Astray
A DRAGON’S KISS BURNS COLD.
December 2044 - The Elvish Protectorate
Paloma slammedthe door of her truck and swore.
Pressing her thumb against the ignition switch, she studiously ignored the familiar faces wandering out into the packed dirt parking lot in front of The Shack, the unofficial town hall. She could feel their familiar gazes on her through the shatter-proof glass of her windshield, but she couldn’t bear to make eye contact with any of the people she’d known her entire life. She gritted her teeth and tried, with limited success, to block out the sounds of their continued muttering.
Paloma grew up with most of them. She babysat for them. Her eighth grade teacher sat beside her in a folding chair and raised a wrinkled arm to vote yes. Looking at them now, Paloma wasn’t sure she actually knew any of them.
The town she’d been a part of and the people she’d known her whole life wanted to execute a dragon without warning or even an attempt at something less deadly. They wanted to end a life because they felt threatened by a shadow that had only barely brushed their mountaintop.
And it was Paloma’s fault.
Tears blurred her vision as she backed out of the parking lot and onto the only road the tiny, scattered mountain town could boast.
When she spotted the blip on one of her monitors two days prior, she had no idea that she would be responsible for the death of an innocent being. As an aerial researcher, she only did her job: watch the skies and monitor her sensitive equipment’s readings for abnormalities in energy buildup that could lead to devastating weather patterns and other, more specific m-phenomena. Spotting the dragon was a surprise. They normally flew so high that most ground-based monitors couldn’t pick up their flight patterns, but her equipment — specially designed by her late father and perfected by Paloma — managed to catch a glimpse of them.
That wasn’t immediate cause for concern, of course. Dragons could and often did fly wherever they liked. The high peaks of the Sierras were not strangers to the passing dragon shadow. But it was rare enough that Paloma noted it. All day, she watched that little blip on her screen get closer and closer. She let herself imagine what it would be like to be capable of that kind of freedom as she waited for the dragon to sail overhead — on their way to wherever they needed to be, great leathery wings outstretched to catch the air currents.
Except, they didn’t continue on their way.
She watched, dread knotting her stomach, as the blip circled back around before making jagged, irregular movements around the surrounding peaks. Over and over again, the blip sailed from mountain to mountain in an ever-tightening circle around the tiny town far below Paloma’s home and research station.
The tell-tale mark of a rogue dragon.
Of course Paloma was concerned. A rogue dragon was dangerous to themselves as well as others. Dragons were beings of immense size and strength, with a capacity for destruction that rivaled any machine of war the modern age could conceive of. She had to report the sighting to the town and their single, ancient Patrol officer, just in case the dragon decided it was the perfect place for its roost — a decision that would result in the violent eviction of every single individual currently occupying it.
She didn’t just worry about the town, though. Paloma’s heart ached for the lost, circling dragon.
Paloma was just a scientist. An arrant with no magical ability and no experience with dragonhandling, she did what she was supposed to do: she passed her information along to the mayor and town council. Surely there was a way to help a rogue, right? She knew next to nothing about dragons or how to help them. There had to be someone they could call.
Bunch of godsdamned cowards, she seethed, wiping furiously at her stinging eyes as she wound her way through the darkness and up the mountain she’d called home her entire life.
The town’s solution to the problem was not to seek help in subduing and rehabilitating the rogue. The people she’d grown up with, spooked by the tension of the recent political upheavals in San Francisco, voted to call in Patrol at the first sight of the dragon.
They didn’t want to help the rogue. They wanted to call in the elvish authorities — who would not hesitate for even a moment to execute a being who hadn’t done a thing wrong.
Paloma didn’t blame Patrol, necessarily. They were tasked with the safety of the territory, and in a world so full of beings capable of so much harm, they had to be ready to defend that safety with ruthless efficiency at a moment’s notice. Wars had been started over less than a dragon’s flight over a small town, after all. And with Delilah Solbourne’s recent abdication in favor of her brother, rumors of a takeover from another powerful faction flew.
Theodore Solbourne, the newest sovereign of the Protectorate, had done his best to squelch those rumors, but Paloma knew anything could be taken as a challenge to his authority. If a rogue dragon sighting was called in and the sovereign’s people didn’t act immediately to protect his citizens, it could turn into a political nightmare — all the more reason for Patrol to handle her dragon with brutal efficiency.
But this was the modern age. Paloma had to believe that there were other ways to handle a lost soul, circling endlessly in the frigid air, than a swift execution.
Too bad the town refused to listen to her.
No matter how loudly she argued that there was no evidence the dragon intended to threaten the town, she was unanimously outvoted. The mayor — Old Jack, owner of The Shack and all-around ass — promised to call Patrol in the morning.
Bile crept up the back of Paloma’s throat. She’d watched that man’s two dogs for pocket money as a kid. Hell, she’d even briefly dated his son in high school. To see him so easily condemn a creature — a sapient being with thoughts and feelings and family and a soul to death without so much as a blink? It was like she’d stepped into some awful alternate reality where everyone she thought she knew turned out to be a monster in disguise.
It was a long drive back up the mountain to her home. Paloma stewed in her helpless anger the entire way.
It was her fault that the dragon now had a sword poised against its throat, intentionally or not, and the fact burned inside of her like corrosive acid. Their death would be on her hands. The thought made her want to pull over and heave up her dinner along the side of the road.
There was no way she could sit and watch as the town called in a Patrol squad to take down the rogue. She couldn’t do it. She refused to do it.
The road under her truck’s tires was a black blade of asphalt, so narrow in some places that the sturdy pines lining the road seemed to lean over it, creating a cage of jagged teeth in the dark. She’d made the trip hundreds of times in her life, but never had she pushed her truck to move quite so fast, to take the hair-pin turns or serpentine path up to her cliffside home with so much urgency.