by Milton Garby
Antonilon didn't jerk awake, but rather groaned and slowly forced himself to stand up. "Oh man, what happened? I was..." He turned around to face Sara and, since he'd seen her, he was instantly undyingly loyal to her.
"Don't cast magic, don't make any moves to harm me, and stay in that spot," she said, extending her eldritch magic again to read his thoughts.
He froze up. "Okay." 'I'll do that', she heard.
"Also, don't speak. In a few moments we are going to go downstairs. We'll talk a bit, pretending we were talking about your research up here. Then I will leave, and you can return to what you were doing before. You will not mention me to anyone, you will not care that you are missing nearly one hundred gold, you will carry on life as if we never met and you never possessed that money, or you lost it. Once we go downstairs you are allowed to talk, and allowed to cast magic, but you can still do nothing that would bring harm of any kind upon me. Nod if you understand."
He nodded. 'I understand,' he thought.
"Good. Hold still." She pushed her magic into his head again, this time to undo a few changes. He would still be loyal to her, but the links that would make him undyingly loyal to anyone he saw would have to go. Luckily breaking it was easier than building it, so it only took a minute or so before she could safely relax her Old God magic. "Let's go," she said.
They left the room and walked down the stairs. As they did, she started to make more magical talk with him, but most of it was empty chatter. Then they reached the first floor and she took a few steps from him.
"Alright, I'll see you around," she said, turning her back to him and walking at a leisurely pace outside into the streets of Dalaran.
A chill wind nearly blew her off her feet, but she recovered, wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. She still remembered where the Magus Commerce Exchange was, so she pushed herself north through the thin crowds. She eventually found herself in a single street that arched back into the main body of Dalaran, and on all sides were shops with signs hanging out. One was a forge. Another was a greenhouse. But the one she was looking for was Legendary Leathers.
As much as Sara would have liked to go to Ulduar wearing a skirt, or a dress, that simply wasn't an option. Warm, heat-retaining pants it was. She also got a heavy tunic and the thickest jacket they had, plus a bag to hold her belongings. It wasn't an enchanted one that was larger on the inside, that was out of her price range, but it'd have to do. She stuffed her old clothes into it and left Legendary Leathers.
Sara braced herself to be knocked around by the horrific cold, but instead it only nipped gently at her face. She tucked her nose behind her fur collar so that only her eyes were visible, and took a few testing steps around the area. Her clothes kept in the heat perfectly, but they'd be put to the test once she got to the very northern reaches of the Storm Peaks.
She bought another Sparkling Stormjewel from a jewelcrafting shop, just in case her current one didn't work on iron dwarves and iron vrykul. She also got some conjured rations that were small and had great amounts of nutrition in them, but tasted like ass. Some shades to prevent snow blindness, and a paper and pencil. Lastly, she bought a hearthstone bound to the Hero's Welcome Inn. After her shopping spree Sara still had seventeen gold left, so while at the inn she bought some milk, downed it, and then left for Krasus's Landing to set off to K3 in the mountains.
Krasus's Landing was, of course, all the way on the other side of Dalaran. She'd left Nethergarde around noon and that meant she'd arrived at Dalaran in the morning, but by the time she'd reached the building that held the stairs that went to the Landing, the sun burned the sky with flame and cast elongated shadows on the purple tiles.
She climbed the stairs and stepped out into Krasus's Landing, and her jaw dropped.
The area was enormous, and all the way at the end was a single high elf man with hippogriffs behind him. Krasus's Landing was a giant marble circle, with a few pillars reaching up around the edges. From where she stood Sara could see more of the Northrend sky than she could before now that there were no towers obstructing her view. Pinkish clouds drifted in the breeze, and far off in the distance Sara could see a colossal tree, made entirely of glistening white crystal and as large as Dalaran itself, sprouting from the earth. An aurora, green and blue, streaked across the sky and promised only to grow more visible as the sun went down. The wind whistled between trees and howled as it wound between the pillars.
Sara approached the man, who was also dressed for the weather, and payed the seventy five silver for passage to the Storm Peaks. Like in Kalimdor the hippogriffs were all unruly and afraid to go anywhere near her, but she eventually got herself saddled. After a few loops around Krasus's Landing to pick up breakneck speed, the hybrid bird shot off into the sky.
Once it had gotten a fair distance from Dalaran, Sara hazarded a glance behind her. The floating city was even more breathtaking with the sunset framing it. Ragged, uneven stone hung beneath the pillars, as if a giant had just come and scooped Dalaran out of a mountainside. The towers reached upwards, trying to grasp the aurora, while reflecting and refracting the sun through the many crystals in Dalaran. Sara smiled, then looked towards her destination.
The Storm Peaks.
The hardest part of her journey was ahead of her; getting money from Dalaran was easy in comparison. The Storm Peaks were utterly unforgiving and blew about with tremendous winds 24/7. Normally that would be something she appreciated, but it had a very good chance of killing her so she needed to get around them. During the Northrend Campaign, the archaeologist Brann Bronzebeard had set up an encampment near Ulduar that flight masters could travel to, however the outpost was now defunct and the closest she could get was the goblin city K3, waaay at the very south of the Storm Peaks.
Sara was not going to trudge all the way through the mountains to get to Ulduar, so she was just going to have to assume control of the hippogriff and force it to fly to Ulduar.
The mountains were tall. Even from here, the peaks reached far above Dalaran's highest point. She couldn't hear the howling winds, but as her mount circled around the perimeter of the mountains as it searched for an opening, she could easily see the billows of snow whipping about between crags. In fact, no. If she listened really closely, she could hear the wind whistling, beating against the air. But the sound was coming from the wrong direction for some reason. No... no that wasn't the Storm Peaks' wind.
So what was behind Sara?
She turned around just in time to see what looked like an animated skeleton, tangled with a red lizard, smash into her.
The hippogriff squawked and fell out of balance, then began to plummet out of the sky. Sara screamed and drifted away, but the harness went tight and she didn't go too far from the hippogriff. Maybe if she could pull herself back and the animal righted itself...
The harness snapped.
A fresh scream sprinted out of her throat as she continued to fall. The sky and the ground tumbled in and out of her vision as she spun and the wind drowned out any noise and she was certain that this was it. This was her end. No shadowy barrier would save her, she couldn't reach her hearthstone, she was going to die. Even knowing there was an afterlife didn't comfort her. She was quite certain that she was not going to get the good endless-peace-and-harmony afterlife.
Then something grabbed her. Sara flailed and fought against it as sharp, merciless sickles closed around her prone form. Two wings spread out far to her left and right, and when the creature grabbed her she was oriented to see the far, far too close ground coming up to her. She'd been getting ready to release a shadow nova and throw this creature off her, but seeing how disgustingly fast she was traveling parallel to the earth stilled her magic. The creature angled itself up and when the ground seemed close enough to touch, they finally began to climb again.
Now that imminent death wasn't a worry for her, Sara began turning her head back and forth to see what had grabbed her. Black claws attached to a scaly leg... scales everywhere. Pale underb
elly. Flapping, membranous wings. Behind her there was a muscular tail with a spiked club.
She was in the clutches of a dragon.
Sara
A dragon.
A damned dragon!
Irritation flared deep inside Sara's chest. Dragons. If she was right it was a red dragon too, and that made a surge of directionless, meaningless anger tear through her for some obscure reason. It wasn't bad enough her mount was shot down and she was being flown off by a dragon, it just had to be a member of the Red Flight. And to make matters worse there was nothing she could do. After she nearly left a red smear on the ground the winged lizard had ascended back to a dizzying height, there was too much wind for her to communicate with the damn thing, plus she was moving around too much to do anything to its brain.
All that would've been tolerable, except they were also flying south, directly away from Ulduar and there was still nothing she could do! She was trapped, optionless, the walls of machinations she had no influence on closing around her.
Sara miserably grabbed onto the scaled legs, which at times felt like they were about to puncture her with their claws, as the dragon flew south towards the mountains surrounding Dragonblight. It angled into a hole in the mountains and, through her wildly swinging perspective, Sara got a glimpse of what the Dragonflights looked like when they militarized.
They'd occupied a sizable nook surrounded by steep, snowy cliffs, something that couldn't have been good for the cold blooded reptiles. A lot of the dragons had taken mortal form to conserve space in the relatively small area. They walked around, carrying weapons or boxes of supplies in their arms. Drakonids and dragonspawn patrolled the area, and one smooth, circular pad of stone in the mountains seemed to serve as a launch pad for the dragons. Another pad, on the opposite side of that one, was likely the landing pad and it was to that circle of stone the dragon carrying her went.
Now that she had some reference points, she could conclude the dragon carrying her was just an adolescent, a drake. Said drake slowed down so that Sara could hear the dragons around her growling to each other in their native tongue, then she was brought lower to the ground and unceremoniously dropped. She had expected that and braced herself, but a flash of pain up both legs led her to fall flat on her ass. A shock of powerful magic ran through her body, suffusing every inch of her skin with dark might and she let out a breath because she'd never felt so powerful. She could do anything, overcome anyone!
Then a sick feeling in her stomach rose, and she threw up onto the ground.
Once she was done retching she groaned and shuffled away from the mess. Shaking, she stood up to find herself face to face with the drake that had dropped her.
Its face was long and it had an underbite of fangs as long as her index fingers, made more obvious by how its mouth was far longer than hers. Right above its two nostrils was a triangular horn, and its yellow, slitted eyes were on the sides of its head. Despite that, Sara didn't think it had any trouble looking ahead. Behind the top of its head began a crest of thicker, darker scales that formed armor all the way to the beginning of the tail. Along the crest were three backwards-facing horns on the neck. The dragon's muscles were powerfully built even for its relative youth, and while the scales along its body were red like the sunset its underbelly, like the membranes of its large bat-wings, was tan. The joint of each wing had a large black talon, and the tail ended in a spiked club that could crush her head like a melon.
It stared at her, then opened its mouth. "Are you alright?" The voice was decidedly masculine and, while understandable, his Common was accented with rough, growling sounds. "That was a long fall and I'm not sure if the undead drake hit you on the head."
She frowned. "I'm fine, just a little shaken. Undead drake?"
"Yes, the demons have been making those. Err, hmm. Perhaps it'd be better if I took you to Taistrasza, follow me." The dragon began padding past her, but once Sara had to turn to keep looking at it he changed. A shimmer in the air collapsed around the drake, and he collapsed with it. Wings turned to robes, scales turned to skin and jackets, horns to hair and claws to nails. Sara looked around, then back at the human shaped drake, and huffed.
She still had no choice.
So Sara followed after the young man and made it a point to return the many, many curious stares she received. Luckily most of the dragons around her were preoccupied with their tasks so only a fraction looked at her. Though she did notice that a lot of the 'mortals' in bronze clothing stared at her in disbelief. The drake that 'saved' her led her to a small tent, inside which four shapeshifted dragons of all four Flights gathered around a map of the surrounding region, talking animatedly in Draconic.
Her drake cleared his throat. "Taistrasza," he said, grabbing the attention of the high elf woman, the blue-robed orc man, a goblin woman, and a gnomish man with blonde hair. They exchanged some more words in Draconic, the drake raised a voice in surprise, and the high elf snapped something sharply. Several times Sara caught the word 'karkrun' in reference to herself. He looked down and nodded, then turned back to Sara.
"Follow me, I need to talk to you about how we met."
"She put you in charge of me and you're not happy about that," Sara guessed as he walked past her, all smug and confident in his dragon-ness.
He stiffened, but nodded and continued to walk.
Sara followed, hoping to eventually get at least some answers and, more importantly, a way back to her hippogriff. Dragons supposedly had incredible hearing, so she didn't hope to get privacy. Instead she asked, "So you crashed into me and knocked me out of the sky. Care to explain?" she growled.
He chuckled nervously. "Sorry about that. I was fighting a fel drake and we ended up separated from the rest of the fight. Bad luck we happened to hit you, its claws sliced right through the hippogriff's head. You were falling, I fireballed the harness and caught you. Then I flew you back here."
So he saved her, but it was his fault she needed saving in the first place. But there was something... "Fel drakes?"
He snarled, looking south. "The Legion's in Dragonblight and they're using their necromancy on us. It makes things... difficult. My apologies for knocking you out of the sky, not my proudest moment, heh," he said, finishing with a nervous laugh.
Sara stared at him, unimpressed. "Take me back to the hippogriff. I need it to get to the Storm Peaks."
He tilted his head to the side in an inhuman fashion and asked, "Why? Miss, I'm afraid your mount is dead."
"Well then how do you suggest I get to the Storm Peaks?" she asked. She was not going to waste her hearthstone on going back to Dalaran already just to get another hippogriff. How exactly was she going to explain it to the flight master? Plus, she might need the stone again later. "And I don't care that - " Oh no. She was going to have to tell them wasn't she? It was going to be Nethergarde all over again, except with dragons that stood a decent chance of forcing her to stay.
"Care that it's dead? Why? It's not going to just..." the drake trailed off and his eyes widened. "You're a necromancer?"
Oh no. Not dealing with that. "No!" she snapped. "Of course I'm not a necromancer," she snarled, not caring how many dragons heard her. "But since it's apparently going to get out anyway I can resurrect the dead, so take me to the hippogriff so I can bring it back and get to where I'm going."
The disguised dragon gaped, the implication of her words clear. Several others around them stopped to glance at her. "You can... do that?"
She pursed her lips. "Yes. I can. So just bring me back to the crash and I can be on my way."
The dragon frowned and twiddled his fingers. "Actually if you're telling the truth, then you can be of tremendous use to us here. Nobody likes talking about it but we're getting - "
"Oh no!" Sara shouted, slight flickers of darkness flowing from her fingers. "Everywhere I've gone people have always been 'Oh can you revive our fallen? Oh can you please raise our dead? Oh please oh please oh please!' without fail!" That was an exaggeration bu
t she didn't want to stick around resurrecting dragons when she could be going to Ulduar! She'd had enough things keeping her already! First it was getting drafted into the war, then it was getting held in Nethergarde like some sort of resurrection machine, nearly dying to the Burning Legion, getting mugged in the sewers of Dalaran, and now, purely by chance a dragon knocked her out of the sky. She could've been in Ulduar weeks ago yet here she was!
"Please, please calm down," he urged with wide eyes.
Calm down? Calm down?! HE WANTED HER TO CALM DOWN?!
She probably needed to calm down.
Sara brought her hands, still leaking shadow magic, to her chest and took in a deep breath, then let it out. She took another breath, then focused the disguised drake with a disgusted look. "I'm calm. But I am still going to Ulduar, even if I have to - "
"What is going on here?" a man asked behind her.
She whirled around, perhaps not as calm as she claimed given the way her shadow magic pulsed hungrily. "What?!"
The man who'd snuck up on her was the blue robed orc, undoubtedly a blue dragon. His irises shimmered with arcane flows, his tusks were as large as he was muscled, and he was both bald and green. "Miss, we all couldn't help but notice your problem. I realize you are upset, but you need to calm down before we can find a solution."
Sara glowered at the man and squared her shoulders, not letting go of her magic. "Or what?"
The orc lowered his head to give her the 'Seriously?' look Sara had given so many others. Then he stepped back and warped the world around him. He grew and grew and grew, five fingers turning to three claws each as tall as Sara, skin and clothing turned to sky blue scales, baldness to horns, and then there was a fully grown blue dragon standing in front of Sara.
She had to crane her neck back all the way to meet his eyes, since he was now twelve yards tall. More if she counted the wings. His body was built similarly to the drake that had brought her here, but there was a skin flap down the neck, and spikes on the back of both 'elbows'. From the crest, instead of three horns in a line, two massive horns came out next to each other and went straight back, and in between them ran a line of five smaller horns. Every scale on the blue dragon's body bristled with arcane power and the occasional stray snowflake drifted out from between his alternating overbite/underbite fangs.