her sisters but there was no one but the dragoness herself that could possibly understand her pain, she was sure of it. And that was why she had to throw her labouring, straining body onward, though every beat of her wings seemed to come with greater difficulty than the last. It was not a long flight, not truly, not with all that she had done to practise and prepare. So why did it drag her down so, gravity acting on her with ever-increasing force even though it was a calm night with just the right tip of wind to guide her on towards the town?
Forest. Open meadows. Farmland. Lights. Humanity. Her heart pulled for it, though she did not cry out again, swallowing down her shrieks, as much as they battered against her lungs, chest juddering sharply. She couldn’t get enough air in! What would happen to her if she couldn’t breathe? Well, any dragon, or human too, for that matter, knew that, but that did not stop the panic rising as her breath clawed more and more sharply at her windpipe.
The humans. Civilisation. People. Not the new age of dragons, none of that, not her sisters. They would know what to do, she was sure of it. Kelvin had to be sure of it.
She flew lower, though that was partly because she simply couldn’t keep her body high enough anymore, dragged down more and more as she keened out her pain. It was lower and quieter than the shrill shrieks of before and yet the agony was the same, her eyes aching, sore, so very sore. Her tail thrashed, striking a tree lining a road, and she shuddered back to reality, flying a bit higher, if only to ensure that she did not cause more damage. Hopefully for the moment, anyway. They’d understand, yes, everything would have to understand.
Higher and higher until she was undetected again, not amongst homes and families and lives that Kelvin so very dearly wished were all their own. She could not bear the tiny windows into lives that she wanted, that she could have had – if only she had not gone on that spelunking trip. Even Casey had not wanted her to go, had wanted to see a movie and have a date weekend or something with her instead. Why, oh, why had Kelvin not listened to her?
Everything could have been avoided.
And it was all her fault.
Her sides shuddered, flanks heaving, breath raking through her. Each breath came with a huge effort of her body, tail flicking with pain, though it was not something that could so easily be suppressed.
Where was she going? Oh, the streets looked different from up above. Someone screamed but she paid them no mind. Going. She had to keep going. Her wings were the only thing keeping her going, putting her muscles to the test as she darted over a side street, low enough that she could read a street name.
Harvard Road.
That didn’t make sense. She had to be miles away still, on the wrong side of town! Had she gotten turned around somewhere? The unfamiliar lights, foreign to her after
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living in the mountains for so long, sparkled off her glittering scales, catching the edges.
A car screeched to a halt and she whipped around, leaving it behind, the lights smaller and smaller as she hurled herself, desperately, across the sky. Quickly, quickly. People would see but she didn’t want them screaming, seeing imagined figures looming over her, so tall and so dark that they blocked out even the majesty of the night sky. In the city, the stars were fainter, appearing further away, light pollution blocking them out. The suburbs were tightly packed together, even though they had promised more space and room to move to the people who lived there, but it was the city itself that she had to plunge into, taller office blocks hinting at being skyscrapers but not quite making the cut. They simply did not tower over the ant-like humans left below, on the ground, enough to make that cut.
Trees. Plants. Flowers. Penned in gardens. None of it was like the mountain that she had left behind and, still, the dragoness hurled herself onward. There were no updrafts there to befit a dragon and even the wind had dropped, humans gathering below as she flew lower and lower, breathing laboured. Maybe her body was trying to tell her that that was the time to lay her legs? Worry twisted like a kick in the gut. No, no – it could not be time! Not yet!
But it was only fear, if “fear” and “only” could ever be placed in the same sentence together. They were not comfortable bedfellows in any situation.
“Hello!”
She had to try, though saying simply “hello” did not feel very dragon-like at all. Below her, a woman clinging to her garden fence, a bathrobe loose around her, gasped. More people ran down the street as Kelvin tried again.
Directions. She had to get directions. They’d understand when they heard her talk. She just had to pronounce the words, not entirely in the dragon-tongue. That had been something, thankfully, that she had managed to pull from Alan’s research.
My sister’s done so much for me.
“Help me! I’m looking for Layman Street! Help me! Something terrible has happened!”
She had to fly higher and the words themselves felt as if they were being choked out of her chest as she tried to throw them forth. Maybe thing would be okay if only she could get them all out, all at once? They ran over one another, blurring the lines, people pointing, shouting, all directed at her as she flew and soared, higher and higher.
If they would not answer her, then she would have to find her own way there.
Although it was large for a town or small for a city, depending on how one wanted to look at it, the beckoning of it was hers for the taking. She could travel, in flight, far more quickly than anyone could in a car or land transport and she made good use of that, her lungs shuddering as she took in a deep lungful of air. It helped, a little, even as sirens wailed, law enforcement, presumably, responding to the ruckus.
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Her heart twisted as if something had put its claws around it and wrenched violently. Would they hurt her? Oh, she’d have to talk to them!
Flashlights, powerful ones, glanced off her scales, and she forced herself on, flying higher, pulling herself into evasive, twisting manoeuvres. When she didn’t even know where she was going, just what else was there for her to do? They couldn’t follow her, she was sure, her distraction clawing her away from her sadness, worry pushing at her.
She’d called out to people and they had not responded. What did that mean? Couldn’t they understand her? Were they hearing her and ignoring her?
She fled the police, out of range of lights and sirens, though she could still hear the latter. They were coming, coming swiftly, coming for her. Her breath raked down her long windpipe, icy air clawing at her. She had not realised that the night was that cold, but everything took on a chilling edge as something lashed at her spine.
Stiff, so very stiff. Fear did that to a person and the same to a dragon. She was not warm enough to be flying such long distances and performing such manoeuvres in the dark, not when she had not practised for the time Brent had. But Kelvin had not thought about that before setting off, whimpering and pulling herself onward, regardless of just how her wings ached for relief, to take a step back, to curl up back with her sisters again and forget that she had ever left in search of the love she had lost.
But…no. No, she had to be strong. The city beckoned and she wracked her brain. Casey could not be far, she was sure, had to be sure, or if not her parents. They would be able to understand her and yet a chopper assaulted the air to her back, more and more forces coming for her, not understanding just why she was there.
If she could talk to Casey’s parents, even hope that Casey was there too, everything would be alright. That thought alone, she had to cling to. It was all she had left, all that she could hope for, forcing herself on through the madness that had begotten her life.
Casey.
Kelvin.
Casey.
Kelvin.
Casey and Kelvin.
Could one really be without the other? Kelvin snarled, teeth showing as her lips pulled back. The helicopter closed in, though the memory that flared up before her eyes of playing with similar toys when she had been nothing more than a boy was not as reassuring as it could have been. It had crashed and burned, that helicopter, stomped under an unassuming foot. The adult that it had belonged to didn’t even notice the destruction they’d caused in the wake, too busy rushing to something or the other.
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But Kelvin had always remembered the splintered, plastic remains of that little helicopter and how her heart had wrenched for it as if it was being pulled out of her chest. Loss had never been an easy thing for her to bear.
The drone of the helicopter was relentless, however, powering over, forcing her to evade. How did it know where she was? Kelvin didn’t know anything of that sort of technology, clipping a multi-storey building clumsily with the tip of her wing as she ducked aside.
Away, away. There were too many buildings! She tried to read the street names, closer to where she wanted to be, almost there. She tried again to talk, dragging the words up from the back of her throat, lowering her altitude so that she was almost on the street. If not for her scales and her legs, of course, she could have been a car, automatically easing onto the correct side of the road, as much as her heart leapt and pounded. Any lower and she’d be on the ground – then she’d never get to Casey!
“Please!” She cried out, though her words were enveloped in a roar. “Help me! Layman Street! I need to get there, I need to find my girlfriend! I’m not a dragon – I’m a man!”
Yet that screamed utterance was nothing of the fact that it should have been but a lie that curdled through her very soul. No man lay beneath the scales, hide and sinew of a dragon, her tail swinging behind. There were more there, people clustering, pointing up at her – almost as if they knew she was coming? Her heart pounded. Had something spread? She knew what social media was like, though that was one thing, most certainly, that she could not say that she had missed at all as a dragon.
No. Onward.
So close, so very close.
Her wings ached but she could not give up as she ducked, sirens rising. There was an uproar down there and a pang shot through her gut to know that she had caused it, that she had stirred everyone up and out of their beds. They’d all seen a dragon.
What would come of her sisters if they knew about them so soon?
No!
She pushed the thought away and bore on. She was almost there, flaring out her wings and dropping down onto the roof of a building. It was not the highest of them, a block of flats that did not belong in the heart of the city and, undoubtedly, would be demolished later for a bigger, more impressive building that could house more bodies, but it had looked nice enough from the photographs that Kelvin had seen. There were homes throughout the entire building, some bigger than others, but the parents – ah, that was where her plan really came together. That they were on the top floor was a blessing to much.
“Hello?”
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She hung her head over the edge of the building, searching out lit windows. Not all had the curtains pulled across, much because they had a degree of privacy in such a setup, kitchens and living areas flashing by as she scuttled along sideways, crab-like in how she presented herself. But no one was watching (yet) as she poked at windows, her tail swinging anxiously back and forth, back and forth.
How much time did she have? Oh, there was no way to tell, the chopper circling somewhere but her scales, for the moment, remaining undetected. It would be hard to take off again from where she was, but it would be possible, helpful that it blocked her from most view, whether from the street or the helicopter. It could fly down the streets and sweep them in the city, but it still was not something usually deployed there, to say the least. She could use that to her advantage?
“Mr and Mrs Lee? Your daughter, Casey – I’m looking for her!”
She called their names over and over as life stirred under her and the grumble in her belly grew. She had to find her – what if none of them were there? What if they had moved? What if they weren’t even home? Had she exposed herself and all her sister dragonesses for nothing?
“Hello? Mr and Mrs Lee? Mr Lee?”
A woman screamed, reeling back from a window as Kelvin grunted, as surprised as she was to see someone there. Though, frankly, she was the intruder, not the woman who was merely trying to enjoy a night in her own home, so she did not have any cause to be so startled.
She was going to have the whole city after if she didn’t find Casey soon! Something had to happen, something had to change, and she couldn’t keep going from window to window, hoping that, somehow, she’d find her parents and be able to make them see reason.
Kelvin stilled, head shooting up sharply. What was that? The chopper droned and she listened intently past it, something softer pulling at her. A whimper? Crying?
Slowly, she turned around. It was not that she was familiar with that sound but that something in her knew that her quest had come to an end. Her heart lodged in her throat, breath not needed for the moment, and she walked, slowly, so very slowly, to a storage building beside what she assumed was a staircase leading back down the building on the inside. Complexes like that often allowed access to the roof, though it was sometimes ill-advised, and there was evidence of some construction going on there too. Maybe they were trying to make it a place for residents or a gymnasium like had been on one of the posher student dorms.
Either way, she already knew what she was going to find as she hooked a claw around the edge of the slightly ajar door. The woman within cowered, her white skin almost glowing in the dim light, Kelvin looming without intending to. There was a bruise on her cheek where she must have rushed to hasten away from Kelvin’s landing on the roof too clumsily and a still-burning cigarette on the floor, smoke on her breath. The dragoness’ nostrils puckered and flared, wrinkling away from the pungent scent.
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But it was her: it was Casey. No one could know how or why or what – there could be imagined explanations, of course – but she was there. Kelvin’s heart pounded, blood roaring in her ears, the deafening snarl of her body suddenly too much to bear.
Oh, but how she’d missed her.
“Casey…” She swallowed, sinking back onto her haunches. “Casey, it’s me. It’s Kelvin. Casey… Casey, please don’t cry. I’m so sorry… So sorry… Sorry…”
She couldn’t get the words out, even though dragons did not cry, choked up and rubbing at her own throat as if that was going to help at all. Casey looked up, though it was as if she did not hear the dragoness, scrambling a little further away, a cardboard box lodged against her left side.
“P-please…” She stammered, eyes wide, glistening with fearful moisture. “D-d-don’t…”
Casey could not say more than that, shaking so badly that her lips would not work, jaw opening and closing without any effect. Kelvin stepped back, wondering if that would help her feel more comfortable with some space, shuffling away on her hindquarters. Was she scared of her? That made sense, completely so – oh, she should not have surprised her! It was all her fault, but she had to make her girlfriend understand, hustling and hastening, a whine even bursting from her lips in her haste to get words out, anything out. The woman’s eyes remained locked onto her, raking over her form, her blue and white scales, her claws, the spiralling horns. Oh, she knew she didn’t look like Kelvin anymore, but surely Casey would understand – somehow!
“Casey? Casey, can you understand me?”
The woman nodded. Minutely. It was enough. Kelvin exhaled a sigh that she had not realised she was holding in, relief lacing her tone.
“Oh! Oh, Casey, it’s been horrible, I wish I could hug you right now. We went down into the caves and something terrible happened, I don’t know how to say this without sounding crazy, but we all turned into dragons. There was something there that changed us and I don’t know what on earth happened… Alan thinks she knows but, well, she can’t know everything. I’m just so glad to see you again, to let you know that I’m still here, I’m still alive, that I still…love you.”
Kelvin ducked her head shyly, the words the first that she had ever spoken in that manner to Casey. It seemed strange and yet fitting too at the same time to spare them there, for they could not always be kept in and to oneself.
“Casey? Casey, say something?”
And yet that night was not the one in which she would have the words returned.
“You…”
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Kelvin’s head tipped forward, wanting to hear her better.
“Yes, Casey? What is it? Please, say something!”
But Casey shook her head, raising an arm to cover her face, as much as it trembled. For all she saw was a dragon…a beast, an animal. She sucked in a breath, yet Kelvin was not privy to any of that, the dragoness waiting, eyes wide, hoping against hope that everything would be alright. The pounding of Casey’s heart was tangible, palpable, in the air between them, though she should have known…
What? What exactly? Kelvin blinked, flanks shuddering even though she had enough air in her lungs. There was something amiss, a darkness in Casey’s eyes, even as the lips of the woman that she loved pressed together, the hard, thin line trembling anxiously.
“Casey? Casey… Casey, please say something.”
She’d regret demanding those words from her forever.
“You can’t love me…” She whispered, the words raking through her throat as if they were forcing their way through a cloud of smoke. “You can’t… You think you can just come back here as a dragon and everything will be okay again? I don’t even care… What? Why did this happen? Why do I deserve this?”
Kelvin reeled but Casey found strength in her anger, up on her feet, her hands balled up into fists that she would not use. Maybe things were different now that she recognised the dragon as Kelvin, at least in some way (words were powerful, after all), but the scathing fury slashed across her face told a different tale entirely. Her dark hair played across her face, her pointed chin, eyes seeming to slant in towards each other even more stringently as she glared and jabbed a finger at the dragon.
“You’re not my boyfriend! He’s dead! I’ve already accepted that – everyone’s grieved you! They think you’re gone! And you should have stayed gone!”
Kelvin’s chest pulled.
“No… Casey, you can’t mean that!”
“Don’t even say my name! You spent all that time in your books and now this? This?”
Maybe she was angry, yes – that was what Kelvin had to believe. But that didn’t stop her from scoffing, arms jerking as if she was trying to cross them, shifting position, twitchy at best.
“You’re nothing – you disgust me!” The words rushed on, tumbling over one another as much as Kelvin wanted to stop them. “This is all your fault, all your books, all your games… If you’d spent less time on that crap, maybe something like this wouldn’t have happened. You brought this on yourself, all your imaginings, wanting this. You think that your books on magic and fantasy and fairy tales can play out like this in reality? No! That’s not how the world works! I went to your funeral!”
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The words came out in a ragged sob and, still, without thinking, Kelvin moved to comfort her, only to be backed off again by another scream.
“I… I never meant any of this to happen, I didn’t want –”
“No! Don’t come near me! Slimy worm! I wish you had died down there! You didn’t have to come back and fuck up my life anymore! All I wanted was a boyfriend, a normal life, normal things! And you didn’t give me any of that! I thought you could give me a good life and now you’ve screwed up everything! There’s no going back from this!”
Her lips twisted and, for the first time ever, her features became ugly. At least, that was the first time to Kelvin. She’d never seen Casey like that before, never before, chest catching, pulling, aching deeply.
Had she… The dragon trembled. Had she been wrong about her the whole time? Casey’s words streamed on, though her head was gone, gone and lost, trailing through turmoil, Casey’s eyes blazing, fists flying, yet none of them came near him as she threw them in the air.
“This isn’t going to work, everyone thinks you’re gone. They’ve cried for you, had your funeral. What do you think they’ll all say if they see you as a dragon? If they know that this shit has happened to you, coming back to twist our lives too? So, don’t come here now and make any of this shitshow any worse than it already is!”
Kelvin gaped, her head pounding, aching fiercely. Opening her mouth several times, she hacked and gagged on the words, feeling as if she had swallowed a lump of meat that was too large and subsequently lodged in her throat. The world slowed down, though her thoughts were so sluggish that she could not cling onto them, eyes watering, reminiscent…of something else.
“I… Casey, what are you saying? You don’t have to say it back but –”
“Shut up! I can’t even look at you!”
Kelvin whimpered. Was she really that hideous? What did Casey mean? She couldn’t shun her after everything Kelvin had done to get to her…could she?
Yet even a dragoness like Kelvin, as much as they may have wanted to, could not control everything.
“Go! Get out of here! You’ve ruined everything, everyone pities me – get the hell away from me! I don’t want you here, no one does! There’s nothing for a beast like you here! Nothing that you can fix and save when you’ve already crushed it all!”
Again, Kelvin saw the tiny toy helicopter under someone’s foot, crunched to particles, just as her heart had been. She keened but her legs and her wings were quicker than her mind even in that moment, spinning around. She flared her wings and laboured into the air, though there was no connection in her mind between the moment of
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sinking back onto her hind end to throw herself skyward and the moment itself of being up in the air.
Sirens screamed, confusing her senses, yet if she had still been human there would have been tears streaming down her face. Tears were not so easily softened when they were trapped inside, Kelvin’s head hanging, howling, leaving behind the woman that she had hoped, in some way, that she would still be able to spend the rest of her life with. In her bedside table drawer at home, maybe still, rested a promise ring: one of a set they had exchanged with each other.
They hadn’t meant anything. Not then, not in the present moment. For they could not mean anything when only one side of the party took them seriously.
Had it only been her that cared? Kelvin could not think straight, the city confusing. It was too much to take in, too much all at once. But she just had to keep going, had to keep pushing on, flying randomly, aimlessly. But she didn’t know what she was doing, where she was doing, even if she had to keep going.
“Casey!”
Her roar blistered forth with all the pain, anguish and agony shot through that she had carried with her since her transformation, even with how she had fought back so vehemently against the change in the first place. She had tried, she really had! Why was it that Casey could not see that, not in any way at all? It didn’t make sense, none of it – why hadn’t she been glad to see her? Casey had not even known that she was a dragoness, not a dragon male, and that hadn’t even mattered anyway.
Excitement brewed in the city below, Kelvin flying high enough that she thought she could escape detection, but that was only from those on the ground. The helicopters, for there was more than one, confusing her senses and coming, seemingly, from all sides, didn’t have such a hindrance at play. They could see her, follow her, beams sweeping, searching, hunting her as if she was just an animal to be trapped.
Kelvin shuddered. To them…perhaps she was. Perhaps that was all that they would think of dragons, in the end, when the coming of the new age of dragons and civilisation was finally revealed. There was no way for anyone to know just what could come in that regard, only hope that it would not be as dreadful as history could have suggested.
They have to realise I’m real by now… Even Casey knew I was real. That’s why she hates me.
Kelvin whined, clawing and pawing at her own muzzle, though the pain did not ease things in the slightest for her. Away, she had to get away, but she didn’t know where she was going. In her distress, everything looked the same. Was she even passing the building where Casey had scorned her all over again?
Something pulled in her chest and she cried out, twisting, grunting out loud, though there was no one there who cared to hear her. They were closing in, zeroing in on her as if she was nothing more than a target to them, something to be beaten down,
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trapped and locked in. Panic fluttered through her, out of time with the beat of her heart, throwing off the natural rhythm of her body.
Why, oh, why had she come to the city? Why did she think that she was going to make everything right again? Kelvin zigzagged back and forth, seeking an escape. What if she flew straight up into the clouds? Buildings hid her partly there and she was afraid to dart back out into the suburbs where the area was more open. Would she be able to shoot past the helicopters before they caught up to her? There was no way to tell and her wings were so heavy, so very tired, that every beat of them seemed to come more and more slowly, dragging her down.
Her sisters… She crooned, not able to hold back the low, terrible groan of despair as it bubbled up from deep inside. Oh, what had she done? It had all been for nought when she had found the woman that she had loved only to find that that love was not returned, treated with horror and disgust instead. Maybe that love had never been returned, would not have come to pass if she had been a man, for she saw the warmth in Jenson’s eyes when she looked at Anniyah, the same between Alex and Sandra. They had become dragons and yet it did not even matter that the gender of the males, how they identified too, had changed, only that they were together and, through it all, their love had remained strong.
If that had not been the same for her…the love could never have been said to be true.
“Kelvin!”
What? She pulled back, back-pedalling with her wings in mid-air, though hovering was, by far, not one of her strong suits. Santino whipped by in a purple blur, for she could not mistake her scales for any other, her jaws agape, fear stark in her gaze.
“What are you doing out here?” She shrieked, swiping at the air with a forepaw as she turned sharply. “Follow me! We’ve got to get out of here!”
Kelvin’s chest expanded, a little of the metal band that had closed in there loosening, if only a fraction. It was something, something, at least, and something was much better than nothing, energy shocking her as her tail lashed the air.
“I could ask you the same question!”
Yet she followed and the tale was told in just how she followed without question. For if there was one that she could trust to lead her along the right path, it was one of her sisters. All of them, all different and yet the same too, the coven forming a whole. Her heart surged, hurling herself into frenzied flight, Santino’s tail whipping around a building as she followed with renewed determination.
Home. Yes, she had to get home.
“The others have landed some way away – come quickly!”
There was no time to explain the plan, Santino’s heart pounding, though there was a fierce delight in her heart too. That risk, that danger… Okay, perhaps it was not quite
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the mischief that she had gotten up to in her younger years, never anything that would get her into too much trouble but more than enough to make her mother pull her hair out with worry, exploring abandoned buildings, playing tricks on the cops… But it was enough to revitalise her. And just who could have thought that she would find a little of her old self in her new self as a dragoness?
Maybe life as a dragoness had only needed a little excitement to remind her of who she was!
But things could not be true for all of them and their very lives and existence were both at stake as they fled. Santino checked back every few beats of her wings to make sure that Kelvin was as close as she could be, tiring quickly. What had she done in the city? What had come to pass there? There was no saying, no telling, back gardens and houses, just like the ones that they might have lived in if they had not become transformed into dragons as they had been, flashing by below. The dead of the night may have still been upon them, but it would not be so for long, everything a blur of worry, fret, fury chasing their wings.
Yet there was a park, a park flanked with trees, and no one who took solace there on a night would believe that a coven of dragons had landed in the middle. Kelvin hardly dared to set down – how would she take flight again when she was already so tired? – but she had to, grunting as she set down heavily, Santino joining her, in the thick of the flock. All but Sandra, that was.
“She’s patrolling, higher up,” Arya said, her muzzle crinkled with worry. “Oh, Kelvin, we had no idea… Kelvin, we’ll sort this, but we’ve got to go now.”
She trembled, head hanging, breathing laboured. A line showed down her flank with every breath that she managed to drag into her lungs, nose so low that it brushed the grass. They seemed to be on some sort of sports pitch, though it had not been well-maintained, the grass longer than it should have been in the warmer months of the year.
“I… I know… I’m so sorry, I’ve risked it all, risked all of you. I should never have done it – and she didn’t care for me anyway!”
The words ripped themselves from her with such anguish that Isla-Rae could not stop herself from rushing in, crooning and rubbing up against her, comforting her sister with the touch of her scales on another’s.
“Sweetheart, it was never your fault. We should have known, we knew you were struggling but we didn’t want to force you or overwhelm you. We know better what we should do now, not leave you out on your own. To cut you out was never what we meant to do, but giving you space was not the answer either.”
“All of you!”
Alex stood tall in his bright red scales, impossible to miss with Jenson at his side, the two of them the largest dragons in the coven. In the dark of the night, Jenson’s changing scales were rendered pitch-black, only the drake’s eyes gleaming.
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“We must leave – now! They’re coming!”
Kelvin could only follow and that in itself was a relief, Arya and Brent helping her take flight, sharing the air from under their wings and buffeting her higher and higher until she could catch the wind on her own. There was no doubt that they would have to set down to rest once outside the bounds of the city, even the sprawling suburbs, but, for the moment, immediate escape was at the forefront of their minds.
Only Santino hung back over the sports field, a storage shed set up laden with equipment. But it was not that which caught her attention as she dipped over a stretch of sand. What it was used for, she could not have said, for it was far too much to be used for long-jump practise – perhaps the area was still being developed? And yet it gave her the perfect chance to cause a distraction that would surely rile up the humans in investigating, wings beating, pummelling the ground with every ounce of strength she had in her body.
She was a strong flyer, bristling with functional muscle, and that played into her benefit as she swirled up the dust into a storm. She could control it too, darting back and forth, forming it into a twister, a pillar of sand that rose higher and higher, drawing it all up as if it was being dredged, though she could barely believe that she was able to create something of such a towering scale. She trembled in delight, scales itching – oh, that there was someone there to see the artistry of her creation!
It could not be set to live on its own, however, needing the breath of her wings to live, though she had done all she needed, one final beat of her wings spilling it forth, sending the sand raging across the field. Like a tidal wave of stinging, biting grains, it snarled forth, covering the pitch, the wind catching it, toying with it, further strokes of her wings buffeting and driving it up into a tumultuous uproar of one crosswind catching the other. There was no way such a thing could possibly be missed from up in the air or even on the ground.
“We’ll be gone while they investigate that… Hah!” Santino bristled with glee. “Try that on for size, why don’t you?”
“San… Santino?”
She froze: not the best thing to do while airborne for she dropped heavily to the ground, sand still drifting over the playing field. The trees rustled in the wind formed from her wings but could not hide the rising bark of a small dog, a mutt straining at the end of its leash, something like a cross between a “lab” and a “staffie”, mottled through with brown and white markings.
The dragoness stiffened, wings mantled over her back. Could she get away? For the hands holding that leash were more familiar than she wanted to admit: right then, at least.
No…
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Santino trembled. The words were coming whether she wanted them to or not. Or maybe only the one name.
“Sebastian?”
The man’s jaw dropped, his skin a deeper olive shade than Santino’s, for he had been an exchange student when he had joined the same university as Santino, Greek with eyes that had caught Santino the very first time they had met. There had been no escaping the pull of that man, not even back then, and not even in that moment too with the dog that they had picked out together at the rescue yapping and pulling at the end of its leash, tail wagging madly.
“You…”
Santino gulped, shaking her head and backing off. No, no… She was a dragoness! What did that mean for…
No.
It was not one she could face up to, turning on her tail even as Sebastian stretched out a hand to her. She didn’t see it, could not see it, hurling herself skyward and powering away from her past with stroke after stroke of her powerful wings, an ache cutting through her chest.
“Wait!”
She did not.
Some things could not be faced up to so easily.
She would deal with that later, following the others, though it was harder to track them than she would have initially expected. Her dark scales cloaked her well with the night, however, as two helicopters and flashing police cars swarmed on the mess she had created, resounding gusts still buffeting the trees as if something even larger than Santino had passed by there. They would be fine investigating that, no one would get hurt – and Sebastian would have safety near.
She had not realised that he had been so close. But she would consider the implications of her discovery later. How had he known it was her?
“Santino, hurry!”
She could not think when she had to fly, Arya darting back to guide her along.
“Why are your voices coming from everywhere?”
They left the taller buildings behind even as Arya laughed and snapped her tail in a proud flick.
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“With the size of our lungs here, as dragons, we can shout, scream, roar – and our voices will echo off those bigger buildings – they don’t know where we’re coming from or what’s happening! With enough madness going on, the confusion will be more than enough to get us away.”
They could only trust in that, all joining together again to fly up and up and up into the clouds, cloaking themselves and evading detection. It was there that tiredness proved to be their greatest foe, for the helicopters would not be looking for something so high up. They could be glad that there was enough cloud cover that night, coming in while Kelvin had been flying to the city, to cloak their presence but Kelvin faded quickly.
“Hang in there.”
“We’ve got you.”
Jenson flew under Kelvin, letting her use the air from her wings to support her, a little of an updraft created simply from the passage of a creature as large as Jenson. They didn’t want to attract attention and that meant using the stars to guide them, avoiding gaps in the clouds – even if that meant that their route home would take longer.
“There’ll be planes too, we’ve got to watch out for them.”
That was Brent, always thinking ahead. Alex flew alongside Kelvin, helping her along, though there seemed to be little that they could do. Could any of them physically carry Kelvin? It did not seem possible and, thus, they had to encourage her on, Santino taking the lead and darting ahead to find a place to set down.
“We’re almost out of the city – can you make it a while longer?”
Kelvin would have to, even though her wings dropped lower and lower, one beat hardly pushing her through the air at all. The only reason she managed to keep her altitude was by the grace of the others alone, heart heavy. Could one be weighed down by that? She did not know.
Sandra pushed her on, her wings large and strong, able to send gust after gust from behind Kelvin, creating a tailwind to push her on. In such a manner, with some dragonesses changing out to buoy her up and others to create a tailwind to carry her forward, they moved along at more than a skyward crawl.
Brent tipped a wing, calling their attention.
“There’s a quarry… We can hide in there for a little while but we’re going to have to keep going, Kelvin, alright?”
Kelvin swallowed hard, nodding resolutely.
“Yes. I can do it, I promise. But a rest… That would help.”
The problem with the quarry was that, while it would conceal them while they dipped into the entrance of it, it would not allow them easy access to fly again, unless they
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used the walls to leap from – though that only meant that they had to gain more altitude. It was a tricky conundrum and situation to be placed in, though it was not as if they had many options at that time.
Disused, there was no machinery left and the cloud cover fell away at just the wrong time for them to plummet down, Kelvin dropping more heavily than the rest. She stumbled over herself as the others landed more lightly, though there was still a weight behind the dragons that could not be helped. They were still, after all, large creatures in the grand scheme of what Earth had been used to supporting in more recent years.
“There now…” Alex nuzzled her, closing in, a wing draped over Kelvin’s back even as she nudged her back onto her feet. “Get your strength back. It will be a smooth, easy flight back, I promise. I can feel the wind coming: it will carry you most of the way and all you will have to do is spread your wings.”
It was tiredness that laced her, however, a lump in her throat, twisting her head back and forth as ragged, pained breaths ripped from her body.
“I’m sorry… I should never have gone…”
“What happened there, darling?” Alex nuzzled her, leaving her nose pressed to Kelvin’s cheek. “We’re all here for you. It’s all okay. It’s all going to be okay.”
Slowly, piece by agonising piece, Kelvin revealed the story, though it was not a joy at all to tell. Her heart ached and her sisters were there, even as it felt ever so slightly better to, finally, let it all out, all at once.
“I’ve done so wrong…” She mumbled, even as Isla-Rae tried to quiet her, telling her that she didn’t have to think like that, that it wasn’t true, laying a wing over her back. “I should never have left, I’m so sorry… I hurt everyone…”
“No, no, not like that, never like that, dear.”
Santino should have been loud, finding herself again – yet she felt that she had lost herself again just as swiftly. Could that be so? Strangely, she looked around the quarry as if seeing it for the first time, sheets of smooth rock left behind where the rest had been cut away, leaving steep, foreboding walls. They’d always thought that something was about to tumble down from those walls at a moment’s notice, yet it had never been the case. Maybe they had been right to be cautious.
“Something on your mind, Santino?”
She sighed. She could always count on Isla-Rae to be watchful. It was just one of many motherly things that had come forth in her and she was still on the fence as to whether or not it was a good thing.
“I used to come here with Sebastian.”
Arya looked at her strangely.
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“Sebastian? You never mentioned him before.”
The dragoness shuffled her feet, as guilty as any of them ever had looked.
“No… Not until I saw him in the park we left.”
“What?”
“He saw you!”
They had so many questions and yet it was Santino’s turn to bundle into herself, hunkering down with all four feet close together. She couldn’t bear to brace her stance, something inside her pulling and pulling as if it was trying to tug free of her body. That didn’t make sense but, then again, what had made sense to any of them since delving into the caving system?
“Sebastian… We were together. I never thought I’d see him again and, well, that, as a dragoness…”
Santino gestured hopelessly to her body with a wingtip.
“He likes men. I was a man. But I’m not anymore and nothing is going to change that.”
The others fell silent, though Anniyah and Sandra flanked her on either side, comforting her with the presence of their bodies alone. Yet if there was one dragoness amongst them that needed space at that time, it was Santino, mulling over what had come to pass, the facts of the truths that she would have to face up to sooner or later.
Not that night though. There was too much at stake to lose herself to worry, fretting as knots churned and turned over one another in her stomach. And there was a lot of stomach in her to contain the mass of that worry.
They’d deal with it later and she knew that she’d have her sisters with her when that monster was due to be confronted, however it played out.
They settled together for half an hour or so, the first light of dawn colouring the horizon. Kelvin sniffled, her head resting on her front feet, knowing that they could not stay there together. Yet all of them had found something in their strange little clan, their unconventional family, that kept them going. At the very least, her painful misadventure had opened her eyes to what she had been missing before and what she had in the present time.
“The last is for lessons, darling,” Sandra murmured, nuzzling the top of her head between her horns. “The present is for living, for actions. The future is for plans and dreams.”
Kelvin’s lips twitched wryly.
“Not for doubts and fears.”
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“No. But that sounds more like the dragon you are meant to be.”
“What?” Kelvin’s nose wrinkled. “Doubting and fearing.”
Sandra chuckled and shook her head.
“No. That little humour. You don’t have to hide it.”
It was just one of so very many things that Kelvin would mull over. Not every problem in her world could be solved in a single night, that much was true, but they would soon have to take to their wings and take to the air again. They could not rest there for long, even if it was a moment of peace in the calm of the storm, for it had already swept them up in its claws and was not about to let the dragonesses, the new age of civilisation, go so easily.
They would be together, together and facing the new age, the changes in the world that they would be the mothers of, even if not directly bringing about. No harm but positive leanings and inclinations that smoothed out the edge of roughness and coarseness that humanity had implemented. The changes they’d set in place had benefitted few but changed the path of the world forever while dragons had merely been lying in wait to, gently and lovingly, set all back on track for a healthier future.
They had a greater purpose there than they had yet learned, but time was on their side. Whether they were taking on a new life and fate or easing into it, breaking down their past ails, there would be more to come in time. And neither was it natural to have every loose end and every thread tied up at the close of the day, though they were at the dawn of it.
As the light cast itself over the land, as it did at every dawn, the dragons silently spread their wings and took flight, their sights set on motherhood, the softness to come back at home. Their species would continue, dragon bloodlines set out for all to follow in the footprints of, though it was safe to say that the world that they left behind would never again be the same.
That was alright. Things that were the same never grew, never changed, never developed. And that was all very much a natural part of the world.
The dragons were stronger together, the coven and flock complete, one being made up of separate, thinking souls.
Those souls would bring forth change.
The mothers of dragons had much to look forward to.
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Chapter Eleven
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Kelvin’s broken heart was not so easily mended, but that was simply because there were some things, as a dragon, that one did not bounce back from easily. A human being did not bounce back easily unless that was their way, so why should it be that Kelvin should instinctively be “alright” after such an upheaval? Yet she had her sisters around her, more troubled about being a dragon than ever but still, in a way, accepting that it was to be her life.
“There are different ways that people cope with loss,” Alex said, though she had taken a long time to reveal what had happened to her and Sandra, back when they had been humans, the depth of their loss. “People react differently, not always rationally.”
Kelvin had sighed.
“Then she should have been glad to see me… This was different. I know it was, but I… I can’t make sense of it.”
She knew, in a way. She’d read enough, though had been blinded to the cause of the change, the twisting manipulation, how it curled through, tugged at her heart, pained her right to her core. But Kelvin had only thought that that sort of thing happened in fiction, fantasy, the sort of thing that one could wrap themselves up in, lose themselves in.
She’d never thought that that would become her reality. That Casey had relished in her disappearance, what it had given her… Kelvin shuddered, shaking her head, shrinking into herself even while Isla-Rae laid her near translucent wing over her, comforting her softly without saying anything at all. Their shades blended together, the splotched blue and white of Kelvin coming together with her light, easy on the eye, pearlescent hues. Yet every dragon there was so much more than their bodies, than what they looked like. It was merely their outward garb, all as they changed and learned on the inside.
There had been something wrong even before Kelvin had disappeared. That was all she could tell, but maybe the answers, for her, would be uncovered in time.
And there was a comfort to be had too in how her stomach felt heavier and heavier, weighing her down even while she tried to throw herself into flight and being, simply, a dragon. If she was going to be like that forever, after all, she’d thought that she should engage in every aspect. The others supported her but they all could not help the fact that they were more and more laden with their pregnancies, despite not showing. It was felt in how their balance was slightly off, waddling a little more, their bodies wanting them to stay closer and closer to the nesting sites, just until the time was right.
After that… Well, all would come right.
She had to take it slowly and lightly, bit by bit, breathing out as she was the first to lay her eggs. Kelvin did not want it to be here but, as a way to take a wingbeat towards mending the heartbreak, it worked as well as anything else.
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A family to love and a family to care for… Her eyes misted over even as she paced and paced, the nesting grounds set out where they could be well protected from both the elements or any predators that may have wanted to take their eggs from them. The trees loomed, offering some protection in the little valley they’d settled on (well, Isla-Rae had insisted on it being the best location), and the dip kept the nesting mounds away from the wind and rain. She’d already prepared a mound of earth, but Alan had assured them that once one of them began to lay, they all would.
“Certain seasons for mating and certain seasons for laying,” she had said, others imagining her pushing her glasses back up her nose, though those were something long lost in being a human being. “We will go through cycles. I think…it will become clearer when these eggs hatch.”
Would divine intervention render them pregnant again? Or would they choose mates from their friends’ offspring when they were of age? That Sandra and Alex were comfortable as a couple was set but would motherhood lure them on to raising a family or other families in less conventional manners? Only time, in that case, would tell. And there was no longer any rush for any of them to get there, despite the hasty pace of everything else in the world.
“Are you alright?”
Arya followed her closely with a tilt to her antler-like horns, disliking letting Kelvin out of her sight after the incident. It was a good thing that they did not need as much privacy as humans, allowing them to, at least, be easy about each other’s presence. Kelvin couldn’t get the words out as she lay down and got straight back up again, unable to find a comfortable position.
Arya called the others, not wanting her to be alone, dragons pressed to her on all sides as she was encouraged to squat, her hind legs braced apart so that she could direct her eggs, as the contractions worked them out of her, into the nesting mound. A neat hollow had been made in the centre, but they were hardly eggs the size of chicken eggs but much larger with a firmer shell, Kelvin’s breathing panting and labouring as she laid each one of them.
The dragonesses helped, scraping away at the mound with her, helping Kelvin bury them. They were cautious, treating every lay, the very first one, as something special, something to be cherished as a group. They had to be deep in the middle of the mounds to stay warm during the harder months of winter, the young within growing and becoming little dragonets, though only time and the gestation period within the eggs would allow them to become dragons. All nests resided in a circle, protecting one another, as instinct and their discoveries came together, weaving knowledge with what they simply knew.
Only later, however, when fire licked at their bellies, the backs of their throats, betraying another ability, would they realise that they didn’t have to be quite as deep and as careful as they had made them to be. First-time mothers would always take things a step too far, not realising, even at that time, that the ability to warm their eggs had been inside them the whole time. The protective circle of the nests too helped them, guarding them, allowing one dragoness, at all times, to stand watch over them,
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allowing the others to rest, feed, hunt, to live, just as they needed to, the course of life drawing them all together and onward as a singular family unit.
Kelvin grunted, Arya leaning over her with a worried look in her eye.
“Here… I’ll keep them warm for you. Only worry about laying. It’s all okay.”
Kelvin moaned, shaking her head back and forth, though the strain was new to her, her guts churning and aching, her tail trying to lift. Nothing felt right and yet everything did at the same time, things coming together in a way that felt comfortable. And her eggs were not alone either, so close to the other mounds that it would feel as if all their children were growing up together before they’d even hatched.
“You’re doing so well.”
“Just a few more.”
“You have such a big clutch.”
“A little more, you can rest soon.”
The encouragement of her sisters, her coven, soothed her, eyes falling half-lidded as she allowed them to carry her onward, to buoy her up. She didn’t have to make her own wind when they were the wind beneath her wings. Her heart may have been in pieces and her pride, what little she had had, in tatters, but she could face the world, she thought, with them by her side.
Would she be a good mother? Would she be able to look after the little dragons as they deserved? Was she ready for it? Some questions had answers and others did not but that she was all as it was going to be, Anniyah and Jenson flanking her with the strength of their bodies as the very last of her eggs dropped safely into the mound.
“There now,” Jenson soothed, touching Kelvin’s tail tenderly with hers. “Scrape the earth over. That’s what Alan said.”
They may have had more experience in raising a family than the rest of them, bar Alex and Sandra who had had the one child, but they deferred to Alan when it came to dragon behaviour. Instinct may have taken care of it, but it was good to know what to do, what to expect, everything that experience did not cover. Living life as they had was all very well, but their eyes had, finally, been opened to a new life and a new world, something that they could push forward into, bravely carve their own path.
Once the mound was covered, Kelvin was led off by them, the dragoness weakly lying down, her strength gone from her. Brent and Sandra hovered over the mound, though it was only at that point that a new ability came to light, something that they had not, before, felt the fiery prickle of in the back of their throats.
Fire. No wonder their eggs would survive the winter buried in the mounds. They were more fragile than expected and required close caretaking of them, Brent lifting her head back, eyes wide. Her body was not like that of any reptile that she could have
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known and only later would the sacks of gas, that both offered them buoyancy in the air and what was about to be shown, be revealed in their continued studies. But she knew, somehow, how to click the “strike” at the back of her mouth, something gritty residing there that she hadn’t understood.
Fire, however, roiled forth from her maw in a sputtering blast that grew in strength, scorching the ground around the mound and the mound itself. Instinct was, indeed, a powerful thing, Sandra pressed comfortingly up to her side, Kelvin’s eyes on them the whole time, motherly instincts kicking in.
“What if I’m not good?” Kelvin mumbled, half-covering her muzzle with her forepaws. “What if they don’t like me?”
“Darling, you’re going to be a wonderful mother,” Anniyah murmured, resting a wing over Kelvin’s back. “You’re not alone. None of us are. We may know some but we’re all going to need all of our sister dragons in this venture.”
“It’s okay to be scared too,” Jenson said. “It would be wrong if you were not scared. This is one thing where concern and fear… Well, in small, healthy doses, they are what show love. A different kind of love to what you may have experienced so far.”
Love? All she felt was loss. But love could come to fill that hole, showing her a route that she may like to follow, for nothing was set, even when their fate and destiny had been laid out so many years before in the dragons that had come before.
She would be a mentor to others too, taking all she could and passing it on, her knowledge and learning something that everyone could benefit from. She was the first, after all, to meet someone from their past life and experience heartbreak from it, yet she could use that experience to do something good.
Kelvin sighed, her lips softening, easing into a light smile that was almost not there.
She would do all she could. They all would. And the fire that lived inside them, a tangible, flickering substance, would bake the earth until it held its warmth, topped up daily by dragoness after dragoness, warming their eggs through winter. Only when spring came would they see their dragonets for the very first time, their passions coming together in the gentle joys of motherhood.
Maybe they needed something softer and lighter, especially after everything that they’d gone through. Yet all that they needed to take on would be done together.
The others followed her in laying, driven by need, and she watched with tired eyes from a small distance, needing the time to rest, at least for a little while. Sandra aided Arya, who she had grown quite close to, her tail twisted tightly around hers for support, sides pressed together. It was a long labour for her to lay her eggs, an even larger clutch than Kelvin’s, yet it was something that Arya too knew that she only had to bear through.
“Oof… Sandra… How…how many is that?”
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“Ten, darling. Keep going.”
Arya gulped. There was so much ahead but she had to push on. There could be no going back. The rest of their lives had begun, whether they were ready for it or not. She’d seen the same trepidation in Kelvin’s eyes. Her eyes half-lidded, breathing laboured, yet even she felt the pull of flame in the back of her throat, almost as if it was working its way up from deep inside her. That was something new, a little distraction, something that could help her wriggle her hips ever so lightly, bearing through the last of the eggs, the first laying of her life.
Santino and Jenson seemed to feel the urges to lay at about the same time, choosing nesting mounds that were next to one another, though it was more difficult for them to lay. They were never meant to, but they were no longer men, and the very act of laying was an act of release to their past lives. They could remember and cherish what they had had but it was time to take another step forward and embrace a part of being a dragoness that, fairly, had worried them. Each had expressed it differently but having someone near who understood was a sort of quiet companionship that each understood. Even if Santino had covered up his worries with brashness and loudness, covering up the fear with so much noise that even he did not have to look at it.
Sandra had to lay, allowing Arya to rest, but she was proud to see Kelvin up and supporting Isla-Rae, the two of them and their soft, light personalities coming together well. The coven had grown in strength with them and the lightness they held for one another, especially after the rescue in the city. Her laying was the easiest of all, her heart lifting, sending a silent prayer up to the heavens where she hoped her daughter was watching.
We love you, darling.
Forever and always, it would be so. One clutch of eggs or more would not take their first daughter from their lives and Sandra finally knew, with reassuring certainty, that she would see Julia again. Her eggs plopped down, one after the other, but she smiled and shooed off Brent when she waddled up, even though she was clearly on the edge of labour herself.
“I’m quite fine, dear.”
Yet she could not rest after her laying, taking her leave to look after Alex, her sweet wife, the dragoness swallowing hard, her eyes narrowed, though she was not in any pain.
“It will not hurt, sweetheart.”
“I know, it’s just…”
She was in her thoughts too. Sandra folded a wing around her, drawing her in close.
“I know, I know. She’s here with us. I can feel it.”
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Alex had no qualms about being a father, or even a mother, again, even if she would have to learn a new way of caring. Mothers were life-givers and the ones that felt the pressure of labour, feeling a little of what Sandra had had in her human form. A fresh respect for that would do him well as they moved forward, together, their two clutches the promise of a new start and new life to come, delighting in it.
Kelvin paused over a mound that didn’t look quite right, as if something had shifted inside. That was something that she might well have to ask Alan about, for she knew more than anyone else about eggs and laying and how they would have to remain inside the mounds, but, on carefully scraping the top layer of earth, she realised that the eggs had not been laid deeply enough.
“Oh no…”
One was cracked, though not all the way through. Something blossomed in her, flaring up, but it was not the fiery breath that one might have considered typical for a dragoness, lowering her nose through instinct alone. And it was good for her to lean into that instinct, relaxing, exhaling, a cool mist seeping from her mouth around the egg. It cradled and held the egg as tenderly as a mother’s claws, the crack sealed shut again, Kelvin smiling faintly.
That helped. Only a little, but it had been enough to help. There was more they could do, she thought, covering the eggs back up with a good layer of earth, firm and secure, to keep them warm too.
Brent was left to lay, along with Anniyah, yet she tried to hold off for as long as possible, despite the rising urge. How could it be so that they all needed to lay simultaneously? Maybe it was species related or culture related but none of them could deny that the urge was there, as much as they may have liked to take some space between laying moments for themselves. Regardless, everyone had someone to support them, even Brent who gained Arya and Isla-Rae on either side.
The dragonesses moved amongst each other, one by one, all of them laying their clutches. The youngest of them laughed a little giddily, some sharing their worries, yet the qualms were laid to rest, at least in part, by the oldest of them leading the way.
“We’ll show you how to raise them.”
Anniyah.
“There’ll be nothing that any of them want for.”
Sandra.
“We’ll be the very best they can be.”
Jenson.
“All will be part of the coven. We’re all in this together.”
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Alex.
Thus, it was so. The mounds lay well-covered, the eggs warm within, though they would rest there until spring and kinder seasons for little dragonets to burst forth into the world. Only then would life be suited to them, allowing them forth, and there was time yet for the experienced among them to share stories of caregiving, laughter and memories, all of which would lead them forward into a way of being that they could not have before anticipated holding for their own.
Yet it was Kelvin who lay there at the end of it all, staring at the mounds, though she was not needed to guard and protect them, not yet. Santino was nearby, taking on that role, though Kelvin watched her mound avidly, imagining already that she could see the earth stirring.
“Will the dragonets dig their way out?”
Sandra lifted her wings.
“I did not think you heard me here.”
Kelvin smiled, half-turning, swivelling her long neck to look back over her shoulder and wings.
“You’re quiet but you have a certain tread to your step. It’s nice to know when you’re around.”
No further words were needed. Her fears, their worries – everything – had already been laid bare. To tread over old ground all over again would be wearying and tiring, traipsing and traipsing when there was no need for any of it. They could sit there, quietly, and enjoy the dawn, the first rays of light easing down into the valley while the rest of the coven, bar the patrolling Santino, slumbered sweetly.
It was not perfect, but it was life. And, sometimes, it was the messy parts of life that led to the most glory in the end.
Life. Love. Family. Companionship.
Kelvin took a deep breath. With her sisters, she would be prepared to face whatever came.
A core belief in the coming of dragons.