Nabvan

by Celeste Raye

“I gave you your shot, Petey, and you turned me down.”

  With that I spun on my boot and started walking toward the crew’s quarters, listening with satisfaction as he chased after me.

  He walked me to my room and I sat in my chair, buckled in, and prepared for landing. I had told Peter that I wasn’t nervous as he left my door, but as I heard the screeching of the ship vibrate the walls around me, I couldn’t help but feel a rush of panic seeping through my blood.

  We landed on the strange planet with a dull thud. The ship, already damaged, crashed and crunched against the foreign surface of the red planet, aptly referred to as Red Wall 7. The planet’s technical name? Ceylara.

  The red planet was our research destination. A government space program had sent only its top scientists on a secret mission, though the details of our work were still being kept under wraps. It was just that secret, apparently. All we knew was there were life forms here worth exploring.

  I was eager to leave the confining walls of our immense ship and not at all worried about our crew’s ability to put the steel craft back together. Nor was I concerned that we were far off course of the area we were supposed to be setting up in.

  Athena said we should use this as an opportunity to explore more of the planet. She suggested we gather a few materials from our surrounding areas, bag them, and then head back to our ship when it was fixed. And since I was heading the science department, I approved her request.

  We didn't want to waste more resources than necessary, so decided only to trek out for the day. While I was always ready to appease sister's need for taking risks, I couldn't help but feel uneasy at the venture. Our higher-ups saw fit to assign us to a certain area of the planet for a reason, I kept reminding myself. Whatever was over there was what we should be focusing on.

  Despite my eagerness to explore, I was one of the last ones to leave the ship.

  “Look at this!” my sister exclaimed vigorously as she ran out of the Vulcana starship.

  I followed hesitantly, watching the armed guards darting their vision across the strange atmosphere with trepidation. Peter wasn’t approaching things much different from me. I watched as he looked over at me and gave a concerning nod, his eyes warning me not to wander off too far.

  I saddled up beside my sister and took in the breathtaking views.

  The red planet was full of oddly shaped crescent hills and rocky surfaces: all flooded by tiny, tube-shaped red plants that flooded from the ground like tentacles. They writhed and moved like living organisms that made me feel unsteady.

  Athena walked up next to me, surefooted as she waved Peter off from us. While I found him sweet and charming, she found him boring and a worrywart. Which, she also said, was just perfect for me. Clearly, she didn’t think much of my taste in men.

  We walked through the field of red and were careful not to disturb the life we saw nearby. I could hear our crew scuttling around the land: our navy blue jumpers flooding the grounds of Ceylara.

  I grabbed some of our items for bagging and handed them to Athena. She took them from me, bored. My sister was not a scientist. She was security. But, since she was my sister and I was heading this operation, she had to listen to me and do as I asked. For once.

  She took the tools from me and stared down at them with trepidation.

  “You do remember what we’re doing here, right, sis?” I asked with a laugh.

  “Yeah, year,” she rolled her eyes. “Thinly populated solar system. The planet is a quarter of the size of the Earth. And we’re looking for life forms to study. You know…” she brushed the tip of her boot against the red tube worms that twisted and contorted to the shape of her foot before bristling against her touch, then burrowing back underground with such haste we both backed up in surprise.

  “And?” I asked in a lecturing tone, a sigh escaping my lips in frustration.

  “Uh,” she stammered, counting on her fingers trying to recite her research as quickly as possible. “A day here lasts 43 hours. A year is 100 days. It has two continents separated by a line of lava.”

  “It’s not lava,” I corrected while kneeling down to touch the red, slithering organisms that seemed to leap from the rocky ground.

  “Hot liquid, then. Tea! Happy?”

  “My joy cannot be restrained,” I said with a breath.

  She shrugged. “Look, I’m just not sold on the place, okay?”

  “Uh huh,” I said dismissively.

  “Do you see any life forms here, besides these things?” Athena asked, once again looking below us. “Honestly, what are you going to bag here besides these?”

  I looked up at her sternly and could feel my lashes hitting the base of my eye. I set my jaw with frustration. I loved my sister, but we were very different. I was quiet, and calculated when I was on missions. And she rushed into danger without a second thought. It made me nervous, especially since the one who was supposed to be protecting me and my crew could run off chasing a dust bunny at a moment’s notice.

  “Just,” I spat, pulling one of the tube worms from its socket and tossing it into one of the bags before hooking the enclosure to my work belt, “take me to that cave there; we’ll grab a second sample and then we’ll go back to the ship, okay?”

  “Dandy,” she said, reaching for her rifle and taking careless steps forward.

  We made our way to an outcropping of molten rock. I turned around to see the ship now a good 50 feet away from us. The red tubes seemed to creep away from our footsteps, likely alerted by the vibrations our feet were making. They were protecting themselves, which excited me.

  If they were instinctual enough to know they needed to protect themselves, it meant they were something’s source of food. And that something might be what we were sent to study.

  I walked around the cave’s opening and peeked inside. It was too dark to see how deep it went, but I could feel heat radiating from within. I went to grab my flashlight but grew startled when my sister pushed me low to the ground. She breathed out in fear and dropped low next to me, pulling the sight of the rifle close to her eye and backing up slowly, drawing us further behind the cave.

  “What is it?” I demanded in a fearful whisper.

  “That,” she said, nodding her head forward.

  I raised my head, quiet as a mouse, and saw a large creature about the size of a rhinoceros approach in the distance.

  “Shh,” my sister cautioned, keeping her weapon steadied on the beast.

  The creature was a large arthropod. It was a deep maroon color and had a visible exoskeleton covering the mass of its segmented body. It had long, skinny tusks that it drove into the ground with enormous force and dug up some of the red, shivering plants before stomping them and pulling their remains to its mouth using its long, spider-like appendages.

  My sister looked at me with annoyance as she saw the smile that was spreading across my face.

  “You take a real joy in this, don’t you?” she scoffed in a whisper.

  “Don’t you see?” I asked. “That’s it. That’s what we came here to study! We need to get close to it.”

  “Wait,” she said, extending an arm in front of me.

  Before I had the chance to protest, we both watched in horror as three winged creatures dove down, their wings soaring with the wind billowing beneath them, and descending violently on the creature.

  And they looked like… humans.

  Or… like dragons.

  Chapter 2:

  Tredorphen

  “I don’t like this,” said Aurlauc, my dear friend and fellow WereDragon. His pale skin was contrasted by deep gray and black scales that slithered across his body like splatter.

  He had long braided hair that was course and raven-colored; thick sideburns crawled down the sides of his face. He was a fierce warrior, and my cousin.

  I brought him along to explore nearby planets with me, along with our sometimes friend and sometimes enemy Khrelan.

  We’d all been friends as children, but as compe
tition for land and food became fiercer, so did our odd friendship. Khrelan was an outcast that I had made my father, our D’Karr, or king, take into our land. We supplied him food and sustenance, a gift I knew he never felt worthy of.

  And he’d been trying to show me up ever since.

  I promised my father we would find food, and as we looked down at the spindly maroon creature below, I grinned at how right I was to land here.

  We perched on the beast, and I watched as Aurlauc began ripping it’s spiny arms from their sockets and lifting them to his mouth.

  “Wait!” Khrelan shouted, his blue wings flapping in protest as he knocked the appendage from my friend’s hands with the meat of his tail.

  “Hey!” Aurlauc pouted. His eyes followed the arm as it was flung off into the distance. He glared at the blue dragon with a hilarious frown and laid his palms bare in confusion. “What was that for? If you wanted first bite, all you had to do was ask!”

  “We’re not eating this,” Khrelan insisted as he kicked the beast to the ground, all of us watching as the creature was suddenly swarmed by the red tentacles that seemed to emerge from the ground with a flurry of slick, wet sloshes.

  The creatures teemed over the beast, and we watched, flying hesitantly above the massacre as they desecrated the Drog until there was nothing but a thick, maroon skin left sitting on the ground below.

  The red tubes tunneled back into the ground, and we watched, astonished, as the crisp black and red char of the planet’s surface emerged, finally free of the tentacles.

  I looked over at Khrelan and then to Aurlauc. The two laughed insatiably as they looked down at the skin of the Drog, but I wasn’t impressed. I crossed my arms and looked back to Khrelan.

  “Why weren’t we allowed to eat it?” I said, frustration easily lacing my tone.

  “It was acidic,” he said.

  “It was food,” I argued.

  The navy dragon sighed deeply at me, and I gave him cold eyes. Eyes that told him not to command me. Unaccepting of my defiance, Khrelan flew off from us into the molten valley and fetched the arm. He held it far from his middle section and let me watch as the acid dripped from its ripped joint and sizzled against the rock below. He tossed the arm to me, and I flew back, letting it pass me and watching the creatures emerge once more to devour it.

  “Hm…” I murmured, unimpressed.

  “You said there’d be food,” Aurlauc whined, flapping his wings and ascending down at a slow pace

  The black dragon put a nervous foot to the ground, and we watched with baited breath to see if anything would come up to grab him, but the creatures knew better, it seemed.

  I followed suit, and soon we were all on the ground.

  “We’ll find food, just…” I bit my lip. “Be patient. We only just got here.”

  “Tredorphen,” Khrelan began slowly: another warning. “We need to give the Weredragons of Dobromia somewhere to go. Our planet is dying.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I snapped.

  “Your father is expecting us to come back with something and you’re the one who told us to come here,” he continued.

  “You guys,” Aurlauc said; he was always trying to break up our fights. Khrelan thought that because he was older, he somehow knew more than the rest of us. It irked me to no end and he knew it, which only irked me further. I had explored just as much as he had during our missions. He wasn’t wrong though. Our planet, Dobromia, was running out of resources. Some Weredragons had even taken to killing one another to protect their food supply. It was becoming a nightmare.

  Aurlauc, Khrelan, and I had left Dobromia some time ago now. My father was D’Karr of the dragons, and when I told him I would find us food, I knew he would expect the finest results. The hope of the planet rested on us finding somewhere new to inhabit. I thought Ceylara would be the answers to our prayers.

  It wasn’t turning out that way.

  “You guys,” Aurlauc repeated and slapped me on the shoulder.

  My brows creased into a frown as I gave him a testing look and eventually, stubbornly, I looked in the direction he had been pointing for some time now.

  In the distance, there was a large object. I cocked a brow and flushed my wings backward, propelling me several feet forward.

  “What is that?” Khrelan asked, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.

  “It’s a ship,” I said. I walked forward, and the Weres behind me slowly followed suit. “A spaceship.”

  We weren’t unfamiliar with the vessel. We’d seen several crashed on other planets near ours. Besides, technology was unfortunately not lost on me, though I never thought I would be able to see one this close.

  “And… those?” the navy dragon asked, bristling at the sight of the strange creatures that swarmed the area around the spaceship.

  “They’re humans,” I said quickly and excitedly.

  “What is a human?” Khrelan asked, testing the word out slowly.

  “Ugh!” Aurlauc waved the navy dragon off and spun on his claw, turning back to the molten caves. “Don’t ask! Don’t get him going! Seriously, unless you’re ready for Tredorphen to go on and on and on and–”

  Khrelan rolled his eyes and lifted a finger in dismissal to my friend before turning to me. “Alien life forms?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “Edible?” he asked with a cock of his brows, said more playfully than anything else.

  “I’m not sure,” I laughed. “But I think they may have something else we could use.”

  I began walking toward the ship and could hear Aurlauc’s large stomps behind me.

  “And just what do you think you’re doing?” he asked with a snarky, cocky laugh. “D’Karr said we’re not to approach foreign life unless it’s a source of food.”

  “Trust me,” I said, but it was obvious that he didn’t.

  He gripped my arm and ejected his claws just enough to startle me: to draw my eyes to his with a stern glare.

  “Tredorphen,” he whispered and pulled me toward him, just out of earshot of Khrelan, who politely pretended we weren’t avoiding his company. “Don’t do this just to fulfill your weird curiosity, okay? You don’t know what those things do.”

  “I know enough,” I said, a smirk crawling up the sides of my lips. “Now follow me or don’t.”

  The men reluctantly followed. We approached the ship like creatures in the bush: creeping low to the ground and using the slick red saliva left by the tubular life forms to help us slither closer undetected.

  Upon closer inspection, humans were everything I thought they would be. Long and graceful, yet strange and loud. I peeked my head up to get a better look at some of their females and felt a strange pang of energy in my gut.

  For now, I wasn’t interested in these humans. What I was after was their ship, and maybe even some of their food.

  I watched from a distance as a thin woman with an angular face brushed a lock of her curly brown hair to the side and beamed as her dark, expressive eyes roamed over the red fields. She was the only one still standing by the ship. The only one still standing in the way of myself and a full stomach.

  I scraped my teeth over my lip and couldn’t help but give in to the annoyance that loomed over the situation. I exchanged eye-contact with Aurlauc and he grabbed a stone from beneath us and tossed it far into the distance, alerting the girl’s attention.

  “Not exactly the distraction I was hoping for,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Aurlauc blinked and offered me nothing but a shrug.

  The three of us looked back to the girl and, while she looked off in the direction of the rock, she didn’t leave her post.

  “What is that?” Khrelan asked, pointing to the long, rectangular object that the woman had resting on her shoulder.

  “It’s a weapon,” I said, my eyes dancing around the rifle. “A gun.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Khrelan said. “What do we do now? Kill her?”

  �
��Maybe not,” I said slowly. “Fly that way,” I instructed, pointing off in the distance.

  Khrelan offered a disturbed smile and scratched the back of his head unsurely. “Uh… what if she uses her weapon on me?”

  “It’s a chance I’m willing to take,” I said with an ambitious, though teasing, grin.

  Tired of discussing it, Khrelan rolled his eyes and took to the sky and easily caught the attention of everyone in the area. Before we knew it, dozens of humans were rushing into the field where he landed miles away.

  Once they were out of sight, Aurlauc and I stood from the gloppy ground below and made our way to the ship.

  I slid my hand across the stale and cold outer finish of the vessel and steered myself toward the open door. Aurlauc followed closely behind, and we both peered into the inner chambers.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”

  The stranger's shout was enough to send Aurlauc tumbling into me; startled and annoying. I shoved him off of me with my elbow and turned to see the source of the voice.

  It was a woman. Two of them.

  Aurlauc went to speak, but I hushed him with a raise of my hand. He clicked his jaw shut with an audible snap and breathed through his nose, tossing his braids behind him with annoyance.

  “Who are you?” I asked, inspecting one of the girls closely.

  She had a heart-shaped face and thick, arched brows, a small pixie nose, and speckled skin. The girl standing beside her looked much the same, but with darker skin.

  The tan blonde walked toward me in a navy blue spacesuit and shifted her head from side to side as she looked at me with a dawning horror.

  “I’m Athena,” the one said fiercely, grabbing her weapon as she spoke.

  “Idiot!” the girl behind her yelled, her blonde hair rushing forward in a cascade of waves and curls she sided by the armed woman. “You’re not supposed to just shout your name out because somebody asks.”

  Athena rolled her eyes and never took her hands off the firearm as she aimed it toward Aurlauc.

  “Well, he wouldn’t have known it was a real name until you just told him it was,” she argued.

  The other blonde set her jaw and stood behind the other woman. She looked at me curiously and was overcome with wonder. Her eyes traced my form and widened horrifyingly. With a breath, she asked, “What are you?”