War of Fangs (The Unseen Book 1)

by L. A. Boruff

  The ground under my feet was dry and rocky. The starlight revealed a flat plain, though I couldn’t make out how much of it was rocky or if there was grass. Soon we came upon a primitive village of stone and mud huts. “Axoular, I was under the impression that your people were much more technologically advanced.”

  He stopped halfway down the hill and turned to me. “We were, Riley Effler.” The cluster of buildings stretched out at the base of the hill.

  “Just Riley, please.”

  He bowed his head. “As you wish. We were advanced. We had electricity, transports, and large cities. But the wars destroyed the cities. And so much of our population was killed. We didn't have people to run our power stations or build our transports. Now, we're here in a village we built, to wait for you.”

  “You built your village by the portal to wait for me? Why didn’t you start to rebuild your lives?” I asked. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t begin anew.

  “Because there are so few of us. We’ve traveled far and wide to bring any of our remaining people here. We leave notes in the abandoned towns, instructing them to come here. We’ve combed our entire land, but it took many years. It’s all we can do to hunt enough food to keep everyone alive.”

  Tears came to my eyes as I stared in horror at what was left of a prosperous, proud civilization. How could I possibly help these poor creatures? Newly discovered genes or not, I was still just Riley Effler, coffee shop manager. I didn’t even know about this world a few weeks before. What could I do? Hopelessness overtook my thoughts, ripped away my confidence, and left me small inside.

  “Take me to meet your people. I must get back as soon as possible, and I want you to travel with me and meet my family.” I started down the hill, utterly wretched.

  “You want me to go with you?” He seemed a nervous sort.

  “Yes. Is that okay with you?”

  “Sure! But I’m one of the younger members of our elder group. I’m not really an elder in the traditional sense. Our elders used to be over three hundred years old. At half that, I'm still considered a bit of a youth. They may insist on one of the older members going.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Well, I insist on you. I met you first, you’ve been kind to me, and I like you. You’re going.”

  “As you say, Riley. As you say.”

  We entered the village via a well-beaten dirt path. The buildings around the outskirts of the village were homey. Windows were adorned with curtains of varying colors and little baubles. Forgotten, hand-carved toys laid in front of doors alongside the occasional discarded tool.

  Axoular led me to a large, two-storied building. “This is where we hold meetings and village-wide dinners.”

  He stopped and indicated I should sit in a wooden chair by the front door. I sat gingerly, conscious of the feel of my scaly skin against the rough chair. When I sat on the rugs in the cave it wasn’t as noticeable. Axoular walked over to a small bell and pulled the cord. I jumped, surprised the instrument put out such a loud noise.

  Lights flickered on behind curtains in the various homes. Dragons in a rainbow of colors poured out of their homes, panicked.

  “Axoular! What’s wrong? Why did you ring the warning bell?” demanded a female Sárkány with deep blue scales.

  “My friends, she has come!” He turned to me and whispered, “Stand up, Riley Effler.”

  I stood beside him, gazing out at the growing crowd. I couldn’t wait to see the beautiful people in daylight. Their skin would be mesmerizing. I spotted one lady in the back of the crowd with hot pink scales.

  “Hello.” I gave a small wave.

  The Sárkány with pink scales pushed forward and in a deep voice demanded to know exactly who I was. Whoops. That wasn’t a lady dragon!

  “She’s our savior. She came through the portal not an hour ago. She’s told me some of her story, and she’s the one we have waited for! She’s here to save us!”

  “Now wait, Axoular,” I whispered in his ear. “I told you, I don’t know if I can save anyone. I’ll do what I can, but I’m no savior.”

  He shrugged me off. “Can the elders please come forward? We have much to discuss.” He walked into the building, leaving me standing alone, staring out at a sea of rich color.

  I raised my voice, “People of Galdiart! I'm no savior. I come from the land of Earth, and I came here to seek help from you, not the other way around.” The crowd mumbled among themselves, upset.

  “Wait! Please, don’t be upset. I see your struggles. I see your plight. I will do anything in my power to help, but you'll need to be patient. I don’t know yet how I can help, but I won’t leave you here to starve and die. We’ll all work together and figure out a solution. Don’t lose heart yet.” I guessed I’d have to find a fucking way to be their savior. I couldn’t leave them like that.

  A young child with scales of brown and green, like mine, came out of the crowd. I crouched down. “Hello, little one. What’s your name?”

  “I'm Kohbi, Savior.” My heart melted at the tiny voice coming from such a beautiful little creature.

  “It is nice to meet you, Kohbi. I need to go in and talk to the elders. I hope to see you again soon, and meet your family, would you like that?” I touched the soft scales of her face and wondered how my children would appear in this world.

  “Yes, Savior. I would like that.” She pulled a ragged doll from behind her back and held it out to me. “Savior, this is Rinta, my baby. Will you keep her safe for me?”

  I drew Kohbi into a hug and pressed a kiss against her cheek. “I will keep her as safe as I would my own child, Kohbi. Go to your mommy now.”

  “My mommy and daddy are dead,” she said. “They died a long way from here. Some grown-ups found me and brought me here. I live with other kids like me that don’t have a mommy or daddy anymore.”

  Oh fuck me, she lives in a fucking dragon orphanage. I can’t handle this shit.

  “I will be back, Kohbi. I’ll be back, and I’ll find you and your friends. I promise you, sweet girl.” Her face was delighted as she ran into the crowd.

  The dragons standing in the front of the crowd grabbed her and one put her on their shoulders. The crowd cheered and pressed close to touch the child that was kissed by their savior. It was overwhelming, knowing that they put so much faith in my kiss that they needed to touch that orphan.

  Chapter 17

  I turned toward the building to find Axoular staring at me through the doorway. “Riley Effler, you are crucial to my people.”

  “But, I’m just…me! I’m nothing special.”

  A rich voice came from behind me. “You better hope you are something special. You are The Jade, and you’ve come to save us.” I whirled around to see an elderly Sárkány woman with scales of white and silver being helped up the porch stairs. She wore a rough dress of what appeared to be burlap, no shoes on her feet, and she leaned on a wooden cane.

  “Riley, this is our eldest surviving Sárkány, Boudicca. Boudicca, this is Riley Effler.” Axoular bowed to the elderly dragon and took the place of her helper, escorting her inside. I followed behind them to a room straight out of a fantasy movie.

  An enormous wooden table was in the center of the room, complete with benches made of halved logs. There was a massive fireplace on either side of the room. On the walls were the heads of strange creatures mounted as trophies. One resembled a bear with a big pig snout. Another head, like an elephant with tusks and big ears, but the nose was more like a dog’s.

  Axoular walked Boudicca over to the head of the table, and helped her into a chair. Three other Sárkány walked in behind me and sat on the benches on Boudicca’s left. Axoular and I sat across from them.

  “Savior,” began Boudicca, “This is Drest, Maedoc, and Morcan. Along with myself and Axoular, we make up the Elders of the Sárkány.” I inclined my head at the two men, Drest and Maedoc, and the woman, Morcan. I was beginning to be able to tell the women from the men. Drest and Maedoc’s heads were more angular and
larger than Morcan’s or Boudicca’s, or, I assumed, my own. Morcan was advancing in years, by the color of her scales. They look like they’d once been gold mixed with browns, but they were fading. Some had turned white and silver.

  Drest and Maedoc were twins. Their scales were the same bright shades of orange and yellow. Their eyes and noses mirrored each other and their eye color, a pale yellow. I asked them if they were related and they confirmed they were twins, which was incredibly rare among the Sárkány. It was difficult to tell how old they were.

  “It’s nice to meet you all, but I can’t stay long. I came here with no knowledge of what sort of world I would be entering. I’ve got to return to Earth, and reassure my family that I’m safe. Plus, Axoular closed the portal, so my family, who are visiting their own ancestors through the portal, will be stuck in other worlds.”

  Maedoc narrowed his eyes at me. “You’ve only just arrived, and you’re already leaving?” He turned to Axoular. “How do you know this is the savior?”

  Axoular became defensive. “Two hundred years we’ve waited! The prophecy says, ‘When a female of jade and jasper appears in the night, the Sárkány will be saved.’ Well, here she is, prepared or not. We were never promised our savior would come through with a grand plan, it simply said that she’d be able to save us.”

  Maedoc grunted and looked me over. I raised my hands in front of me. “I will do anything to help you. I have certain resources in the other world that might help you here. I want to take Axoular back with me to meet my family. My husbands will be able to help us come up with a plan.”

  Boudicca raised her eyebrows. I raised my finger to feel my own. Damn it, I want a mirror.

  “Husbands, child? More than one?” asked Boudicca.

  “Oh, well, sort of. I’m married to one man, but his two best friends, we…well, we're one family. It’s sort of new…” I trailed off in a small voice. “I take it you don’t typically take on multiple partners here?”

  “No. We don't,” said Morcan, voice dripping with condescension.

  “Ah, well. We do.” I couldn’t help but throw her a little attitude. “And now, if you'll excuse us, we must go. We’ll return as soon as we possibly can. Hopefully, it'll only be a few hours.” I backed away from the table and gave a head bob to Boudicca. My butt bumped into the door and I stopped, waiting for Axoular to join me.

  He jumped up and bowed deeply to the table full of elders. Axoular scurried over to me and tried to crowd me out the door. “Stop!” commanded a voice from inside the room.

  Axoular cringed with wide eyes. “I didn’t think we’d actually make it out the door.”

  “We can hear you, Axoular,” said Boudicca.

  Axoular let out a long-suffering sigh, and turned, “I know, Boudicca. I meant for you to hear me. I suppose you have issue with Riley taking me and not someone else?”

  “Not at all. We trust you to protect the interests of our people. But there are things you need to know, Axoular. If you’re to go to the human world, you should be prepared,” Morcan motioned for us to sit down. Axoular walked to the table, his body rigid. I followed and sat beside him again. The room became overly warm. Sweat beaded on my lower back.

  “We know more about the human world and the portals than we have previously told you.” Morcan gave a head nod to Boudicca.

  Maedoc let out a curse. “I thought we’d agreed to get everything out in the open? How much information are you old crones hiding?”

  “It isn’t anything that would've done anyone any good,” said Boudicca. “If we’d let the people know that the portals could be opened, they would’ve tried to go through to the human world, and the results would've been catastrophic.”

  “The portals?” Maedoc was becoming visibly agitated.

  Boudicca nodded sagely. “You see, there's more to the prophecy than is known. Now that our numbers are so dwindled, only Morcan and I know the full prophecy. The second half of the prophecy essentially says that our people must stay in Sárkány until the Savior comes for us.” Boudicca paused, as if for dramatic effect.

  Her eyes blinked, showing her eyelids were nearly opaque in her old age. I wondered exactly how old she was. “If we leave Sárkány before our fated time, it would be to disastrous consequences,” she finished wearily.

  Axoular was indignant. He stared at each elder until they lowered their eyes. Only Boudicca would meet his gaze. “If we leave before our fated time? We have lived for hundreds of years believing the portals can't be opened by anyone but the Savior.”

  The quiet Drest slammed his hand down on the table, making me jump. My skin crawled—I could feel the anger in the room. Drest stood. “We could’ve left? You know how to open the portals?”

  “We do,” replied Morcan. Drest turned away from us and stared into the fire.

  “All of my life, we have lived in fear and poverty. We have toiled and struggled,” Axoular said. Milky white tears ran down his cheeks. His hands were clenched so tightly it looked like the scales on his knuckles were going to split apart. “We could've gone to the human world. We could’ve at least tried to find help!”

  “Axoular, do you believe in the prophecy?” asked Boudicca.

  “You know I do,” said Axoular. “At least, I believed in the part I knew!”

  “The part you didn’t know would've caused strife and dissent if our people knew, Axoular,” said Morcan.

  “You should've respected us enough to fill us in once you appointed the three of us to the Elders. If you trusted us enough to take our council, you should've trusted us with this,” Drest said without turning. His voice was deep and threatening. Smoke floated around his head from the flames of the fireplace.

  “Is there more?” asked Axoular.

  Boudicca blinked her nearly transparent eyelids. “I was the last Sárkány to leave Earth. I didn’t want to return here, but I was being hunted.”

  The room was silent, but my mind was loud with the buzz of my shock. “You were in my world? You were one of the old gods?” I asked, voice shrill.

  Boudicca chuckled. “No, Riley. I hid among the humans. I didn't seek glory. When you cross the portal your appearance will be human. That’s how I lived there for many years.”

  “I don’t know what a human looks like,” said Axoular.

  “You will,” replied Boudicca. “Hush and let me tell my story.” Axoular’s eyes narrowed, but he stopped talking. “Our people were in the human world for a very long time. When we first traveled there, we hadn't yet added the magic to the portal to alter our appearance. I believe you have witches there, Riley, that would call it a glamor spell. It’s akin to that. Our ancestors, many thousands of years ago, created the portals. I don't have the knowledge of how. Once this final portal is destroyed, the portals will be no more and wherever we are, we'll be stuck there.

  “Our ancestors crossed over and their appearance didn't change. Riley, I’m sure you can imagine how they were received.”

  “Either in fear or total worship, I would think,” I said.

  “A combination of both. They called us dragons, and brought us precious metals and other valuable items. When we discovered that the Sárkány could mate with humans, we went a little wild for a while. There were many marriages between the Sárkány and the humans, and the power hungry Sárkány kept harems of both men and women to please them.”

  “Were you not hunted or called demons?” I asked, trying to reconcile where in history they could've been, since I’d never heard legends of sentient dragons.

  “Oh, yes. We got too raucous, too exposed. At the time, the country we were in was being converted by the Holy Roman Empire.”

  “The Holy Roman Empire? How do you know these things, Boudicca? Exactly how old are you?” I asked. I didn’t understand how someone who hadn’t been to Earth in over two hundred years could remember details of events that happened there over three thousand years ago when their written history was supposed to have been destroyed.

  “Yes
, the Holy Roman Empire. I know these things because I studied them in great detail when I was a child. To be allowed to go live on Earth, you were required to memorize our entire history with Earth, and pass an arduous test. They didn't want us to make the mistakes of our fathers and mothers before us. And, I'm almost twelve hundred years old.

  My mouth dropped. “You can’t be. Will I live that long?” How crushing; I’d gone to all this trouble to make sure I would live long enough to have a life with my family. To find out I’d outlive them by several centuries was heartbreaking.

  “No, you won’t. You are half human. Entering our world and passing through the magical portal awoke your Sárkány genes, but you still have human in you. If you are lucky, you could live to be five hundred years old, but most of the Sárkány human offspring lived to between three and four hundred years.” My shoulders sagged in relief.

  Morcan was staring at Boudicca. “You’ve kept your secrets well, sister.” She turned to me. “Boudicca and I were childhood friends. As we grew older, her interest in the world of humans grew and mine didn't. She left, and I was here, living among our people. I had no desire to travel off to new lands and get into a big mess of trouble.” She turned to Boudicca.

  “I never knew you had to learn the entire history of the Sárkány on Earth. Nor did I know you looked different when there.”

  “I’m sorry, old friend. When I was forced to come home, I was heartbroken. I left the love of my life on Earth, and my children.” Her eyes drifted upward, and I knew she wasn’t seeing us in that room, but the memory of her love. “I was doomed from the moment I met him, for he was full human and their lives are so brief. But I loved him fiercely. I came home to protect him and our children. I hoped that if I removed myself and closed the portals from this side, they'd stop hunting me and leave my family alone. I don’t know what became of my family. The council of elders were terrified by all things human. They wouldn't allow me to bring my family here. No human or Sárkány-human hybrid has ever crossed into our world until today.” Her opaque eyelids closed.