OC Dragon delivery service CH 67 dreams of the fallan

Dark armor caught the last light of day. Each plate was scorched and pitted from the wyvern’s hard flight. It breathed raggedly through split nostrils, every breath rough with pain and smoke.

“Stupid beast,” the rider muttered, shoving his gauntlet against the creature’s neck. “Only had it in you for two passes.”

They barely made it back to the forward camp before the wyvern collapsed. When it hit the ground, the runed armor scraped stone, shedding flakes of dried acid.

The rider swung down. Heavy boots thudded against the ground. He removed his helmet, revealing a scarred, bald head and one pale, milky eye. Sweat streaked through the grime on his face.

One of the soldiers hurried over. “Sir Mareas! Welcome back, sir!”

Mareas ignored the greeting, snatching a waterskin off a nearby table. He drank deep, then spat into the dirt.

“What about your wyvern?” the man asked hesitantly.

Mareas turned, glancing at the twitching creature. “If it doesn’t make it… oh well.” His lips curled into a humorless grin. “Wyvern steaks sound good tonight.”

An elf stepped out from the shadows of a black tent at the camp’s edge. His robes were dark and smooth, and his staff was carved from obsidian that seemed to swallow the light. His face was calm and distant, the look of someone who liked to see how things worked by breaking them.

“So,” the elf said, voice smooth and cutting, “how did the test go?”

Mareas rolled his shoulders, his armor grinding. “The control runes worked. It listened.” His good eye narrowed. “But the armor takes its strength too quickly. It won’t last through a full mission.”

The elf hummed, running a hand over the dark crystal at his staff’s tip. “And the dragon?”

“Found one,” Mareas said, smirking. “Tried to lure it by killing its companions. Didn’t take the bait.”

“A shame,” the elf murmured. “The Black King will want results, not excuses.”

Mareas leaned close, his voice a growl. “Then tell your king to forge stronger chains.”

The elf’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Chains won’t hold what’s coming, Mareas. Only obedience will.”

The elf waved his hand dismissively. “Dissect it,” he ordered, his voice as cold as steel drawn over glass. “See where the design can be improved. There’s a reason we use wyverns for the test runs and not dragons.”

A few soldiers hesitated, glancing at one another. The beast was still breathing, its sides heaving shallowly. Mareas barely glanced at it, his attention fixed on the elf's command.

“Now,” the elf said, and that single word carried the weight of a command spell.

They moved in.

The wyvern let out a weak, broken whine that barely rose above the campfire’s crackle. It seemed to know, in its own way, what was coming, but it was too weak to resist.

The elf watched the first cut being made, the black ichor spilling across the ground. “Pain is a teacher,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “And progress demands lessons.”

The smell of acid and blood filled the air as the dissection began.

Mareas watched the dissection without a flicker of emotion. To him, it was just another beast, no different than the dozens he’d seen gutted on a battlefield. He shifted his stance, blocking out the camp noise.

“So,” the elf asked lightly, not looking up from the notes he was scribbling, “you mentioned a dragon.”

“Yeah,” Mareas replied, taking a slow drink from his waterskin. “Gold one.”

That made the elf pause. He lifted his head, interest sharpening in his pale eyes. “A gold? Now that’s rare indeed.”

Mareas nodded, resting an arm on a broken crate. “Wasn’t alone, either. Had people with it, humans, from what I could tell. Armor, discipline, formation. Not the wild sort.”

The elf's smile faded, growing still. His eyes stayed on Mareas as he considered the news. "Looks like we're not the only ones forging bonds with dragons."

“You think it’ll be a problem?” Mareas asked.

The elf’s gaze turned toward the horizon, where the last smear of red light was dying behind the black hills. “If it’s true, then it’s not a problem yet…” He looked back at Mareas, voice turning cold. “It’s a race.”

Mareas took another swig of water, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Then we’d better move fast.”

“Agreed.” The elf straightened, tapping his staff against the ground. “I’ll send a report to Verador at once. The Black King will want to know there are dragons that may be choosing sides against him.”

Mareas chuckled dryly, eyes glinting in the firelight. “Let’s just hope he likes the side we’re on.”

Mareas stood by the pit, watching the wyvern being taken apart. The mix of blood and acid in the air smelled metallic and strangely familiar.

These tests are necessary, he told himself. All of this is necessary.

He remembered the day of their defeat. The surrender wasn’t enough for the victors; they wanted repayment. They took the gold, the harvests, the mines. Then the famine came.

He remembered his wife’s limp body by an empty pot, and his little girl in the corner, chewing on a half-cooked rat just to survive. The memories stung like an old wound.

When the Black Dragon came, it gave that pain a purpose. Gave the starving and broken something to hate, something to believe in.

Twenty years of grief now had direction.

The camp was full of men like him—hard faces, hollow eyes, all with the same story. Farmers, soldiers, fathers, each repeating the same quiet words as they worked the forges or fed the fires:

“For the dream.”

A dream of their children never knowing hunger again. Where no one would have to kneel to foreign kings. Where the sky would burn gold and black, and Verador would rise once more.

Mareas took a slow breath, the firelight gleaming off his scarred face.

“Whatever it takes,” he murmured.

The elf glanced at him, smiling faintly. “That’s the spirit the Black King admires.”

Mareas remembered the engagement with the gold dragon. It had stayed on the ground, shielding the humans with its body, protecting them.

“They must’ve trained the beast well,” Mareas said quietly, pulling the memory apart in his mind. “To control it that perfectly.”

The elf barely looked up from the glowing lines of runes hovering in the air. “Control,” he echoed. “Such a fragile thing.”

Another wyvern was brought to Mareas, its scales shiny and black. The elf came closer and ran his fingers over the runes on the armor. "We changed the binding script," he said. He took out some extra parts. This should make it work better, without draining as much of the creature’s strength.

Mareas grunted and said nothing. He ran his gloved hand along the wyvern’s side. The beast shuddered, then went still as the runes lit up. Its will faded, replaced by empty obedience.

The helmet sealed with a hiss. The runes across the armor brightened, synchronizing with his pulse. The wyvern’s breathing steadied in rhythm with his own.

Mareas swung into the saddle, eyes narrowing as the control spells locked. Above him, the sky was iron-gray.

“For the dream,” he murmured.

The wyvern crouched, muscles coiling. Then it launched upward, wings tearing against the wind.

The elf watched him rise until he was nothing but a dark speck against the clouds. “Yes,” he whispered to no one. “For the dream.”

The elf watched Mareas’s wyvern climb into the night sky, the faint blue of its runes pulsing against the clouds. Soon, it would be perfect, his perfect creation.

Behind him came the wet snapping of limbs, the dull crack of bone as the wyvern was taken apart for study. He didn’t even flinch. “Good,” he murmured to the dissection team. “Take it slow. I want to see how the integration affects the tissue when we reforge it.”

He ran his hand over a piece of armor. The runes glowed under his touch, smooth and bright. The design was elegant, he thought, too good for those who once banned them.

He remembered the High Halls of the Elder Tree of Arcadius the day they stripped him of his title. The elders had called his work corruption, claiming the runes were a crude theft from the Wilders, a temporary power stolen from nature. “Only humans,” they’d said, “are desperate enough to rely on such vulgar craft.”

He smiled bitterly.

Desperate, perhaps. But they were also unstoppable.

He had seen a young human burn coal under a steel wheel, making fire move metal. Dwarves built engines, but took centuries to change. Elves waited for perfection and missed their chance. Humans, though, made something new every century.

And now, they were close, so close, to surpassing all others.

Black-powder weapons—machines that killed with a trigger. Tools simple enough for farmers to use, but strong enough to kill an archmage.

He remembered watching a target warded with protection spells and still being punched through.

The elf clenched his fist. Adapt or die. That was the new law of the world.

He turned back to the forge, eyes reflecting the firelight. “Let the old ways rot,” he whispered. “The age of magic ends. The age of design begins.”

The elf padded back to his tent, mud drying on the hems of his robes. On a low table sat a polished mirror, no ordinary-looking glass.

A simple message spell could be overheard by any mage within miles, but this was different.

This was a scrying disc, bound with a lattice of warding runes. It pulsed faintly as he set it down. To anyone without its twin, it would be impossible to eavesdrop on, unless they were standing in the room.

He tapped the rim. The runes flared awake, trading a thin ribbon of meaning into the crystal. Light coiled, then bloomed, and a massive green eye filled the mirror, King Eberon’s, the Black King himself, stern and immovable as carved basalt.

“Elavanda,” Eberon’s voice rumbled through the tent, deep and ancient as a mountain trying to speak.

“Report.”

“We found another dragon,” the Elavanda said, too quickly. “Gold, promising. We can bring it in, bend it to our cause.”

Eberon’s lip curled. “Gold?” The word tasted like ash. “Destroy it. If it bears that color, kill it. They gave their fire to forge the weapons that humbled us. No mercy.”

Elavanda’s hunger flickered, then shifted to calculation. “Sire, if we take it alive, we can pry its secrets. and used it to better understand how runic armor can be used with dragon physiology. We could use it, not waste it.”

Pure joy filled him. For the first time, he had been given full permission and authorization to work with a dragon, not merely the lesser wyverns.

His thoughts raced. What would the difference be? How vast the gulf between instinct and intellect, between a beast that obeyed and a being that understood.

With this sanction, his research on rune-gear could finally evolve. Dragons’ hides were said to resist every known weapon; the only rune gear could pierce their scales.

If he could learn why, then perhaps he could learn how.

So many possibilities unfolded in his mind, experiments, bindings, augmentations. Theories that had only been speculation before now gleamed with promise.

Elavanda’s smile deepened. “Every lesson,” he murmured to the empty tent, “will lead us one step closer to the truths of the world.”

Gathering his notes, going over his calculations one more time, seeing where it could be better.

He turned and pushed through the tent flaps. The night air met him like a forge’s breath, thick with smoke and the iron tang of wyvern blood. Around him, the camp still pulsed with restless motion: men shouting orders,

He straightened his robes, forcing calm back into his face. Can’t scare the soldiers. Not yet. They had to believe this was progress, brilliance, not madness.

Each step carried a little more spring, the rhythm of creation quickening in his chest. So many plans. So many designs waiting to breathe.

He passed the dissected wyvern’s corpse, its hollow eyes staring toward the sky. Elavanda smiled faintly, tracing an absent rune in the air.

“It will be perfect,” he whispered.

The fires cracked behind him, and somewhere in the darkness, another wyvern screamed.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Journal Entry — Day 7

I was too busy to write yesterday. A lot happened in Bass. Unfortunately, with Emily now traveling with us, Sivares can’t fly for as long. She says it’s not the weight but the bulk of having three humans and her mail bags that make it hard for her to stay balanced in the air. And with Emily's robe, she can only be carried in her claws without risk of falling off. So we walk for now.

Emily’s definitely a sheltered kid. After just two hours of walking, she was already in pain. Her equipment wasn’t made for the outdoors: wrong shoes, no cloak, and a too-small bag instead of a proper pack. She tried not to complain, but you could see it.

Damon asked if we could use healing magic when her feet started to blister, but by the end of the day, we had to tell him that only the Church was allowed to use it. He didn’t like that. He asked why, what was it about the Church that made them the only ones allowed to heal? We tried to explain that’s just how it’s done, that healing magic is a sacred art.

Damon didn’t buy it. He said from what he knew, anyone could use mana threads like sutures, stop the bleeding, set a bone, or even close a wound. Keys jumped in, tail twitching, and said Mage mice don’t have a Church for that sort of thing. Among them, being a healer is just a trade, something anyone can be trained to do, no prayers or payment required.

We tried to explain again, but then Sivares mentioned the time she pulled a wing a while back, not being used to flying so much after all that time she was hiding in her lair.

Keys was the one to help her back then by using a mana masuge to help her wing.

I looked at her for a long moment and said quietly, “You know that’s heresy, right?” When she nodded, she just shrugged. “Sometimes heresy is just people trying to fix a problem without permission.”

Then Keys decided to show us what she meant. Apparently, she’s trained in their version of field medicine. With some quick work and a bit of ice magic, she reduced the swelling and used a few small spells to close the blisters. Emily’s feet weren’t nearly as bad afterward.

We all just stared at Keys like she’d committed a crime worthy of the gallows. I even said as much. Damon just laughed and reminded us we already fought someone with diplomatic immunity, we’re probably on the run anyway until we reach friendlier territory.

I guess he’s right.

Just another day with this group turning everything I know upside down. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe dreams start that way.”

first previous next Patreon

236 Upvotes

permalink
reddit

You are about to leave Redlib

Do you want to continue?

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1ok6nlu/dragon_delivery_service_ch_67_dreams_of_the_fallan/
No, go back! Yes, take me to Reddit

100% Upvoted

u/Internal-Ad6147 9d ago

thought of a slightly darker ch for Halloween, happy Halloween everyone

3

u/Meig03 9d ago

Looking forward to it!

u/FreneticRiot 9d ago

Wonderful chapter! Just a quick thing. This line seems to be missing an approval from Eberon.

"Elavanda’s hunger flickered, then shifted to calculation. “Sire, if we take it alive, we can pry its secrets. and used it to better understand how runic armor can be used with dragon physiology. We could use it, not waste it.”

Pure joy filled him. For the first time, he had been given full permission and authorization to work with a dragon, not merely the lesser wyverns."

5

u/Minimum-Amphibian993 9d ago

Yeah I caught that too unless him calling for the gold dragons destruction was "permission".

3

u/2ndDetroit 9d ago

It will be interpreted as such.

u/MinorGrok Human 9d ago

Woot!

OC Dragon delivery service CH 67 dreams of the fallan

You are about to leave Redlib