Dragon Blood

Chapter 5

They were born in the utter blackness of the beginning. Their cries were the harmony in the world's first song. Rich, wild magic soothed them, like the gentle touch of a mother. It was said that their very presence was the beginning of what the world would become.

She had been with him, and he with her. Siblings by birth. They were the only set of two that hatched from a single egg. They were the light and the dark of night. Yin and Yang. Khonsu and Nut. Luna and Nox. 

Their connection went beyond any that could be established between the others. They could feel each other's pain, physical and emotional. She knew the first time he lost control in the air and fell. He knew the first and last time her heart had been broken. She knew the elation when he learned he was going to be a father. They were always together, one way or another. A single thought away from instantaneous communication no matter the distance between them.

Until they weren't.

Luna had known something was wrong the day before he was gone. She was caught in the throws of a passionate evening with her vampire lover when a cold feeling struck her. She felt truly and entirely alone for the first time... ever. She reached out with her connection and felt nothing. She didn't even feel him listening. His very presence was gone. 

She had been in Paris, almost twenty-two hundred kilometers, from the small Greek island where Nekros made his home with Phoenix. She could be there in five hours at her greatest speed, something she had never had to maintain for so long.

She flew until her chest hurt from her heart slamming into her breastplate. Her lungs cramped, her flight muscles felt like they were ripping apart, and her own ice magic was struggling to keep her temperature under control. But she did it. She arrived at Gyaros before the sun had risen to find it glowing with bright orange flames lapping at the low brush of the island. It was fueled by some kind of petrol that had been carefully spread across the entire island. 

By the time she put the flames out there wasn't enough left for her to find out what happened. There was no sign of Nekros, or Phoenix, or Rhiannon. She couldn't even find the shell of her egg. It had been cleaned of any evidence that the dragons had ever been there. Her cry of rage and emptiness was heard across the globe.

The remaining seven dragons gathered on the small island of Gyaros. Two of them having been roused from a hibernating sleep by Luna's incensed cry. She could not be consoled. Her grief was unimaginable, and her rage was incredible. For the first time, the dragonkin felt a shadow of fear wash over them. Three dragons were just... gone. One of them was a hatchling. A hatchling! As there were maybe only three or four dragonkin hatchlings for every generation, they tended to protect their young more furiously than they guarded their territory. For the first dragon hatchling since the beginning of time to go missing was unthinkable to them.

For the next twenty-six years, they searched. The Ancient counsel could not maintain their air of calm and arrogance as the dragons and their kin, two species who were old, predictable, and content to live parallel to the rest of the world as long as they were left alone, were suddenly on the move and acting like they've never done before. They were tripping over themselves to figure out why. While the dragons never were and never would allow themselves to be represented by the Counsel, they were forced to clean up when the human governments didn't accommodate the whims of the three dragons they knew about. There was a village in Venezuela that was still under ice, and a swath of swamps in northern Canada that had to be quarantined.

Yet, there were still some governments that tried to think they could take on a creature older than time and sin itself.

Even now, as Luna flew five thousand feet over the Gobi Desert, skirting the southern side of the China-Mongolia border. A while back she was joined by an escort of five Chengdu J-10 fighter jets, arrogantly nicknamed the Vigorous Dragons from the Chinese Air Force. The two ahead of her were flashing Morse code. If she bothered to translate it, it probably came to something like "you are in restricted air space, land immediately" blah, blah, blah, but she never bothered to interpret the flashing.