Lone Star Dragon

Short Story: Beneath Rock and Stone

Beneath Rock and Stone

Diggers, as their name implies, are the dragons who perform most the of the heavy lifting within their colony. They spend their lives underground, laboring in the dark as they enlarge their colony while mining the minerals and ores their colony needs. The males often forgo the metamorphosis that gives a dragon their wings and remain lizard-like in appearance. Doing so drives their bodies to form denser muscles, bones, and claws...

It is in their realm where the extent of dragon industry reveals itself. Here ores and minerals are purified and processed, rocks are shaped, basic tools are forged, and volatiles produced...

When exploring the creation myths of these dragons, you will discover that a digger is how feral dragons imagine a male dragon in its most concentrated form. Wingless, earthy, and, perhaps, a bit unclean.

- Excerpt from, Academia Drakonnica: Volume Six, The North American Dragon

-----------------------------------

Summer-Rain awoke to darkness, but such was life when your mother ruled the light-less depths of another dragon's queendom. Her distant, and ungrateful, relatives called these depths many things and, unsurprisingly, none of them were flattering. The Dark Belows was one name, certainly not her favorite. The Digger's Domain was probably the most respectful, though it also suggested their isolation. She had never used any of them, however. She had known little else and so thought of these tunnels and chambers simply as what they were.

Home.

Sunlight and open skies were gifts for her family, not privileges. Not even for lesser royalty, like herself. This was no punishment, for she found the dark to be comforting. The smell of churned earth was pleasant, and though the collective musk of her brothers and Fathers had little appeal, it was a reassuring scent, for life was continuing as it should.

The small tunnels were not entrapping as outsiders so often complained. Instead, they made her feel protected, like a hatchling beneath her mother's wing. Her recent time spent under sky, where she was constantly exposed on all sides, and danger could come from anywhere. That had been terrifying.

Yet, the dark seemed colder than normal. Tasting the air, she realized the cause. She had awoken alone. Not for the first time, but the surrounding sand was not simply cooling as occasions before. It held no warmth at all.

She had known it would be so, yet the complete absence of her father was still unsettling. It was nothing like waking to discover he had crept away, reappearing just as carefully, hoping his inability to offer her his complete dedication would not be noticed. But the state of their relationship had shifted now that she was a respectable, winged draka. Yes, she had known, but she had not understood it until now, and it bled some of the joy from her promotion.

Having passed her colony's trials, she was no longer a dragon who needed looking after. Well, a more honest explanation would be to say her protection was now her own responsibility. If anything, she was in far more danger now than she'd ever been before. Starting today, all of her Sisters would either want to use her to make headway towards the final promotion, or just displace her to somewhere she couldn't interfere.

They wouldn't try to remove her entirely. Her colony had a long standing practice of not permitting royals to kill each other. Being not only the youngest royal, but a digger too, well, she probably wasn't threatening enough to merit some sort of accident either. Those too were rare, and those that had occurred might have only been honest mishaps. Draka were expected to be wise and learned, but that didn't stop them from being fatally thoughtless at times, or just grimly unlucky.