B4 Ch31: Dead Cities (Patreon)

Pink wings enfolded Arthur and Brixaby from all sides, one wing with a tracing of green in the membrane.

But what concerned Arthur more was the dropping sensation in his stomach and the feeling of weightlessness. The dragons couldn't fly clung together like this. They were falling.

His yell of alarm was echoed by Cressida, whose voice sounded muffled, either from her armor, the wings, or distance.

Of course, Brixaby's objection was the loudest, though completely unheard by Joy, who was busy babbling.

"I haven't seen you in so, so long! It's been forever, and we went through so many horrible things. And there weren't even any other dragons other than old Sams, can you believe that? None that were alive, anyway. Whoops," she added, slightly chagrined, "we're falling."

In the next second, the dragons separated. Brixaby righted himself, buzzing to regain his equilibrium.

Arthur looked around, but though it had seemed like they had been falling forever, in reality, it had only been a few seconds. They were still high in the air, the flat, gray, featureless landscape of the dead lands still far, far below.

Unfortunately, the incoming flock of scourgelings was nearly upon them.

With half an exasperated roar, Joy extended her poison claws – claws that were lengthening. It seemed that sometime during their trip, she had absorbed the Sharp As Nails card into her secondary core.

Brixaby, too, swelled as he prepared his next stunning shout. He was forced to swallow it down a moment later as Joy barreled in his path to throw herself at the scourgelings.

Arthur made a note to work on that. These were his retinue, and they would have to learn to work as a team.

That was for later. Now, they had scourgelings to kill.

Arthur pulled sharp metal bits from his Personal Space. With a moment of thought, he started circling them around both arms, prepping them to fire.

Curiously, it was harder to move the shrapnel around his arm with the damaged card anchor.

Not having time to think about the implications of that, Arthur switched the metal around so that they circled around his torso instead. As long as they were within an inch of his body, it was good to go.

Unfortunately, shooting them out as he normally did used mana. But Arthur had already thought of that.

He used his fine control of the shards to spin faster and faster around his body until they were a blur. Then, once he was within range he simply… let one fly free.

This method didn’t exactly allow for precision targeting, but there was a whole flock of scourgelings in front of him. He just made sure to send them not in Joy or Sams’ general direction.

The scourgelings were Commons, and if he was able to strike one at center mass, they fell immediately. Otherwise, the wings made good targets. The membrane was thin, and any hole quickly opened wider. Then the scourgeling just fell to its death.

Meanwhile, Sams glowed brightly, so bright that for a moment, he was like a second sun in the air. Scourgelings whistled in pain and rained down around him.

Then, the yellow dragon made his way toward Arthur and Brixaby. Sams was old enough and wise enough to keep out of the way of Arthur's shots.

Horatio, who also wore metal armor, though without a helmet, yelled out, "It's past time you showed up!"

Grinning, Arthur threw him a rude gesture.

However, the flash that he had seen of Horatio showed that his friend looked more hollow-cheeked than usual. Stress or not getting enough to eat?

More scourgelings were flying inbound in a line from the distant nest.

Leaning down, Arthur spoke to Brixaby, who gleefully relayed his orders in the minds of the others.

"Keep flying towards the West. We'll outpace the reinforcements soon."

Both Cressida and Horatio raised fisted hands in the hive-signal of acknowledgment.

They continued fighting as they flew, though Arthur and Brixaby seemed to be what had turned the tide.

Fewer and fewer scourgeling reinforcements were appearing, until the steady stream became a trickle.

Brixaby had swelled and turned, ready to finish off the rest of them, when Joy let out a shout.

“Brixaby! Don’t!”

Immediately, he deflated and looked at her. "What is wrong?"

“I only need five more to finish my quest!”

Brixaby swelled again, though this time it was indignation. "I didn't get a quest!"

"Well, you weren’t here when the fight started, silly!" Joy called back as she flew past him. Conveniently enough, there were only five more scourgelings left in the air, and they looked exhausted from having chased the dragons so far.

One light scratch from Joy was enough to quickly spread the poison through them. They fell with foam coming out of their mouths.

Arthur frowned. "Do you think her quest told her exactly how many scourgelings she'd be fighting today? Or do you think that it updated when the nest stopped sending reinforcements?”

"Her card is a meta-ability," Brixaby grumped. "Who knows." But he was more concerned with other issues, yelling out to Joy, "What was your reward?"

She gestured to the ground which was peppered with scourgeling bodies. "All of these Common shards, of course!"

Sams snorted a pointed protest.

Quickly, Joy amended, "Well, of course, we'll share. It would be totally unfair of me since you guys don't have quest cards."

****

The dragons landed, and the riders were able to reunite.

Horatio was first, deftly unhooking himself from his professional, high-grade dragon saddle. He hit the ground with the clank of armor and ran over to Arthur, pounding his friend on the back. "Glad to see you. I was starting to think you wouldn’t show up."

Arthur frowned up at him. At first, he thought it was the armor, but while they were both on the ground, he wasn't so sure. "Aren't you too old to keep growing?" Horatio was now at least a head taller than him.

He grinned down. "Are you sure you haven't shrunk?" He reached out as if to ruffle Arthur's hair like he was a kid, but Arthur deftly ducked away.

Close up, there was no doubt: Horatio's cheeks were sunken in, like he had missed his fair share of meals. His lean face gave him a more stretched look, and his dark hair looked stringy and unwashed. The patchy beard he was trying to grow didn’t help.

Then Cressida was walking up to him, having dismounted off Joy. Arthur went to hug her, and she him, but then there was a terrible awkward moment where they both paused and hesitated, almost as if realizing that this might be too much and they weren't sure how to treat each other.

Then, pressing her lips together in a thin line, Cressida closed the distance anyway. Arthur was happy to envelop her in his arms, even though her armor smacked hard against his chest. She smelled like sweat from the long fight, but with a unique sweetness that was all her.

"I missed you," she said.

He leaned back, grinning, he knew, like an idiot. "Me too. Uh, I mean, I missed you too."

He caught Horatio rolling his eyes at both of them.

Meanwhile, off to the side, the dragons were starting their harvest of all the scourgelings they had downed. Thankfully, Sams’ and Joy's didn’t seem interested in denying Brixaby his share, and Brixaby wasn't trying to assert his authority of being a Legendary by trying to grab theirs.

"If you're here," Cressida said, regaining Arthur’s attention, "then the city isn't far away?"

She almost sounded desperate.

"No, not at all. It’s about three…" He thought for a moment, remembering that the dragons would be tired, and therefore a little slower, “Maybe four hours away.” He pointed back the way he and Brixaby had come.

"There are people there?" Horatio said, almost inanely, or so Arthur thought until he clarified, "Still alive?"

"Yeah, of course," Arthur said. "Why?"

Cressida and Horatio exchanged a glance.

Then Cressida said, "Then that would be first un-destroyed city we've seen this entire trip."

There was a beat of shock.

"Explain—No, wait." Arthur hadn’t failed to notice that Cressida’s face, too, looked lean. Definitely missed meals, then.

He pulled out chicken soup in bowls, still steaming as they’d been put into his Personal Space piping hot. By the way his friend’s eyes went wide, he knew he’d made the right choice.

Horatio took his, and then grimaced, looking over his shoulder back at the dragons. "We were counting on hunting on the way, but it was mostly dead lands, and even the small patches of live land didn't have much life to it. So the dragons had it worse. I can see Sams’ ribs."

This was an exaggeration. Sams’ did look a little leaner than last time, but Arthur didn't begrudge Horatio. He would be upset if Brixaby was infrequently fed.

Cressida, too, was looking at her bowl with a guilty expression on her face, like she was starving but didn’t dare eat from it. "Joy's had it worse. She hit another growth spurt on the way here."

And of course the dragons couldn’t eat scourgelings.

"Don't worry about them," Arthur said, then un-stored half a haunch of bison. It was already butchered, the skin and fur cut away. It was also at least a two hundred pounds and thumped to the dusty ground.

Arthur looked down at it with a wince. "Sorry, I forgot, I don't have anywhere to cook it." It wasn’t like there was dead-wood laying around for a fire. Why hadn’t he stored logs in his Personal Space?

"Cook it?" Horatio said with a laugh.

Arthur looked up to see his friends giving him an amused look. Oh, right. Well, he was used to cooking his meals for Brixaby.

“Joy won’t be picky.” Turning, Cressida called her dragon over. “Joy, come over here dearest and see what Arthur has for you!”

Immediately, Joy’s head popped up as she sniffed the air. “Meat? Fresh meat?”

Arthur unstored another entire bison leg and thumped it not too far away. He’d nearly made Dannill cry with his requests for dragon supplies, but he hadn’t regretted it for a moment.

Joy and Sams started on the bison while Brixaby looked over them with an air of mild superiority as he drank from his own bucket-sized portion of chicken soup.

Arthur encouraged Horatio and Cressida to drink theirs, too, as it had the added effect of mild healing.

Joy set upon the bison leg with abandon, and only looked up long enough to ask, "This is very good, but do you have the head that goes with this cow? I’d love to crunch down on some brains."

“It’s a bison, not a cow,” Arthur said. “But no, I don’t have a head.”

“Bi-son.” Sams said the word slowly, testing it out. “That would explain the gaminess to the meat.” He crunched down, snapping the femur in two before eating it whole, bones and all. “Not that I am complaining.”

Arthur winced and turned back to his own meal. When feeding dragons, he found, it was best not to watch.

“Tell me about your journey.”

Cressida explained. "Arthur, they were huge. Bigger than the hives – bigger, I think than the central cities back in the kingdom."

"Weird buildings, too,” Horatio added. “They weren’t eruption cones, but they went just as high as some of them -- at least the ones that were still standing. All glass and steel, it was crazy.”

"And it was empty?" Arthur asked.

"All on dead land," Horatio confirmed. "Not a damn thing growing anywhere. I almost thought it was a scourgeling-city, except for the nasty skeletons," he said.

"And the dragon bodies," Cressida added, quietly. "Too many to count, and a lot of them were… Pretty small."

"Hatchlings?" Arthur asked.

She shrugged. “No, they were old enough to fly. Some were in the buildings, even. And they didn’t upset Joy like a dead hatchling would.”

Brixaby perked up. "If there were dragon bodies, what happened to the cards?"

"No," Horatio shook his head. "No, these were dead for a long, long time. More than decades. Centuries, probably.

“But if they were in the dead lands—"

Arthur stopped Brixaby with a shake of his head.

Cressida noticed and started to narrow her eyes at him, but Arthur caught her gaze.

"Later," he said.

She looked at him for a moment, then shrugged and continued hungrily digging into her soup, dipping a handmade dumpling that Arthur had added. The dumplings weren't made of any extraordinary ingredients, but they did taste very well and went nicely with the richness of the broth.

Horatio continued. "The cities were… weird. There were all sorts of machines, everywhere, all rusted out. I had no idea what they used to do, and the signs were all in a different language," Horatio shrugged.  "Some of the letters looked a little like ours, but—"

"No, they speak a different language here, and have a different alphabet, too," Arthur said. "I'll get it for you, don't worry. It's kind of like a card anchor."

Cressida's eyebrows rose, but then she nodded and returned to her story.

"Well, the cities weren’t completely empty. That’s where we found some of the armor, and I was able to scrounge a better saddle for Joy off one of the dragon’s. She’d outgrown her old one.”

He looked, and Joy was indeed wearing a different dragon saddle, with an odd black material that wasn't quite leather. But he couldn’t tell much more about it without closer examination.

Setting his now empty bowl aside, Horatio sat down on the scourge-dust, stretching out his long legs. "I have to say, I'm not too much of a fan of this part of the world from what I've seen of it.”

“You’re just sitting on the dirt?” Cressida made a face.

"I'm carded, aren't I? I'm not catching anything from this."

"Yes, but it's scourge-dust. It's gross."

Arthur grabbed a picnic blanket from his Personal Space and set it down. Horatio rolled his eyes at him but shifted to sit down on the blanket.

The dragons, unfortunately, were too large for the blanket, even Brixaby. But they settled down nearby, resting. Brixaby pulled out a few buckets of water.

"I usually use these for dowsing fires, but this will do nicely."

Joy and Sams sucked down the water so greedily that Arthur felt bad.

“Tell me about the city we’re about to see,” Horatio said.

So Arthur took the time to explain what he knew of the city of New Houston, and most importantly, of the Dark Heart.

Horatio and Cressida's reactions were exactly as he had hoped — both horrified and fascinated… leaning more towards horrified.

That was a relief because with everyone else looking forward to it opening, sometimes he felt a little crazy for thinking that the Dark Heart was a bad idea.

"This is worse than playing with fire," Horatio said, shaking his head. "There's nothing good about dealing with scourgelings."

"Yeah," Arthur said. "From what I understand, other cities nearby have been overrun by letting their Dark Heart erupt. There are no dragons to deal with scourgelings in the middle of a city. And, from what I can tell, the dead lands here are trying to encroach on what they have left.” Arthur shook his head. "If it were my city, I'd make changes."

"It could be your city," Horatio said.

"Eitch," Cressida said, and it took Arthur a moment to realize that was her nickname for Horatio. An immediate flare of jealousy flared up in his chest, hot and bright. But the next moment, he was able to rein it back.

He shook his head. "No, I might be a Legendary, but I'm not here to take over the city. Besides… I guess the Dark Heart isn’t all bad. It's already given me some gifts. Brixaby?” He waved to get the dragon’s attention. “You got the—”

He stopped as Cressida reached out and grabbed his arm. "What's this?" She turned his hand over and caught her breath at the look of what was left of his card anchor.

"Oh yeah," Arthur said. "I sort of blew up my card anchor."

"You what?" Horatio scrambled over, then let out a low whistle at the look of Arthur's arm. "I'm surprised you still have that hand."

"Yeah, well, that's another reason why I'm not ready to write off the Dark Heart. It brought me here because it's what I need.” He went on quickly, “But that's not all I found."

"What else?" Cressida asked.

"Scourgeling nests," Arthur said. "And what lies at the heart of them. As soon as your dragons rest a bit, I'll show you."