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Slayer or Layer 26

For Lorvianne

By Draconicon

Flying over a caravan was not how he ever imagined he'd be spending a day, but then again, he had never expected to have wings.

Or scales.

Or a feral body.

Lorkos shook his head as he floated on the thermals that came from the fires atop the wagons. He had wondered why they bothered to keep those lit during the day, but the reasons became very apparent the longer he remained airborne. They gave him lift, allowing him to fly without having to flap constantly, and it kept him aware of just where the caravan was without having to look down.

It was a good feature, and he was surprised that the lizards had thought of it. It seemed smarter than their sort were usually capable of being.

Still, he tried to make himself focus on his goals. They were taking him along away from the capital city, and the only reasons he was going along with them were the possibility of finding a scaly shaman and because he owed them a debt.

He tried to tell himself that he was more interested in the shaman than the debt, but he couldn't quite make himself believe it. They had...done a pretty extreme service for him, fighting off enemies in the night that would have harmed him merely for being what he was. Hell, he was pretty sure that, even before the curse, most of the people he knew would have thrown him to the metaphorical wolves rather than fight to save him the way that the lizards had done.

Lorkos extended his wings, catching the thermals and rising a bit higher, looking around the landscape. The road that the wagons were taking led away from the capital in a winding fashion, passing by a river and then towards some of the lower mountains. They were on clear plains for the entire duration of the trip, though, which meant it would be easy for him to see anything sneaking up on them.

Nothing for the moment, thankfully. He didn't want to have to torch mammals if he didn't have to.

He circled, looking back the way they'd come. The capital city loomed high in the distance, looking like some great spire that seemed massive even from his height. Like a mountain made by man rather than by god, it did not survey so much as it loomed, like some great shadow that wanted to cover everything in its reach.

...That was an ominous thought, he realized, shaking his head and trying not to think that way anymore.

With nothing to fight, Lorkos pulled his wings back in and began to fall. It was a short descent, despite his height, and he only pulled out in the last few hundred feet, flaring out his wings and landing with a thump a few dozen meters off from the caravan.

Sure, it scraped up a lot of ground and grass, but it was better than hitting the hard road and leaving a mark there.

The lizards came running when he marched up, several of them offering platters of meat that they'd just pulled down from the fires. Despite the bad manners, Lorkos gave in to his hunger and ate everything that he was given, snapping it off of sticks and swallowing it too quick to taste more than a hint of poultry.

His needs sated for the moment, he followed at the side of one of the wagons, looking inside.

Gathered around the fire were a number of female lizards, each one swollen with an egg that hadn't been there before he'd turned up. Not that he was directly responsible for them. That would have been a feat, considering that he no longer had a dick. However, his aura, his need, had pushed the caravan into a mating frenzy the likes of which the smugglers had never seen, everyone that was capable of pregnancy pregnant, and everyone capable of breeding still nursing their balls much later.

One of the pregnant lizards looked up, smiling. She pulled her blanket up, holding it wrapped around her middle, and leaned against the wagon side.

"Mistress. What do you wish?"

"I..."

What did he wish? The fact that they continued to call him 'mistress' still sent a weird feeling down his spine. It wasn't the lie; he was accustomed to that, and knew that it was the only way for him to get what he needed. Nor was it the fact that the little ones were willing to serve; that made sense, considering that he was a dragon, and dragons were supposed to be the overlords of these creatures.

No, it was the happiness that put him off. It was the way that they were just...grateful, almost like this was an everyday occurrence. What exactly did these people live like? What was their daily life if this was so normal?

That answered his question for him.

"I've lived a long time in solitude," he lied. "I don't know how the place we're going...works. Can you explain?"

"What do you need explained, Mistress? We've got all the time in the world tonight, and I can start thinking about it."

"Just...everything. Why do you serve dragons? Why do you still trade with people that want to kill you? Why do you - just...why?"

"That's a...lot of questions, Mistress," the blue-scaled lizard said. "Don't you know some of this? What about the kobolds and drakes of your mountain?"

"I didn't grow up with any."

"Oh...oh...I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Before he could ask why, the lizard reached through the gap of the wagon window, hugging him around the neck. He stared for the duration of the hug, then stared after it was broken, the girl pulling back inside, muttering that she'd get all the information that she could for the mistress.

Lorkos didn't understand it, but knew that he was due another circling in the air. He took to the skies, riding the thermals as high as they would take him before the air demanded that he use his wings.

It wasn't until he was too far away to speak that he understood. If there had been no creatures for him to talk to growing up, if there'd been no dragons to educate him, then it meant that the mammals had slain them.

They were grieving for a loss that he had probably committed on dozens of dragons in his lifetime.

...Dammit...they're not that sort of people. They aren't...they wouldn't have...

Lorkos didn't let him think about it. In the way of someone that had a job to do the world over, he put it out of his mind and focused on the task at hand.

Night came, and he landed as the caravan set up their central campfire. Every wagon donated some firewood to it, and when the bonfire was lit, it scattered light all around the encampment, lighting every nook and cranny to the eyes of those that were used to the darkness, lizard and dragon alike.

Lorkos laid a little way off from the fire, shaking his head repeatedly as he thought about the afternoon's interaction. The fact that the pregnant lizard could have been capable of feeling such sympathy had shocked him, as had the fact that she had worked it out so quickly. It meant several things that he didn't know how to handle.

First, that there were enough deaths among the scaly people that they actually had a process of comforting each other, that they expected to need to. It was not what anything even vaguely bestial did. They had to have some intelligence and more emotions to be able to actually carry that off.

Second, it meant that they wanted their dragon rulers to be happy, that they didn't have some hidden agenda to escape. They were willing servants, through and through, and they seemed to hurt when their masters were in pain.

This doesn't make sense. They're supposed to be monsters, ruled over by the cruel dragons. Even if they're not, why would they serve the dragons when all they got out of it was war and death?

Maybe he'd learn about that tonight? Maybe they'd finally explain.

Eventually, the blue-scaled lizard woman returned to him with four other pregnant females in tow. They all sat down, putting torches down on the ground before them, then bowed their heads.

"Thank you for telling us your needs, Mistress," the first one said. "I didn't know that you had suffered so much."

"It's...alright. I don't notice much anymore."

"It's a sacred duty for us to tell you the history, then. If you don't know..."

The lizard women looked at each other, then looked down at Lorkos's stomach, at the swollen womb that was stuffed full of eggs, just waiting to be laid. They were not the only ones carrying children.

And obviously, they wanted those children properly informed.

They care for learning, too.

One shock after another, tonight. He settled with his head on his forelegs, nodding for them to begin. The blue-scaled one looked at her companions, who gestured for her to take the lead.

"Well, let's go back to...before the dragons."

"How long ago was that?" he asked.

"Before the war. Before the mammals were driven from the mountains. Before everything else that happened. Maybe...four generations? Six before?"

Four or six generations. If they were going by lizard generations, then that was probably about half that in human ones. Two or three. So...not much more than fifty or seventy years, if that. He nodded for her to continue.

"Before the dragons, we lived in the rocks and stones. Scalies were sport, things to hunt by the furs and the skins. We...were dumb, then. Didn't know what to do. Just hunted to eat, but there wasn't room for us. We were starving, dying.

"Dunno where dragons came from, but they gave us...ideas. Gave us the head for them, and then put the ideas in there. How to remember who belonged to who. How to remember what was a family, what was a clan, what was a people. They reminded us, mothers were responsible. Mothers remembered who they gave birth to, who hatched from them, where fathers could go anywhere. Females took charge.

"As we became more organized, we started thriving again. There wasn't much food under the mountain, but there was some. Enough for us to eat. Enough for us to live off of. Not enough to do anything with."

"What started the war?" he asked.

"Something stupid," the lizard woman said, shaking her head. "We had a bad harvest under the mountains, so we wanted to try and get some food from one of the mountain cities. But they'd hurt us before, so...we went there in bigger numbers, and we asked one of the dragons to come with us, just to make sure that we were safe.

"Instead, we scared them. Scared them really, really badly. Some of them shot arrows at us, the dragoness protected us. She swooped down, burning the sky with fire, scouring the arrows before they could land. She burned the men off the wall for what they had tried to do, and the rest ran."

They abandoned the city after the first attack? That couldn't be. The great war had involved a great many cities being abandoned, burned to the ground, destroyed by dragons and their scaly servants alike. The idea that the defenders would have run off like that, leaving everything to be taken...

Lorkos shook his head. He hadn't been there, and he had to remember that so many other things had been proven wrong. That bit of history could have been wrong, as well. He needed to treat it all as possible until he could prove it wrong.

"And...after that?"

"She was punished, stripped of her old mountain, made to look over the place she had destroyed by the other dragons. She took another dragon as a mate, and laid with him, breeding again and again, as if she was afraid that the world would lose all dragons if she didn't push out as many as possible.

"The other dragons decided that war was inevitable now, after that mistake, so they led us out of the caves, down the mountain, striking every mammal city on the slopes to make sure that we had a buffer zone, someplace further out than our homes so that the first attack couldn't just kill us off."

The buffer zone. It was never meant as anything aggressive, not in the way that his people had always assumed it had. They were doing the same thing that a town bordering a river would do, or those that had a bunch of hills near their settlement. Anything that could be used as a defense, they seized, wanting to protect themselves. It made sense, surprisingly. It all made sense.

"What was her name? The dragoness that started the war?"

"Ashin."

"...What was that name, again?" he whispered.

"Ashin, the red dragon."

Ashin, the one that had cursed him.

The End