by Lili Zander
After a week and a half in a healing coma, the soldier that Thrax had found, the one that had started our search for a safe hideout, woke up. Arax was concerned that he might be uncooperative, but he didn’t need to worry. The soldier was quite happy to switch sides. “I’m Lowborn,” he said bluntly. “Blood status is not supposed to matter to the Zoraken, but when they rounded up troops for a suicide mission, guess who was chosen? Not a single Highborn.”
While cooperative, he didn’t know enough about what the Zorahn navy was planning. “I heard the High Emperor was furious,” he said. “That’s all I know.”
Almost by accident, he did tell us something exceedingly useful though. Every day at noon, there’s some kind of solar flare that disrupts their sensors. “The commander hates it,” the soldier, whose name is Gunnix, confides. “But there’s nothing he can do. The technicians have tried their best, but for about a knur every noon, we can’t get any readings.”
When Arax heard, he’d okayed the use of the communicator. “It’s as much for morale as anything,” I’d heard him say to Viola. “We were ripped away from our families. We haven’t talked to our loved ones for sixty years. I don’t have the heart to ban this.”
He’d actually personally handed it to Luddux. “Dariux told me why you needed it,” he’d said. “I really hope she’s doing better.”
Lud had been quite pale as he’d turned the communicator on. “I’m too nervous to look,” he’d said to Xan. “Can you do it for me?”
“Of course.”
I’m not going to lie—I was a nervous wreck as Xan scanned the messages. My heart was racing. I had my fingers and toes crossed for luck.
Then a smile had broken out on Xan’s face. “She’s alive,” he’d said. “Your message got to her in time. Read.”
I’d have read over Lud’s shoulder, but since I can’t read Zor, I had to wait patiently—okay, I was not patient at all—as Lud absorbed the note from his daughter, and then read it aloud.
Father,
All my life, I’ve felt alone and unwanted. I knew my mother died in childbirth, but nobody ever talked about you. I was left with the impression that you did not want me.
Now, I have family. Aunts and uncles and cousins. But even more importantly, I finally know the truth. I finally know why you never found me.
When I got your note, I cried for days. I wept for what was stolen from us. And then my sorrow changed to anger.
I refuse to live in a society where a man can be condemned to a lifetime of exile for failing the testing. I refuse to accept a system where a father can be torn from his daughter for no fault of his own.
A rebellion is brewing against these injustices. I intend to join it. I intend to fight back.
I won’t be able to talk to you again for a long time, Father, because my communications will be monitored. But it is the dearest wish of my heart that one day, we will be united.
Mar’vi und Luddux
I was bawling like a baby by the time he was done reading the note. She’d signed it with his name. She’d formally acknowledged him as her father.
The non-stop tears? I blame pregnancy hormones. Viola has decided that I’m worse than Harper. Poor Xan and Lud.
So here we are. The future is uncertain. Raiht’vi, the person responsible for all of this, is still missing. Any moment now, the Zorahn ships could find a way past the asteroid belts.
I can’t control any of that. I can’t control the future. All I can do is hold my mates tight and show them every day how much I love them.
A small group of us is sitting in one of the communal rooms one evening. Lud and Xan, Zunix, Liorax, and Olivia, Dariux, Bryce and me. “So,” Bryce says during a pause in the conversation. “Now that we’re here and settled, are you ever going to tell us what you were looking for, Dariux?” Her smile turns teasing. “You never know, we might help you find it.”
I don’t expect him to reply, but he does. “A really long time ago,” he says, “The scientists created the Draekons.”
Zunix, who has known Dariux a very long time, groans out loud. “Great,” he says. “A history lesson. Thank you for that, Bryce McFarland.”
Dariux shoots him a quelling look. “Things went badly, you already know that. Kannix, High Emperor, ordered the death of Wonacx, the head of the Council of Scientists, and he also ordered every bit of research the scientists had done to be destroyed. We lost thousands of years of knowledge as a result of Kannix’s decree.”
“And this relates to us because…?”
“Because Wonacx didn’t want his life’s work to be destroyed. He smuggled Draekons and scientists to a secret hideaway where Kannix couldn’t get to them, and then, he destroyed all signs of his crime.” He smiles slightly. “Well, almost all signs.”
“I’m assuming Dariux will get to his point before my baby is born,” I quip.
Everyone laughs, except Zunix, who’s staring at Dariux as if he knows where the other man’s going. When the mirth dies down, Dariux picks up his story. “To the best of my knowledge,” he says, “He sent the Draekons here.”
No fucking way.
“Wonacx wasn’t a fool. He knew it would be generations before the Draekons could be looked at as anything other than creatures of terror. He would have had to send enough of them so they could form a self-sustaining community. Live, mate, reproduce. Give rise to the next generation of Draekons. Always waiting, always watching. Until it was time to emerge out in the open again.”
He looks around at us. “It is my belief,” he says, “That somewhere on the prison planet, there’s an enclave of Draekons that have stayed hidden for more than a thousand years. I’ve been searching for the lost city of the Draekons.”
Thank you for reading Draekon Destiny!
The prison planet adventures continue in Daughter of Draekons, Harper’s birth story. Flip the page to keep reading!
Daughter of Draekons
Daughter of Draekons
I'm pregnant.
I cycle between three states. Hungry. Horny. Weepy.
I eat French fries dipped in vanilla pudding.
I look like a beached whale.
I'm also scared. No one knows what my child will look like, or what species she’ll be. She could be human or Draekon, or…
Something else entirely. Something new.
Daughter of Draekons.
Daughter of Draekons is a short story set in the Dragons in Exile series. It does not not stand alone, and should be read after Draekon Destiny. Catch up with everyone on the prison planet while you’re waiting for Draekon Fever.
1
Harper
"Oooh, baby," I moan. "Oooh, yeah. Right there."
Vulrux grins at me as his hands massage up my legs. His thumbs stroke a particularly sore spot on my calf, and I melt into the bed. I'm propped on about a thousand pillows—thank you, Zunix’s syn—with all the essentials within reaching distance. A large cup of water, a flat leaf I use as a fan, and materials for a soft baby blanket that May is teaching me to crochet with thin strips of ahuma fabric before my due date.
Not that we know when that is—the due date, the length of this pregnancy, or how big or small my daughter will be when she arrives. Dariux’s med-kit was able to tell us the gender of the baby, but nothing else.
There’s no rulebook here. Draekon pregnancies are only four months long, but human ones are forty weeks. It could be any day now. In a few weeks, or a month, or who even knows? I got pregnant sometime during the rainy season. As best as we’ve been able to calculate, I’m hovering around the four-month mark, but so far, though I’m bloated, fiendishly uncomfortable, and needing to pee at the drop of a hat, there’s no sign that my baby girl is ready to leave my womb.
Sometimes, that thought makes me weepy. Ah, who am I kidding? I cry a lot nowadays. Yesterday, May had come over to help me troubleshoot my baby blanket—I am not crafty—and I sobbed buckets on her shoulder. “I can’t even make a stupid blanket,” I’d bawled.
“How am I going to care for a child?”
She’d inched away from me, a terrified expression on her face. Poor May. I have to waddle over to her apartment today and apologize.
What if my baby goes the full nine-month term?
Dear stars above, I hope it’s not the case, because I’m already huge. I don’t even want to know how much weight I’ve gained. While my skin is glowing, the rest of me resembles a beached whale.
Correction: A beached whale with fantastic boobs. That’s one thing pregnancy has done for me. My breasts are large and lush. I lie around half naked because the temperature setting in our underground-apartment is a temperamental beast that only seems to work half the time, and when it’s on the fritz, it’s hot and humid here. I probably look like a wanton goddess, but most of the time, all I want is for someone to rub my aching calves.
My poor, poor mates.
“Have you gotten any more leg cramps?” Vulrux asks.
“No.” Thank all the pregnancy gods—human and Draekon. The last Charlie Horse I got hurt so bad it woke me up in the middle of the night. I moaned so loudly my mates thought I was going into labor.
“Good.” Vulrux keeps kneading my calf. His hair is mussed, and his face is serious and a little tired. That’s my fault. Lately, I’ve been up a lot at night. Between heartburn and having to go to the bathroom after the smallest sip of water, not to mention the tossing and turning trying to get comfortable, I’m awake every few hours. My mates wake up right along with me, though they never complain. Quite the opposite. They’re always patient, loving, and eager to help.
I totally hit the Draekon jackpot.
Speaking of jackpot… The door opens, and Dennox comes in. The smell of the food he’s carrying hits me, and my stomach growls. I just ate an hour ago, but tell that to my body. It thinks I’m starving.
"Did you get them?" I ask eagerly, sitting up in my pillow-nest.
My mate nods and offers me the platter of hot French fries.
"Ohmygherd," I sigh as I bite into a fry. "So good."
Dennox and Vulrux exchange amused glances. I ignore them in favor of the fries. Food hits my stomach, and it settles.
For the next few minutes, I munch happily, licking the grease from my fingers. I’ll pay for this later with heartburn, but Vulrux is working on some sort of stomach tonic he mixes with fruit juice. Fingers crossed, it does the trick.
Speaking of fruit… “Can you hand me that?” I reach out a hand, and Dennox hands me a cup of creamy vanilla pudding. Okay, it’s not really vanilla pudding, though it certainly tastes like it. It’s mashed kunnr fruit, and it’s absolutely delicious. “I’m going to try something.” I dip a fry into the sweet stuff, take a bite, and moan as the salt-fat-sugar combination hits my tongue. “That is amazing.”
Dennox grimaces, but Vulrux cocks his head to the side, as if his inner healer is fascinated by a particularly interesting patient.
The plate of fries is courtesy Raiht’vi’s food syn. The missing scientist developed a taste for American junk food during her brief stay on Earth, and programmed her food synthesizer to generate fries, chocolate, burgers… You name it, the syn will make it. No broccoli though, and no spinach. Ah well. Who needs nutrition?
Well, my baby does. I think. Then again, this is the first human and Draekon baby... ever. Let’s be honest, we’re all just groping in the dark.
I eat the rest of the fries with the pudding. I love my mates, and while in theory, I love that I’m bearing our child, I’m sick of being the pregnant freak show of the Prison Planet. Felicity is pregnant too, but she’s barely started showing.
Cravings, weight gain, hormones, all the crazy symptoms. Not to mention my secret anxiety. No one knows what my child will look like, or what species she’ll be. She could be human or Draekon, or…
Stop it, Harper. Worrying about it won’t make things better.
2
Viola
We’ve been in our underground home for a month now. It’s not technically underground, of course. It’s built in the middle of a mountain.
When we first discovered it, the hollowed-out dwellings inside the Dsar Cliffs had been a great mystery to us. Someone had obviously built this, and what’s more, they’d filled it with tech. Door sensors. Lights. Temperature controls. Bathrooms with flush toilets. Halle-fucking-lujah.
Seven floors filled with apartments, communal spaces, greenhouses and more. On what is supposedly a planet uninhabited by anyone except a few Draekon exiles.
Then Dariux had dropped his bombshell revelation a week ago. A thousand years ago, when Draekons were being exterminated, Wonacx, the scientist who had created them, had smuggled away some of them to the prison planet. Our prison planet. Dariux believes that the descendants of those Draekons are still alive, hidden somewhere on this planet.
The lost city of the Draekons. It almost seems like a fairy tale.
Of course, there are several unanswered questions. If our underground home was built by the Draekons, where did they get the tech from? Why did they build this place underground, when there’s plenty of space above ground? Are they still alive?
And most important of all, if they are out there, why haven’t they made contact with us?
I hear the sound of footsteps, and then Bryce steps into the communal room. “Happy Tuesday,” she says cheerfully, walking over to the cooling unit in the corner of the room, and getting herself a drink of kunnr wine. If Bryce is drinking wine, then the beer experiment of the week has been a failure. Pity. I’m starting to develop a taste for her brew. “I just ran into Ryanna and May,” she says. “They’re almost done with their rounds.”
Days of the week don’t have much meaning on the prison planet, but I’ve decided to keep a calendar anyway. It’s too easy to drift from day to day here and lose track of time entirely. We’d done that at the start. The first couple of months, I barely noticed the passage of time. I’d been too busy having super-hot sex with my Draekon mates.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m still having crazy-hot sex with Arax and Nyx. That part hasn’t changed. I’m just tracking days better now.
We’re slowly setting up some routine in our new home. We don’t have as much to do here as we did when we lived in the Na’lung Cliffs, but everyone’s found something or other to keep themselves occupied. I spend my days in the greenhouses. I’ve found a large store of seeds held in stasis, and I’m in the process of growing them. There are some herbs that Vulrux needs for his medicine too that we’re trying to cultivate indoors.
Sofia learns as much about medicinal plants as she can. Ryanna’s learning to speak Zor. Bryce alternates between making beer and running after her pet karvil Fluffy McCutie. And of course, we all still have to hunt for our food and lay stores for the rainy season. Raiht’vi’s syn can generate some meals, but if all forty-five of us were to use it for all our meals, it’s going to run out of juice in less than a year. Syns don’t last forever.
Speaking of routine, ever since we moved in here, we human women have been making a point of getting together every Not-Really-Tuesday evening. It’s just fun to hang out and gossip. Plus, it helps stave off our bouts of homesickness. Every so often, it hits me that I’m never going to see Earth again, and a wave of sadness washes over me. Hanging out with the other women helps ease the pain.
May walks in, carrying a ball of ahuma yarn and a pair of wooden knitting needles, Ryanna following on her heels. “The rounds are complete,” she says. “All forty-five residents are accounted for.”
Ryanna nods. “The poor seaside Draekons,” she says. “They’re going stir crazy. They’re not used to being so cooped up.”
The seaside Draekons, as we call them, are the nine men that were originally part of the same batch of exiles as Olivia’s mates. They’re Lowborn and Midborn. They’d got tired of being pushed around by the Highborn, there’d been a fight, and they’d left to go live by themselves in a camp on the westernmost edge of the continent, right next to the sea.
I’ve never been to their original home, but Felicity has. “It’s spectacularly beautiful,” she’d said. “Long beaches of pink sand. The water’s shallow enough to wade out for miles and warm enough to swim in.”
“They’re not the only ones getting cooped up,” I sigh. “We all are.”
Last week, the men patrolling the Lowlands found the wreckage of five Zorahn ships. “They’re getting serious,” Arax had said, his voice laced with worry. “If we keep flying our patrols, we’re going to get caught. We’ve got to stop.”
No more flights. We’re confined to the Lowlands. Every single one of us has to come back to the mountain every single night. Ryanna and May do rounds at sundown to check to make sure that everyone is accounted for. It’s just not safe to be wandering around for days on end anymore.
Bryce goes slightly pink when the seaside Draekons are mentioned. I’m about to be nosy when Olivia enters the room, her face unusually serious. “Lio just got back home,” she says. “He saw a ship land in the Eastern grasslands. It took damage, but there are survivors. Three heavily armed soldiers.”
Fuck. I wanted to talk to everyone about throwing Harper a surprise baby shower. So much for that. There’s a very tiny voice in my head—a voice I’m not proud of—that wants to blame this all on Raiht’vi. It’s her that the Zorahn soldiers are looking for.
I wonder where she is right now. I wonder if she’s safe.
3
Raiht’vi
It would be so easy to give up.