The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Twenty-One

Ptoleria sat astride one of the five open-air, two-seater skyships that streaked towards the vast maw of the landing bay of the mighty Olympidrome platform landing pad that dominated Ometh Nastreq's vertical horizon line. She and her entourage flew towards the heart of the densely populated, baroque-architected city, to where the Olympidrome was located, following the sweeping path The Dragon flew, his vast wings beating the air. They passed under the noisy static chatter of a brick-red and flamingo-pink writhing air current that was several dozen leagues in length and at least three leagues wide.

Ptoleria stared enwrapt at the bunched, corded muscles in Zhe'kae-Chah 's broad back as they flexed, powering his flight. He was, to her mind, magnificent.

The Belflaegor Stream sizzled its way across the lower altitudes beneath the darkening sky's anemic cloudbanks as it wound its curling, twisting way seaward.

It, the Belflaegor Stream, was an eerie atmospheric anomaly specific to the skies over the longitude and latitude that contained the city-state of Ometh Nastreq that ran through length and breadth of the Pang Xa'Omathra region of Qundin. A jetstream of rushing air that was perpetually sixty to seventy degrees higher in temperature than the air surrounding it, the stream ran southwest to northeast at a speed of two hundred and forty kilometers an hour, bisecting the atmosphere over the continent's coastal land mass at a thirty-eight degree angle to the equator. The Belflaegor Stream birthed multiple litters of ball lightning, literal clusters of spherical electrical discharges that chaotically dispersed from conical light cocoons, every three to six hours, as time was measured on distant planet Earth. The towering, skyscraper-tall Light-Hoops of Ometh Nastreq, web-work girder structures scattered throughout the city's nine districts, attracted and collected the ball lightning before it could randomly discharge its energy after impacting against other structures in the metropolis' jagged skyline. This was how Ometh Nastreq got its electrical power, storing the energy it did not use in translucent, three-story tall crystal conduits filled with a rare, thinly viscous, molten metal that absorbed the charged particles into temporary stasis. In this way they kept their energy needs independent from the technological dominance of their antagonistic neighbor, Peravendath.

The sound of the quick clay-siphoning qre'thwyll pumps dozens of stories below grew louder as the five craft formation came inside the retractable roof-hood of the platform landing pad and, using their vertical takeoff and landing stabilization jets, settled atop the marked tarmac and wound down their engines. Ometh Nastreq was built upon a series of interlocking, stacked, lenticular terrace plates set atop a rhomboid foundation in a quick clay quagmire, called "qre'thwyll", on the seacoast. The angles of the foundation's parallelogram configuration kept the malleable quick clay, a glaciomarine clay-type so structurally unstable that when it is subjected to sufficient stress, the substance's behavior sometimes transitions from that of a particulate material to that of a fluid, allowed vibratory stresses that would normally deliquesce into thick, sludgy mud to reconstruct back into firmer soil. The top-offset plate-stack that comprised the rest of the metropolis' foundation allowed for a limited degree of shimmy and twist that was negated as the motion went through the stack, thus keeping the city firmly stable. At the height of the towering Olympidrome and at the prodigious, soaring heights of the lightning-catching Light-Hoops, the motion of the ground was too faint to be felt.

Landing atop the platform deceptively lightly despite his muscular body mass, Zhe'kae-Chah was greeted by a coterie of diplomats and high-ranking soldiers while he folded and collapsed his immense wings into the shapes of a pair of scythes resting down the length of his back.

After emerging from the cabin of the flittership that had carried her down from Zhe'kae-Chah's subterranean palace on The Ke'Tareveel, Ptoleria cautiously observed the interactions of the smaller, more frail human denizens of Ometh Nastreq with The Dragon. She wondered whether or not they were aware of what they did and how they moved, surrounding him and remaining out of arm's reach, shifting and trading positions with one another as they walked with him, as if to make certain the mighty reptile-hybrid could not maintain solitary focus on any single one of them, slowly waving their arms and hands in non-threatening gestures, revealing they carried no weapons, so as not to threaten or antagonize him ... treating him like he was some wild, exotic beast as opposed to showing him the respect due a learned and intelligent ruler of a sovereign nation. They only barely followed the common rules of diplomatic and political etiquette, acting like little rodent-folk, like a worrisome pack of furry hive animals in the presence of a predator. She slowly drew in a deep breath and gradually released it, exhaling away her tension, disapproval and smoldering anger at their unconscious mammalian disrespect. She so much wanted her liege to allow her to bare her sharp and pointed teeth, to extend the knife-edged nails retracted into the cuticle-slits in her superhumanly-strong, talon-like fingers, and be unleashed upon them, allowed to tear at their flesh. They deserved a painful death.