“Kry
stis,” he rumbled, when he saw her waiting. Her scaly crimson lips spread in a fang-toothed grin. Her eyes glared jade in the hazy light of Antila 2’s dull sun. Her armored plates were dark, though not as dark as Drogan’s. He had stared at her long enough before to notice that her scale-tone was not black, but a red hue deeper than any ruby. She was, after all, the only thing to look at on Mukurus. There were other Dragons around somewhere, or so Krystis said. Drogan and DA-Vos had yet to meet a single one of them.
“Drogan,” she hummed back to him. Krystis bore down on him with those eyes of green flame, her slick tongue hung out just slightly. Drogan was never sure if she wanted to devour him on a dinner plate or in a bed. Not by her looks anyway. He stood the straightest as ever he had in her presence. Forgetting her higher rank, Krystis had two feet of height on Drogan. Even with her wings folded around her shoulders, she stood broader than him, too. “You can leave the crates.” The first few times Drogan heard her voice hiss and flicker through the blood on the sides of his head and understood her, he had hardly been able to compose himself. As Machaeus had explained, Dragons didn’t really speak. Their thoughts were made known to one another through resonance of the Chrysum in their blood. Drogan plopped the crates in the brown clay. “Any sign of organized resistance?”
“None. They were caught completely off-guard, the same as before,” Drogan told her.
“Well done, Drogan. The Higher Order will be pleased,” Krystis grinned. Her eyes glided up and down his scaly muscle. “You went beyond Neptune. What did you find?” Drogan had a split second to formulate a believable ruse and get it out before Krystis tapped into his mind’s eye.
“A planet called Saturn, with ice rings. The humans have built a mining net inside them, for Chrysum,” said Drogan.
“Humans… clever despite their frailty. Is Saturn their homeworld?” Krystis followed.
“No. There’s still no sign of it,” Drogan grumbled before Krystis could sense anything different, “Planets in the Milky Way aren’t exactly close, but their SkyLine helps. They’ve even begun building a branch towards this galaxy. If their ships could reach as far as here, who’s to say their homeworld is even in the Milky Way?” Krystis nodded throughout the theory. Her talons sunk in the clay while she paced a semicircle around her young protégé.
“Very well, then we keep searching. We raid their mines along the way. We’ll find the core of it all, so long as you keep your wings wide,” said Krystis.
“That’s what the Higher Order is after? The humans’ homeworld?” said Drogan.
“What the Higher Order is after is none of your concern, Crusader,” Krystis growled, though not without a certain daring playfulness, “A title that can easily be stripped of you, if you keep asking questions.” She plodded within an inch of his face. Krystis’ hot breath trickled down the scales of Drogan’s throat. He clenched his fist to keep his arm from trembling along with his DA-Vos gauntlet. This was hardly the first time he’d tried to dig to the bottom of the well, the intentions of the sleeping Higher Order of Dragons in Machaeus’ care. At the heart of it, It was because of them he’d left everything behind sixty years ago.
“You speak as if I’ve only just become their Crusader. My wings bend to their wind. My arms carry their quarry. Yet still, they sleep. Still, Machaeus watches over them. You say there are more of us, yet I see only you. I only want to-
“Quiet - now!” Krystis hissed. Her claw flattened against Drogan’s armored chest. Her talons curled in, etching lines in him deep enough to silence him. He arched his gauntlet back. In a moment, Drogan was ready for the fight he’d always hoped to avoid. Then Krystis’ snout slid against the edge of his face to whisper, “They can hear you as well as I can, even asleep. They don’t want you to know. Do you understand what that means?” Even though he did, it took Drogan a few seconds of clenched fangs to still his shaking fist. It was a good stretch of his mind to wrap it around the idea that her hostility was coming from a place of concern. Yet, if she’d let him speak… who knew what he Higher Order was capable of? Drogan certainly didn’t.
“I… understand,” said Drogan. He pulled an inch back from Krystis and spun on his scaly heels. There was a rocky hovel with his name on it in the remnants of what was once center city Fierghlass.
“More pressing business elsewhere?” Krystis asked, in a tone completely at odds with the tension of a moment past. Her eyelids flickered low. It turned Drogan’s stomach to see the look on her draconic face, one he hadn’t seen on another since his last night of passion so long ago. It had been in a hospital bed, and ended so badly he couldn’t bear to go back, even in dreams. Sheba… Drogan shook himself back to reality, to find that same look on Krystis. Desire. She slid an inch closer.
“Nothing’s as pressing as my rocky cot right now,” Drogan growled.
“Not… so different from what I was implying,” Krystis whispered. The scales of her chest grazed his. Warmth. It caught Drogan just off guard enough to keep him there an extra second. Looking at the glare off her scales, he’d always expected Krystis to be cold. But, now they were touching, he felt the radiance of the same flame he had in his own draconic chest. “You don’t have to go, if you don’t want to.” Just then, Drogan realized he’d let his mind wander too far. Krystis sensed the resonance of love, the last echo of it that lived in his memories. Drogen chased every last thought of Sheba from his mind with replacement ones of fatigue from his trip.
“It was a long flight. It’ll be another one, when the Higher Order calls again. Who knows how soon that’ll be, or how far I'll have to fly?” Drogan groaned. He had to fool himself to fool her, so he dug deep into the real pit of frustration in his stomach.
“Right…” Krystis hissed. She slid just far enough back for him to turn. Drogan wandered off through clouds of beige dust. She watched him fade away, holding in the sigh until he was out of direct frequency. Of all the responsibilities on her scaly shoulders, the only one Krystis wanted was the one she couldn’t completely control. It made Drogan’s darkly armored body all the more alluring a prize.
“Machaeus. Are we clear?” Drogan mumbled into his splintered ceiling. Veins of Chrysum pulsing energy to his home conditioning system were the only lights in the cavernous building. DA-Vos rested in the corner, in the shape of a pitch black cube.
“Hold,” a silky voice resonated through his head. Drogan had nothing but time, so he did. He held his heavy soft-metal sheets scrunched in both hands. In the time he spent wrinkling them his true master, deep beneath the surface of Mukurus, tightened his digital hold on every branch of the life support systems that enclosed its Dragons. One at a time, he deactivated the pathways. When the last one went dark, the Higher Order and every order beneath drifted off to a true, deeper sleep- too deep even to eavesdrop. “We’re clear,” said Machaeus. The second Drogan heard, he shifted.
His every molecule gyrated hard enough to break apart from those around it. Organs broke into tissues, then cells. Drogan’s entire being atomized. When his mass re-condensed, it wasn’t in the shape of a Dragon. His body was covered in skin, not scales. He had long tangles of auburn hair and a beard, not a mane. Drogan wiggled fingers and toes in place of talons. All that remained of his draconic form were his gemstone yellow eyes. The dark slits above and below them, from when Chrysum had flooded his once fully human body, had never fully healed. They never would. When this form had been his only, he had a different name. But, since his first shift, he could never go back to being that man again. He was Drogan now. He lay there, naked, on the stone for five whole minutes before he opened his human lips. This was, after all, the only time he could achieve something close to relaxation.
“What does the Higher Order want? You monitor their vitals all day. Can you hear them talk?” Drogan asked.
“I can. They don’t say much that would interest you,” Machaeus told him.
“Enlighten me.”
“Resources. Enough to wake the others. They want to fulfill the prophecy they
made when they put themselves into suspended animation a thousand years ago. That’s all they’re after,” said Machaeus.
“Krystis made it seem like they need to find the humans’ homeworld. The deposits on Neptune, on Saturn… it’s not enough, is it? That’s why they want to find Earth. Then they could track down every last human fusion mine,” Drogan realized.
“Excellent detective work, Crusader.”
“Machaeus,” Drogan smoldered with such malice that the DA-Vos cube in the corner of his hovel lit yellow. “I have deceived the Dragons for sixty years. I stole you their embryonic fluid from the incubators to keep you running, which wasn’t easy with Krystis breathing down my neck. What is our plan?”