by D M Gilmore
Chapter 12
Everything was a mess. Just one colossal mess. Ruth galumphed out of the mana station, stretching his arms and cracking his back. Police were crawling over the station, dusting for fingerprints that they wouldn’t find, scanning for mana signatures that had already dissipated back into the flux, and watching the security footage for any sign of who the intruder might have been. Asher’s looping spells did a hell of a job, because most of the time the officers couldn’t even tell where the looping footage started or ended.
The broodtown had no standing police force of its own to speak of, and had to rely on outside departments to keep the order. Three different colours of squad cars were parked outside the station. The three departments were working in tandem, examining the crime scene for evidence and interviewing employees who had been witness to the attack. Nobody was particularly excited about investigating the scene of a stolen mana orb.
Most of the cops were dressed in heavy mana suppressing armour, while a couple had chosen to wear draquartz rings and take on pardrake form. Ruth was questioned by a pair of detectives for the better part of an hour; one was a bulky infused who had green skin and tusks, who wore a nice suit rather than armour, the other was a bronze drake in a tailored suit that looked as though it had never been worn. They mostly asked him questions about why he had chosen to take his smoke break mere minutes before the heist had gone down, and had almost accused him of aiding and abetting, but fell short when there was no concrete video evidence of anything going wrong at the exact moment Ruth had been smoking. When he explained that the door locked from the inside and he didn’t want to have to go in through the front, they had narrowed their eyes in suspicion but ultimately had left the matter alone. They had mentioned that they wanted to question his brother, and Ruth assured them he’d let him know.
Rita Patel had been surprisingly calm about the whole ordeal. “The media will bury this story,” she had explained to Ruth, smoking her third cigarette that morning, “and the Centre of Magical Affairs will ensure we get a replacement orb. I have already talked to them about getting an upgrade to our security system, since ours is so old and out-of-date. All non-essential functions will be shut down for a couple weeks, but it should only take a week or two for us to get everything back up and running. Tell your brother that I’m sorry, and we’ll have to wait to get him on the day schedule.”
Ruth suspected that Rita had known something that she wasn’t letting on, but didn’t want to press the issue. Instead he wandered off in the direction of his apartment complex, enjoying the walk in the warm morning air of mid-August. The tightly packed, decrepit buildings did very little to raise his mood or alleviate his concerns, but he did his best not to be pessimistic about the events that had transpired the night before. He thought about how poor Dale had been shipped off to a hospital, most likely where he’d be left waiting for days before a doctor would finally be willing to treat him. Drakes got no respect, and Ruth was a little mad at Asher for not considering the ramifications of injuring a fellow drake on the job, but he had a feeling that if he hadn’t been able to avoid violence, it had been most likely imperative for the success of the job. Ruth liked Dale, but he liked his own scales more than another’s.
As Ruth wandered down the street, lost in thought, he narrowly avoided stepping on a scaly, catlike creature that darted out from underneath a pile of garbage. The creature folded its scaly ear fins at him and hissed, baring a collection of razor-sharp teeth, before dashing off into an alleyway across the street.
“Stupid dart,” he mumbled, using the slang word for the creature, and kept walking.
Humans weren’t the only creatures affected by mana. Animals of all sorts had mutated alongside them. Dogs, cats, mice, birds, nothing was safe from the change. Drakening, Ruth recalled, was the scientific term for the process of converting the genetic structure of embryos from their origin species into something scalier, with sharper fangs. Most species exposed to manaflux would mutate or experience drakening of some kind, regardless of whether or not they were intelligent. The result was drake-like animals with very bad attitudes that scoured the slums of the broodtowns and fed off the refuse of the drakes. Some of them, like drake hounds, often shortened to drakhunds, were kept as pets and watchdogs, while others, namely drake cats, or darts, were too short-tempered to be kept around for anything less than pest control.
The walk back to his apartment took just a little under an hour, and he was yawning every few steps by the time he collapsed into the elevator. Work was exhausting. Coupled with the stress of the heist and Duncan Smog’s threat looming over his head, Ruth was surprised that he hadn’t collapsed yet. It spoke volumes about his ability to manage stress.
As the elevator arrived on his floor, Ruth’s pace slowed as he dragged his feet, leaving long claw marks on the already scratched-up floor. Finally, he approached the door, and opened it with a wave of his hand in front of the identification panel.
What greeted him inside his home was yet another mess. The pizza boxes that Ruth had stacked neatly by the blue bin were now torn to ribbons and thrown all about the room. The couch had been shredded to bits, its steel frame exposed in places, while foam shrapnel lay strewn all across the ground and drifted through the air. Ruth’s pillow had been ripped in half, the stuffing littering the floor near the couch, and his blanket was hanging off the standing lamp at the far end of the room.
“RUTH!!” Asher shouted, falling over the skeleton of the couch and collapsing into a pile of shredded foam. “HELP ME, DAMMIT! CATCH HER!”
Ruth shut the door behind him and stepped into their living room, unable to hide the look of pure confusion on his face. “What the hell happened in here?”
All of a sudden, a tiny blue blur zoomed out of another pile of trash, flapping its leathery wings wildly and clawing at Ruth’s face. Ruth swore loudly and swatted at the thing, missing it completely as it squawked at him angrily. Ruth’s mind immediately went to the one thing it could possibly be, and he leapt into the air to try and catch it, missing by a few feet as the hovering creature dove to avoid him.
“Stupid drakhawk!” Ruth roared, licking the blood off his snout with his long, slender tongue as his scales bristled. The creature had left three long, thin gashes along the side of his face, and they stung something fierce. “C’mere you little shit!”
The creature squawked in terror and dove out of the air, right into Asher’s chest. Asher grunted in mild pain, but the creature didn’t proceed to disembowel him, much to Ruth’s surprise. Instead, it seemed to be hugging itself to his chest, as if for protection.
“It’s not a drakhawk,” Asher grunted, pulling himself off the ground and looking down at the blue thing clinging to his chest.
“Then what the hell is it?!”
“I have a few theories,” Asher began, “but it doesn’t look like any drakened animal I’ve ever heard of.”
“It sure looks like a drakhawk to me,” Ruth growled, licking his wound again as he stared down at the creature. “I see them all the time around the station, they look just like that, though they mostly eat bugs and rats.”
“Except for one problem,” Asher said, pointing to the creature, “drakhawks have two legs and two wings. This thing has four legs and two wings.”
Ruth blinked in surprise and did a double take, leaning forward and squinting at the creature clinging to his brother. Sure enough, it had a pair of forelegs, a pair of hind legs, and a pair of wings, all six limbs clinging to Asher for dear life. “What the hell is it?”
“Look this is going to sound crazy, but hear me out,” Asher bit his lower lip as he considered the best way to explain the situation. “I think it’s a dragon,” he said, grabbing the little critter by the sides, just under its wings, and trying to pull it off him. Its claws dug into his shirt, and it gripped him like velcro.
“You’re right, that does sound crazy. Dragons aren’t real,” Ruth said, cocking his head and taking a few nervous steps forwa
rd. The creature squawked at him angrily, and he took a step back again. “What makes you think that thing’s a dragon? More importantly, where’s the orb? We have to do the exchange tonight!”
“That’s the part that I don’t like, and what has me thinking it’s a dragon,” Asher growled, as the little critter clambered over his chest and coiled itself around his neck. Asher reached over the side of the couch, and produced a familiar black bag, which rattled and jingled with its contents. Without opening it, he tossed the bag to his brother, who caught it out of the air with a single hand.
“The hell is this?” Ruth asked, his brows furrowed in confusion.
“The mana orb, or rather, what’s left of it,” Asher explained, trying once again to pull the tiny dragon off his body. Still, the creature held firm, wrapping its thin tail tightly around his neck.
Now that it was finally staying still, Ruth got a good look at the creature. It was long and slender, like a snake, the front pair of legs ended in paws with small vestigial thumbs and three tiny clawed fingers, while the hind pair of stubby legs ended in paws remarkably similar to his own. Its wings were thin and batlike, not unlike those of a drakhawk, and it kept them slightly open to help maintain its balance. Its scales were a shiny bright blue, and Ruth quickly realized that they looked more like sapphire than actual organic skin. Its head was slender, and it had a thin crest that flared up angrily at him, and its tail ended in a fan.
Ruth couldn’t deny that the creature definitely looked like a dragon, a creature from fantasy for which drakes had been named, but he had never heard of them being real before. He wasn’t quite ready to believe that it was, in fact, a dragon, but it was easier to call it one than to waste time figuring out what it really was. That was good enough for him. Still, the fact that it was making a mess of their apartment irked him. What the hell was going on? With a frown, he opened the bag, and nearly dropped it out of pure shock.
Inside the bag was not a mana orb, as he had expected, but rather the largest supply of blue crystal— no, not crystal, it shimmered and glowed, full of raw mana. It was the largest supply of blue draquartz that he had ever seen. He could feel the mana radiating off the crystals, the power infused within just begging to be taken and used, to turn someone into a drake.
“I don’t get it, where’s the orb?” Ruth asked, his voice suddenly going quiet as his mind raced, desperate to find an explanation. He looked up from the bag, and met his brother’s downcast eyes.
“It wasn’t an orb at all, Ruth,” Asher explained, taking a seat on the ruined couch and letting the tiny dragon scurry into his lap. “It was an egg. A dragon egg.”
Ruth blinked a few times, as he tried to understand what this meant. “Why didn’t you grab a different orb, then?
“I think they were all dragon eggs, Ruth,” Asher continued, gently running his fingers over the tiny dragon’s head. The critter made a purring sound at his touch, and nuzzled its tiny snout into his fingers rather happily. “Every single orb that is or ever was, they’ve all been dragon eggs. I could have grabbed any of them, and I think the results would have been the same...”
“What are you saying, Asher?” Ruth asked, closing the bag and tossing it onto a pile of shredded upholstery.
“I’m saying that we’ve been lied to,” he growled, his free hand clenching into a fist. “I’ve been thinking about it since last night, when she hatched—”
“She?” Ruth interrupted, quickly glancing down at the little creature that was curled up peacefully in his brother’s lap.
Asher frowned at the interruption, but nodded. “Yeah. I checked. A baby female dragon hatched out of the mana orb that I stole, but that’s not even the weirdest part of it all. I can still feel the mana in her, Ruth. She’s practically radiating the stuff. There’s more mana in her than in those crystals,” he added, nodding to the bag Ruth had discarded. “Our entire lives, we were told that mana comes from the orbs, but I think that’s a lie. I think mana comes from,” he paused for a moment, looking down at the dragon and shaking his head, as if he didn’t fully believe it himself. “I think the mana powering the planet comes from dragons, Ruth.”
It was no secret that every living creature had a little bit of mana in them, it was the principle that allowed people to have mana signatures in the first place, but the idea that a creature could have enough power that they were being used to power every city in the world? That was a bit too difficult to believe.
Ruth shook his head violently and began pacing back and forth, as his slower mind desperately tried to process what his brother was saying. “No. No this is ridiculous. Mana comes from the orbs! It’s always come from the orbs! I-I’ve worked in that station for years!” What Asher was saying can’t have been true, he thought. Surely he’d know if mana orbs were dragon eggs, right? But, then again, he was just a janitor, why would they trust him with that kind of information?
“Have you ever seen them change the orbs? Or what happens to the orbs that they change?” Asher inquired, jumping to his feet, much to the dragon’s protests. The tiny dragon flapped into the air angrily, before returning to his shoulder and coiling around his neck.
Ruth held his tongue and said nothing. He looked from Asher, to the dragon on his shoulder, to the bag of crystals that he had cast aside. “No,” he finally admitted, lowering his head and coming to a halt, his pacing no longer worth the energy. “It’s always some… outside people that do it… COMA, I think… I don’t think Rita’s even seen it done, either.”
“I’ve had some time to think, and I’ve developed a theory,” Asher said, calling up a holoscreen covered in diagrams and sketches and notes. “One of the known properties of mana is that in dense saturations, mana will always try to take a shape. That’s why magic works, a person commands mana to take a desired shape, like fireballs or a warping of light or illusions. It’s been known since the discovery of magic that, whenever possible, raw mana, the stuff in the manaflux, tries to take the form of a drake. We have never known why it specifically tries to take that form, or why it forces others to assume that form whenever possible, but this is fact, right?”
Ruth nodded, but in truth he didn’t really understand. Magical theory was Asher’s area of expertise, not his. Ruth knew muscles and mops, but that was the extent of his range of knowledge.
“So basically,” Asher said, wiping the holoscreen clean with a wave of his hand and drawing a quick stick human, followed by a stick drake. He then drew some squiggly lines that represented mana, and an arrow pointing from the human to the drake, “when possible mana tries to turn humans into drakes, dogs into drakhunds, etcetera, etcetera. Nobody knows why, and I theorize that the reason why is because mana comes from dragons! Mana always wants to take a shape, so maybe it wants to take a shape it already knows really well. That is why draquartz can turn people into drakes, because we’re letting what is effectively a preprogrammed spell into our bodies to change us. Fuldrakes are created because they’re still developing in the womb, just like baby dragons are developing in the egg, so mana reshapes them to more accurately resemble what it thinks they should be! It’s just a theory, of course, but if I’m right...”
“This is a huge discovery?” Ruth asked, arching an eyebrow at his older brother.
“The exact opposite,” Asher lamented, his excitement finally dying down. “Think about it, mana has been the primary power source of the entire planet for nearly a hundred years, you think somebody would have realized that mana comes from dragons by now, right?”
Ruth nodded in agreement, that much made sense to him. If dragons were real, and the little one currently curled around his brother’s neck protectively seemed to be empirical evidence that they were, then how come this was the first either of them had heard of their existence?
It didn’t take a lot for Ruth to come to the same conclusion that Asher did. “Somebody doesn’t want people to know they exist.”
Chapter 13
Nicholas Jones was not a happy man.
When he had been informed by his superiors that he was to venture into the depths of a broodtown to examine a crime scene in a mana station, he knew that it wasn’t going to be a pleasant day. Sure enough, he had been heckled at the border by some punk teenagers wearing their first draquartz piercings with pride, he had been stared at with gaping maws by every drake he passed, and so far the director of the mana station had been most uncooperative with him.
Nicholas scrunched his eyebrows and sneered at Rita Patel, his arms crossed across his thick chest, rippling with muscle and power. Nicholas was large, as far as humans went. He was easily over six and a half feet tall, and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He had almost drake-like proportions, but nobody would ever make the mistake of confusing him for one. No tail, no scales, no horns to speak of, but nobody could deny that Nicholas Jones was a giant of a man. His skin was dark like chocolate, his scalp shaved and smooth, his eyes cold and calculating.
“I’ve already told you, the police were here earlier for their own investigation,” Rita insisted, from just inside the front door of the mana station, “go away!”
“And I’ve already told you,” Nicholas growled, doing his best impression of an angry drake, “that I’m not with the police. I am an agent of COMA.”
Rita’s eyes narrowed as she looked Nicholas in the eye. His right eye was purple while his left was a turquoise. It was clear to her that he was infused, which explained why he was willing to enter the mana station without wearing any draquartz. “Do you have any proof?”
Want me to eat her? A deep voice whispered into Nicholas’ mind. She looks like a good meal…
“Shut up,” Nicholas hissed, low enough that not even Rita could hear him, before reaching into the pocket of his long black duster and retrieving a leather badge holder. He flipped it open and flashed the card and metal shield in Rita’s face, forcing her to take a step or two back in surprise. “Agent of the Centre of Magical Affairs, here to conduct an official investigation into the robbery of your mana orb,” he repeated, for what felt like the third time.