5Author's Note: This story takes place in the shapeshifter universe of Putting on my Otter Shirt. As you can probably tell, it too is loosely based on a crazy dream I had. It ended up as an extension of the mythological background of the world, and probably provides me with a plot driver I was looking for in the Otter side (knocking on wood). The story contains a smidgeon of crack; I really couldn't keep myself completely serious while writing about shapeshifting dragons from space. Oops, did I say space? Please look into this red light (flash). We never discussed space or multidimensional viral life forms tapping into minds here. That's to be elaborated in the upcoming companion handbook titled "WTF Is Going On In This World?" ;)
"In the times of yore, there were dragons. They were shifters, like us, only more ancient and powerful beyond imagining. The black dragons were evil and had no respect for their human side, killing their separate humans mercilessly. The red dragons, who were good and compassionate, saw that what the black dragons did was wrong. One day they got together to slay the evil dragons, and released the humans to live in harmony with them. In time, the red dragons evolved and became all the different species of shifting animal there are. They taught us that humans deserve to live a worthy life too, and that we should help them forget what they have lost so that they will not spend their lives in mourning for what they cannot have."
That is how the story goes, anyway. But history is written by the winners, and we all know things did not go quite as ancient tales tell it. So what happened, really?
-ooo-
The dragons reign supreme here. Humans are our subservient pawns, faulty weaklings stuck in their sole form and dreadfully limited intellect. They cannot fly; they cannot share thoughts beyond making crude sounds and gestures; and a mere fledgling dragon can tear the limbs off a human, or send him plummeting down from the sky.
The highest form of honour granted to a human is to become a secondary form for a dragon, the king of all creatures. As the lifespan of a dragon is far longer than that of a human, a single dragon can make multiple humans semi-immortal once it comes of age - after living for nearly a full human lifespan, that is. The human mind does not survive the attachment, for the most part, but the speck that then survives for generations is considered completely worth it by most of the poor short-lived creatures.
This "most" used to be "all", but not any more. A rebellion has been brewing for a while now, among the humans. They would not stand a chance alone, as they are both outwitted and overpowered. Dragons are not easy to plot against, by any means. When in a human form, a dragon is indistinguishable from a non-attached human to other humans. However, dragons can always identify each other as dragons, as they share a form of close-range telepathic communication that no human can even pretend to replicate. Yes, the humans would be lost without our help.
"We" are the Reds. To be sure, we are just another clan of dragons, the lowest of the nobility. But being looked down upon for centuries has made us somewhat sensitive to others in a similar predicament; like humans, we are outwitted and overpowered by the ruling clan, the Blacks, as well as a handful of other minor clans in between, with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Personally, I like to think that what we are missing in raw intelligence, we make up in our ability for compassion. But I have to admit that some blacks are close to demigods compared to the rest of us. I am unsure why this is so; some theorize it is because of their particularly pure blood.
But I digress; that was not the story I have set out to tell.
I am Akai, and I am to be the saviour of humans. This is my story of the great rebellion.
I got recruited into the conspiracy early on. I was a mere fledgling, young and full of vigour. I was so young, even that I was not even past my first, congenital human form, which was still going strong. No human had become a sacrifice for me so far, and in my zeal I even considered the possibility that none ever would. It had never been done before, and a preposterous thought, but I could see little harm in not being able to shift into a weaker, albeit more nimble form once my innate human form shrivelled and passed away. I never even considered it a possibility that I myself might somehow be damaged from it: given that humans could be replaced, they were clearly not the central core of us, but more like our equivalent of complicated clothes. But suffice it to say that I was quite alone in my musings, as most of our kind as well as humankind considered such an unnecessary limiting of oneself sheer folly, as well as a potentially dangerous goal with poorly specified reasons.
A land mass had been found beyond the current known realm. It was declared uninteresting by our Queen and her council, but it was what gave life to the conspiracy: there was an alternative world, a world without dragons, as far as we knew. We could take the humans there with us, and start over in a harmonious relationship, with red dragons the compassionate and kind guardians of the new realm. All would benefit. We would build ships, in secret, and guide the humans to the promised land.
In case it was not obvious, the plan did not at all include a cessation of the tradition of human sacrifice. Even among my own clan it was seen as a completely absurd notion. As the finest youths among the servant race were selected for the task, and celebrated as heroes, not even the sacrifices themselves complained; I maintain that this was a sign of their limited intellect rather than an educated analysis of the situation, however.
But I went with it, as an improvement to the status quo, obviously better than nothing. So I traded my battle against windmills for helping the ship-builders keep their crucial project hidden from the other clans. This involved mostly warnings about dragons wandering into the area, so that the construction sites would stay hidden. The sites were deliberately placed in an area where few dragons would wander into, and well beyond the range of anyone being able to sense us.
Sometimes, thankfully rarely, my duties also involved attacking an intruder, to kill them so that they could not carry word back to the others. We were lucky; such cases were mostly lone stragglers, and a few of our kind could take them down by ganging up on them. Anyone wandering around these uninhabited areas could be assumed to be something of a recluse, so no one had been missed too much either. Young blacks ambushed each other from time to time, to weed out weaklings from amongst the ruling class. A well-timed assassination was considered a success in social development, when done within the same clan. For members of an inferior clan to commit such an act would definitely have been punishable by death, so we were quite motivated to not let anyone out alive from our ambushes.
Not all of the stragglers were pushovers, by any means. One day, a sturdy black managed to severely wound me and a few others before going down. It was the turning point of my career in the conspiracy: suddenly, I was no longer useful as a fighter, so there was little point in having me around at the construction site. In my dragon form, even breathing hurt, and in my human form I was worse off than the individual humans because I could not hide from other dragons, should they come close enough.
Worse than useless on-site, I was sent away to find some way to make myself useful. Hanging around in human form around other dragons would raise unnecessary questions, but a use was found for me in the end: I would lead a small task force to acquire some necessary equipment for our future journey.
Do you like my formulation? I do, it sounds a lot better than "to go steal one of the devices needed for the ritual of human sacrifice from a mad hermit". Which is how my peers put it.
It was not that bad, not entirely. It did involve a hermit, an unethical device I would rather not have anything to do with, and theft. But I was just a little bit excited about the task, too.
The "mad hermit", generally known as Lord Kuro, was the most brilliant dragon alive, from one of the finest pure bloodlines to exist. He was an excellent target for our planned theft because he spent most of his time in human form, puttering around devices so sensitive that our own talons would never be able to produce or maintain such things. He represented the culmination of the symbiosis of our two races: a dragon's mind, and a human's deft fingers.
I was something of a fan, you might imagine. Not just because he actually appreciated his secondary form, unlike many others, but also because no one else in the realm could really do what he did. It was said that only the Queen could even endure prolonged thought contact with Lord Kuro without growing restless; he was just that magnificent. As Chief of Research, he was in charge of the maintenance and development of the very artefacts that made our most central rituals work.
Of course, one might ask why such a valuable member of the community was allowed to reside in a secluded valley all by himself. It was said that it was by his own request; the politically incorrect would go as far as quote him saying, "Being around idiots gives me a splitting headache." The rebuttals from people getting a headache or worse from trying to communicate with him, in turn, was not much more flattering.
For him, then, the solitude of living in an otherwise uninhabited valley meant peace from the constant noise of thinkers vastly inferior to himself. For the rebellion, it meant that he was too far from anyone else to reach out and call for help.
-ooo-
We travelled to his abode, me and two humans, under the pretence of delivering a new ritual device to a community of red dragons after the old one had broken down. The excuse for the two humans involved an elaborate social construct resulting from our being the lowest clan of dragons: the only servants we could decorate ourselves with were from an inferior race, so not many bothered. It still happened just enough to be somewhat plausible. The cover story did make me, as their owner willing to travel a stretch on foot just to not have to laboriously carry my own servants around, appear as somewhat mentally defective. I was quite confident that this additional burden was practically nothing compared to being a member of the red clan in the presence of the Chief of Research, however.
If you consider this plot naive and simplistic, you may well be on to something. Bear in mind, however, that plotting against a superior clan was socially so horribly taboo that we were not the only ones inexperienced in such. We hoped that Kuro would not expect our move, either.
It was obvious that he did not get many visitors, as he actually came out to welcome us warmly when we reached his door. We were all in human form, as his house was built for it – housing was needed for his delicate equipment more than himself, after all, and he would hardly spend time around the devices in his primary form.
For a while, I could just gape at him. Instead of a grizzly old wizard, as I had irrationally expected him to look like, the man facing us was young, sympathetic-looking and in a word gorgeous (if you happen to like the type, of course). Slightly shorter than an average man, but with long, nimble fingers befitting his profession, and a pair of piercing gray eyes to utterly lose yourself in. To this day, I am not sure if I benefited or near-wrecked our mission by violently blushing in sheer surprise when he flashed us a hospitable smile.
I managed to stammer our purpose, and in a bout of improvisation I also uncontrollably blurted out that I was also a huge fan of his work. He smiled benevolently, and offered us a tour of the premises as a bonus. We accepted, of course.
All through the tour, he was keeping carefully clear from communicating beyond the human methods; it was socially mildly awkward in a way that could be compared to a human being visibly very careful to not touch anyone else even while in close quarters with them. For my part, I did not particularly mind; it was much harder to lie in shared thought than verbally, and I suspect our plot would have crumbled at the first attempt at thinking my way around the scientist before us.
He told us of his work on the ritual devices at length. Halfway through, he got into his wilder experimentation. I had to bite my teeth to not gasp and cheer when he started to talk about his studies on merging other species than humans and dragons together. He had been working on a way to merge humans with other animals, such as cows, and had formulated a theory that with sufficiently small differences in lifespans, these chimeras could exist without the need of ever changing to a new body.
My companions seemed slightly pale at the concept, but I was mesmerized. Lost in the excitement of the thought experiment, I probed him whether he considered it likely that we could be merged with other animals as well. After raising his eyebrows alarmingly high for a moment, he congratulated me on the idea, stating it demonstrated "a rare ability to think outside the box". The stares I got from the rest of our party were less than appreciative, however; after all, I had just compared their most privileged relatives to domestic animals – say, pigs and sheep. To Kuro, on the other hand, it clearly was but a special case of the underlying chimera theory.
When we started to drift towards the room where he had some spare sacrificial devices ready – the regular kind – he asked us in passing if we had our royal warrant for a new device ready. It was tempting to choke on our own tongues there and then, but instead I hastily played for time by pretending (well, admitting) that it would be a shame to break off so soon, and maybe he could tell us something more about the history of the devices or other things.
He happily obliged, forgetting about the formalities for the time being. As he was explaining the early development of the art of merging, we were busy furiously thinking for a way out of our dilemma. The humans were making gestures at me that definitely communicated a necessity to cause bodily harm to Kuro, but I was torn between the safe completion of the mission and the major unethicality of assaulting the only man in the realm who might free us from human sacrifice in the future.
I may have been slightly biased by his charisma, but I maintain that my argument was quite sound as well, rationalization or not.
Luckily, a way out emerged just as he was explaining how different supporting elements of the ritual came to be. One of them was a mind-altering drug given to the human sacrifice prior to binding them to a dragon, to ease the process and make it appear altogether less gruesome due to reduced screaming, which occasionally was observed to indicate some last-minute indecision on the part of the honoured sacrifice. I noted a supply of said drug on the table. A solution was swiftly forming in my mind.
To shift, one must be conscious. And it just so happens that the mind-altering drug had a similar effect to being knocked out, when it came to being able to open the shift gate and change between bodies. I quietly grabbed a syringe, filled it and gave the signal. My partners in crime took hold of Kuro and I plunged the needle into his neck, emptying it just before he snapped out of his initial shock and began to change forms.
The shimmer of the shift gate opening soon died away, dispersed by Kuro's sudden inability to focus. He turned around, furious, but already his movements were jerky from intoxication. "You... you'd betray your own kind? Do you have any idea what you have done?" He tried to lunge at me, but was held still. We hauled him into a storage room, bound his hands and barricaded the door. It would do; the drug would take a while to wear off, long enough for us to get away. No permanent harm done. Despite knowing this, I still shivered at feeling his groping attempts to call out to me with his mind while swearing some of the most horrible oaths upon us that I had ever heard.
It was high time we made our exit. The two picked up the binding device and the necessary supplies for the ritual, and we left the building. Once outside, we split our ways: I would be too easy to track down in their company, and all our chances of survival were better if I could simply focus on keeping myself under the radar until I was strong enough to put up a fight again. The humans and the device headed to the cover of the trees, while I would take the shortest route out.
I set out to climb the steep, winding path out of the valley. The downside of this route was that I could at any time look back and see the house we came out of; I could not stop myself from nervously glancing back every now and then, even though Kuro would most definitely stay out of it for hours, with the dose I had given him.
My guilt-fuelled intuition was correct this time, however. By the time I had made it over the top ledge, a final glance back revealed a speck of a figure outside the small house, against all reason. I realized that I was in clear view against the bright sky.
It felt like a ball of lead had just settled itself into my gut. I might have hoped to not have been seen, but the slight groping feeling from a mind searching for mine revealed that his attention was on me. Nevertheless, I reflexively ducked low and started a mad dash for cover.
I did not make it far before I could hear the flapping sound of great wings. Kuro, who had recovered his dragon form all too soon, was just clearing the ledge. His shadow passed my vision before I could see him before me.
I stumbled into a halt as he gracefully landed a few steps away, his blueish-black scales gleaming in the sunlight. In his dragon form, Lord Kuro was the embodiment of raw power. I furtively tried to apply reason against the terror that such close proximity to a fully-grown drake had on all human bodies, but it was simply overwhelming. My knees turned to jelly, and I could not help but retreat a few steps.
He let out a bellowing roar. "Show your real face, traitor, and fight me for your puny life!" He lifted a foreleg and pushed it against my chest threateningly, his talons separated from my frantically beating heart by nothing but a fragile ribcage.
"I-I would obey, Lord Kuro, but my other body is b-badly wounded. I would likely not remain conscious for long." My voice was pathetically shrill in my ears, trembling and weak.
By remaining in my secondary form rather than responding to his demand to fight him in a theoretically even duel, I would die without honour. It would be slightly better than to shift only to pass out before my opponent, as he would be even more furious for being denied his kill.
To my surprise, Lord Kuro expressed his frustration by simply giving me a minor shove that sent me stumbling on my backside. "Hrmph. To be caught off guard by such a bunch of incompetents! I have spent too much time out here." He took a few steps and moved his scaly face close to mine, locking my eyes with a piercing stare. "You will tell me what the purpose of this excursion was, then I will decide on a suitable form of eternal torture for you, fledgling schemer."
Author's Note: Thanks for reading! I've got the second and final chapter mostly plotted, but in need of some more work before I can post it. (Putting On My Otter Shirt will be a longer epic, containing the quote from the top.) Minor edits to this chapter and the next one Apr'12 based on reviews, thank you!