Calder awoke to a steady chirping, originating from down at the foot of the bed. This was nothing new. Ever since moving into the Dojo campus, the five Elite Flyers and various other flock members had been rotating between sleeping in the Zebulon house and sleeping in the new dorm room. So the chirping wasn't new.
However, they'd been getting much bolder when it came to begging for breakfast at such an early hour. Especially the Elites. Fucking teenagers.
Calder grumbled and pulled the sheet up over her head.
The chirping advanced, as did the feeling of little clawed feet skittering up her legs. One pair stopped at her hip, while the other ventured as far as her waist. With foggy early-morning brain, Calder couldn't remember who in the hell was bunking with her tonight. Definitely two of the teenage boys, but the handful of them were the most frequent visitors of the dorm, since the number of adults in the flock was dwindling and the number of babies still quite high. Basically, Puff was all alone in the Zebulon house with five babies and two pre-teens that weren't even his. Calder knew he hadn't been getting as much to eat, and less sleep, and the poor thing was just so stressed...
Puff either needed a girlfriend to take up the mantle of flock Matriarch, or he needed a few less heads to watch over.
Well... Calder was awake now. Someone had moved all the way up to her neck and proceeded to continue chirping at full volume right in her ear. She pushed the sheet away from her face and gave the perp a glare. It was Moon. Of course it was. It was always Moon.
"Shitstain," Calder growled, shutting the juvie well and truly up. "You're gonna eat last." She shoved him from his little perch on her shoulder and sent the other resident--an equally young and dumb green dragon known affectionately as "Forest you dumb fuck"--flying in a nice arc from her calf to the floor. Calder rolled her eyes at the thud and the squawk, and wondered not for the first time what in the hell fifteen-year-old Eileen was even thinking when she first shared her ham sandwich with Puff.
***
She resolved to stay in the house for the morning. Puff deserved a break, after all. While the Patriarch was enjoying a full belly (Calder had sent Moon and Forest outside to hunt grasshoppers and given their portions of turkey to Puff) and a nap, she went about tallying up the number of babies and brainstorming ideas on how to take care of them. She knew she needed to move some of the younger dragons into her dorm, maybe just so they could sleep there under her watch instead of Puff's, but that left the issue of how to get them there and back safely, easily, and quickly. Because she was not interested in flying a ninety-minute bus service every day at seven am.
Which led to the current moment, where Jet was nestled between the horns on the crown of her head while she kneeled beside her bed and stared down at a small closed gift box. Its contents were cushioned safely within several layers of tissue paper, and Calder regretted the fact that it was her only real option for change.
She opened the box and pulled aside some of the layers of paper. The talisman within stared back.
It was frustrating, but it was the only way.
***
"Whatcha doing, rookie?" An innocent-enough voice asked. She turned around to see another girl, early or mid 20's with vibrant blonde hair and eyes that matched.
"Shifting some things around," Calder said. "I'm moving my youngest dragons in here so I can watch them at night." She dropped a pile of well-loved blankets in a corner of the small room. The wicker basket filled with five baby dragons cooed at the return of their favorite blankets.
That wasn't the only sound of happiness. From the doorway, the unfamiliar duelist was squealing with delight, and that was attracting more of the basket's attention. They were now trying to climb out--over each other mostly--and say hello to the new person.
Calder picked Anora up from where he'd faceplanted on the bedspread and set him back in the basket. She pushed the others back away from the edges and said sternly: "Stay." The climbing stopped, but the little chirps and squeaks and the squirming around did not.
Now Calder beckoned to the girl. "Come say hi," she said. The girl went starry-eyed and rushed over, offering nose scritches and incohesive baby talk while Calder did her best to set up the blankets in the most out-of-danger corner the room had to offer.
"I'm Violet, by the way. It's nice to finally get to meet you," the new girl said in a normal voice. "Usually it doesn't take me two weeks before I can introduce myself."
"Almost three weeks," Calder corrected. "Nice to meet you, Violet. How long have you been a member?"
"A couple years. 2017, maybe? It's been good." Violet rambled for a couple minutes, about living in Aegis and arriving here and complaining about the walk, then transitioned into advice on meeting people. Calder kept quiet while she listened and continued unpacking the box of dragon stuff she'd moved in from Zebulon earlier in the morning. Violet's normal conversational tone was intermittently broken up by bouts of baby talk, when the squeaking from the basket crescendoed and it sounded like multiple someones were trying to escape. Whatever incoherent babble Violet used, it worked, and the noise from the basket subsided for another minute or so before picking up.
Calder had been so absorbed in Violet's chatter that she hadn't even realized she'd unpacked everything but the final box. It sat nice and quiet in her hands, and it wasn't until Violet gestured to the box and asked "what's in that one?" that Calder realized what she was holding.
She cracked open the box, and the eye peered out from underneath the tissue paper. "Ahhhh... a special talisman," she fumbled, slapping the box closed and tossing it onto the bed. "It's part of the reason I can call the dragons without being anywhere near them."
"What's the other reason?" Violet asked, reaching for the box.
Calder grabbed the box before Violet could get there and shoved it in a half-open drawer. "Me," she said as she slammed the drawer closed. "And I had that talisman commissioned years ago. I have no idea how it works or what might potentially break it, and I can't afford to have it broken. It's also freaky." She scooped Anora out of the basket and cradled his teeny black body in her hands before setting him down on the new blanket pad. He fluttered a pair of iridescent rainbow wings uselessly and settled in for a nap.
"You seriously think me taking a look would break a magic token?" Violet asked. Calder shot her an unimpressed look, complete with one eyebrow raised as she rose from a crouch. Cinder's little green and purple nose stuck itself out of the basket for scritches. Calder complied before scooping him up and leaving him with Anora.
"I'm not risking it," Calder insisted. "Can't afford to lose it. I need a hub for these guys to sleep and eat, and a shortcut directly to that hub. Otherwise they'll get scattered all over the globe again."
"What do you mean again?"
"Most of the flock weren't native to wherever I picked them up. They'd portaled themselves randomly into a habitat they couldn't survive, or were being hunted, or whatever. If I ask them to portal anywhere other than 'to me' without an anchorpoint, they'll get scattered again." She swallowed around a lump in her throat and set Saffire down on the blankets where her siblings were waiting. "I can't have that."
Violet was quiet for a moment. She absentmindedly stroked Slinky's back scales while Calder tried to corral Jet out of the bathroom and into the cuddle pile.
"When did you realize you were their mom?" Violet asked. Calder emerged from the bathroom, with a little black aquatic dragon burritoed in a washcloth. She set him down with the others.
"When I had to start separating fights."
Violet snorted. Calder perched on the edge of the bed and joined in on the 'let's pet Slinky' trend.
"Seriously. As soon as there were just two juvies, I had to separate them all the time. Here, it was these two dubasses." She outstretched an arm and a single portal opened, depositing two dragons one after another into the room. They perched on Calder's arm and immediately started hassling each other for the space.
Calder pursed her lips and looked on with disappointment. She glanced at Violet and sighed. Violet giggled from behind her hand. Gold and Moon kept bickering.
"Alright, you idiots, that's enough." The draconic waved her arm around, shaking the two juvies from their perch. "Go home." Moon went first, and Gold shrieked and scrambled to make it through the portal before it closed. He just barely made it. The portal closed with its usual rushing-wind sound, and Calder opened her mouth to make a snarky comment.
The wind rushed again, and two dragons emerged from the bathroom doorway, careening one after another into the wall ahead of them. Neither girl made a move.
"What was that?" A voice on the other side of the wall yelled.
"Fuck," Calder muttered, hovering over her options. "I, uh... I threw a dragon at the wall. Accidentally," she yelled back, hoping to be heard. Incoherent muttering could be discerned from the other side of the wall. Calder turned back to Violet, who was staring at the heap of juvies on the floor. The babies were also staring.
"I thought you told them--"
"To go home," Calder interrupted. "Yeah. But the anchorpoint's here now. This is what their brains think is home now." She swallowed as Moon and Gold stirred and very rapidly graduated to wrestling on the ground, right next to the pile of babies.
This was bad. This was so, so bad.
***
She wasn't surprised when the new situation culminated in an intervention a mere two mornings later. What would've been a generally quiet Thursday dedicated to training was overturned during breakfast.
It started with Violet. She came down to the courtyard while Calder was feeding the flock and asked if the draconic duelist would come back up to the ladies' floor when she was done. Calder nodded and took this as a good excuse to split the last chunk of the two hamsteaks between Puff and Lucky, and tell Icy to go hunt for himself as punishment for causing a ruckus at three am last night. She gathered the portal-less babies up in her arms and shooed everyone else away for the day, threatening them with Icy's fate tomorrow if they caused trouble. The air was too still when the exodus finished and all the portals rushed closed.
Violet held the door open for Calder to enter. The two girls attracted little attention from the inhabitants of the lowest floor as they slipped upstairs.
As they passed the fourth floor, Calder spoke up again.
"So about this intervention," she said, "How high up the ladder have the complaints gone?"
"They haven't left the fifth floor," Violet said. "And they won't go any further if we can figure out some kind of solution."
"Yeah," Calder huffed. Violet heaved open the stairwell door. "Easy-peasy. Let me just materialize another glass eye out of absolutely nowhere!" The babies in her arms were the only things keeping her from throwing her hands into the air out of frustration.
"What's a glass eye do?" a new voice asked. Calder snapped to attention and faced the contents of the common room. Every resident of East Floor Five had gathered and made herself comfortable somewhere among the furniture.
Calder stared at them. They all stared back, waiting for an answer. Violet calmly slipped into the painting, looking on expectantly. Calder opened her mouth.
"Lemme go get it," she said, scooting off to her dorm.
She basically tossed her babies down on their blanket pad and pulled on the bedside drawer so hard she almost yanked it right out of the cabinet. She grabbed the box containing the eye and didn't bother closing the drawer before sprinting out of the room again, nearly crashing into the wall on her way back to the common room.
"This," she declared, slamming the box down on the coffee table, "is a glass eye. It's a talisman, custom-crafted to focus psychic energy from the soul and act as a beacon for Farplane-traveling creatures. I had it made in some town in Hythia while I was passing through about six years ago."
One of the girls--an albino-blonde--lifted the lid from the box and pulled aside the top layer of tissue paper. A heavy silence settled as a replica of Calder's iris and contracted pupil stared unflinchingly up at the ceiling.
"Didn't take you for someone into the occult," someone remarked dryly. Calder glanced in the direction of the voice to see Yullis, the grumpy indigo bookworm from her first Saturday, staring at the unblemished lump of glass on the table.
The draconic sighed, and flopped down on the couch behind her. The space was suspiciously empty. "It's the only thing that keeps the flock tethered to any one spot. Take it away, and they'll portal away randomly and I'll never see any of them again."
"Could you get another one?" Someone asked. Calder almost shook her head, instead opting to shrug.
"I'd have to go back to Hythia."
"Maybe not." There was suddenly a laptop open on the table and the sound of someone typing furiously on the keys. Calder raised an eyebrow at the hasty action but would never admit to the group that she was in the same boat. There were too many dragons making noise inside the Dojo living quarters.
"Four results," the laptop operator declared. "South Point, Eldra; Lancast, Retten; Moreover, Hythia..." A pause. "You should aim for one of those three. The last one is on the coast."
"The Cierran coast?"
A nod from the laptop bearer. A shrug from Calder.
"Well, that's better than going all the way up to Retten. Which direction do I need to fly?"
The computer girl opened her mouth and glanced warily at her neighbors. "It's... the Eternum Coast," she said.
"Isn't that the close one?"
"It's Eternum Coast."
"And what's so bad about that?!" Calder yelped. "At worst, it's a couple hundred miles and it takes three days. I miss the weekend fights but everybody sleeps better afterward. What's wrong with that?"
"It's not the coast itself that everyone is worried about," Violet said, placing a hand on Calder's shoulder and guiding her back to a more relaxed position. "It's how you'd need to fly over the forest."
"There's freaky shit that lives out there," Yullis said.
"Freaky shit capable of eating me out of the air?"
"...Probably not."
"I rest my case. I can get going now--" she rose from the couch, taking her glass eye as she went- "And be there before dark. What's the name of the town?"
The girl with the laptop fumbled and eventually coughed up the name 'Hauterfeld.' Calder nodded and retreated to her room.
As soon as the door shut, the pile of juveniles perked up and stared at her. Calder heaved a sigh that was mostly shoulders, and started throwing stuff that seemed important into a small hiking backpack. Wallet, small pre-packaged snacks, her earbuds because it was bound to get boring, a water bottle that needed to be refilled. She snapped a picture of her glass eye with her phone and closed its box, carefully setting it back in its safe drawer. She swapped out her ratty tennis shoes for the pair of nice hiking boots she'd bought with Fay at the beginning of the month and pulled on her dad's lined park ranger jacket over her tee shirt.
She exited the room and marched out to the kitchenette, ignoring the multiple sets of eyes that followed her from the center of the room.
"Are you leaving now?" Violet asked.
Calder grunted and slapped the faucet on, staring at it as her bottle filled. "Best to get it done with. I have a while before dark. How far is it, three hundred miles?"
"Just about," said the girl who was still pouring over her laptop and twirling a lock of hair around her finger.
"Six or seven hours in the air. Another couple to make the eye. I can portal back here and wind up outside. Two hours to Zebulon."
"You'll be back late as shit," Yullis finished the mental math when the gears in Calder's brain failed to do the computation. IF I decide to sleep in Aegis, Calder thought.
"Thanks." The draconic slapped the faucet again to turn it off and wrenched the screw-top lid closed. "Any final tips?"
"Be prepared to not land in the forest. Especially after dark," Violet said. "That's mostly it."
"Yeah. Seeya tomorrow." Calder chucked her water bottle in her bag and slung it over her shoulder, whistling for an airborne dragon on the way. The door opened and slammed shut, and then the common room finally began breathing again.
Violet still sat tense. She registered someone standing right at the corner of her vision, and patted the spot beside her on the couch. Khireas sat down.
"I know it's not gonna happen to her," Violet said unprompted, "but it's happened to enough people for me to worry."
Khireas shuffled and pulled her coat closed a little tighter. "She's a fire user with an easy escape," the glacial fighter replied. "And she's scary. She'll be fine."
***
Calder mentally kicked herself when she thought back to the last time she'd asked Moon for a long-distance ride and came up with that short-lived sprint after the plane-thieving bastard Rita had sent to Zebulon in March. She sighed and settled in for the flight while Moon picked up speed and fell into a rhythm of his own. He could fly at semi-high speeds for an hour or two with his usual lightweight passenger, but after that mark it'd be someone else's turn to fly for a leg of the trip. Probably Cloud. He was the biggest juvie and could carry more for longer.
But for now, she just closed her eyes and let the wind push all the hair out of her face as the ominous swampy forest rushed by below her.
***
Forest was actually the one to land at the village, after Cloud had finished a full shift and retreated to the dorm to rest. The present green-scaled dragon landed on a rocky outcropping and let both himself and his passenger soak up the view.
The town was rickety, for lack of any better word. Ramshackle houses were built from flat slabs of rough metamorphic stone and wet, sickly wood. Half of the buildings were sat right up against the edge of the cliff and looked ready to jump. The edge of a staircase seemed to be carved into the cliff to the right, weathered by time and footsteps. A perpetual fog hung over the trees and swamp grasses behind the dragon-rider duo, and seeped between the jagged outcroppings of rock that acted as a buffer between woods and civilization.
Calder dismounted from her lift and wrinkled her nose at the smell of salt in the air. She waved Forest off to go home and began picking her way down the jagged spearhead rocks that kept the people away from the woods.
People, expectedly, stared at her as she emerged from the mess of outcroppings. She ignored them except to ask for the location of their occult apothecary. A bewildered man pointed off into the distance, at a shack precariously balanced on a skinny spike of the cliff that extended out as if pointing towards the ocean beyond. Calder thanked him and started walking.
The boards of the stairs creaked and threatened to fail under her weight and the extent of the mold. The whole house reeked of health and safety violations that would give Jade an aneurysm. After making sure that the deck wouldn't drop her into a bottomless pit, Calder pulled the door open and was immediately assaulted by the smell of rotting flesh.
Various animal and fish carcasses hung on strings from rafter to rafter, some salted for eating and others just there for parts. Aside from the slam of the door, the only sound was the quiet grinding of stone against stone.
Calder had to take a full visual sweep of the room before spotting the crone, hunched over at a table in the far corner of the tiny house, grinding something with a mortar and pestle.
The witch looked up slowly, glassy pale eyes settling on Calder's figure and wiry fingers setting down the mortar and pestle. When she spoke, it was at barely a whisper.
"I have never seen you come looking for my services," she hissed, revealing diseased gums and a number of missing teeth.
"I'm not from around here," Calder replied, swallowing her unease. "I need a special talisman replicated."
"You need more of what you have?"
"Yes."
"Let me see."
Calder fished her phone from her jacket pocket as she strode up to the table, pulling up the photo of the eye and setting the phone down on the table. The witch scoffed at the presentation.
"I can't replicate your talisman without it sitting in my palm, young one," she reprimanded. "You seem to think you understand the occult, yet you make foolish assumptions."
Calder closed her eyes and sighed out the frustration. She snapped her fingers, looked over her shoulder, and called, "Gold, be a dear and bring me the eye from home. Tell everyone else not to move until I get back."
Dutifully, he went. He showed up after about thirty seconds of awkward silence, save for the grinding of the witch's mortar and pestle. The box was awkwardly held in his undersized claws, and he fumbled it straight into Calder's waiting hands. Gold disappeared into his foster mom's backpack while she unpacked the box.
"Ahh, much better," the witch wheezed, setting down her mortar and taking the eye in her palm. "What craftsmanship. Where did you have it made?"
"A village on the northern coast of Hythia. The woman claimed to be a medium."
"A medium?" the witch hobbled over to a wall covered from floor to ceiling with shelves and filled to the brim with bottles and baskets.
"Yeah, and then she went ahead and told me that the glass eye channeled energy from my soul to the Farplane or something, and she had to explain what the Farplane was and how it worked because it was the first I'd heard of it."
"Do you believe in ghosts?" the witch asked, with a glimmer in her eye that Calder couldn't quite decipher.
"No," Calder said bluntly. "I think after we die, we die and that's it. At least, that's all I'm hoping for."
"You are unsubscribed to any religion," the witch concluded, sitting down at her table again, this time with a handbasket filled with little bottles of colored liquids, powders, and slime.
"Exactly."
"Find a chair, young one, and watch me work. Someday you may be an occult creator yourself."
Calder blinked and stood there doubting that statement for a minute before grabbing the nearest stool she could find and sitting down. By some miracle, it held her weight.
The witch talked about this and that as she mixed liquids and powders together in bowls and bottles, pricked Calder's finger for blood just like the Hythian medium had done, and altogether looked like she was making gelatin more than a hard glass. It was nice to actually see the process this time though, since the medium had merely taken the blood sample and pushed Calder out into the waiting room for two hours before emerging with a perfect replica of her iris. This witch had some kind of faith in the draconic's future that the draconic herself didn't take any interest in. But for her own integrity, Calder held on to as many words as possible. Over time, the conversation drifted from the work on the table.
"Have you heard the tale of the Great Wither Tree, young one?"
"I'll admit that I haven't," Calder said.
The witch chuckled. "You are sheltered. Did your parents shelter you?"
"I sheltered myself. Was this event recent?"
"Yes, it was. A great being rose from the depths of the swamp and lumbered its way toward us on the coast. Some of those young ones from this 'Aegis' stepped in the way of the beast, but they were just barely overpowered. The Great Wither Tree now lies asleep on the barrier between the cliffs and the forest, dormant."
"Dormant is better than alive and walking around, don't you think?"
"I suppose. But consider this, young one. What will Aegis do when the Wither Tree awakens and begins lumbering around again? They couldn't stop it the first time."
Calder considered this. There was a lot to unpack, ranging from how long the Tree might stay dormant to how many people were willing to stand up to it if it ever did. She must have been silent for a while, because the witch started staring at her with a strange mischievous and knowing glint in her eye.
"I don't bet on the future," Calder said. "But I know that a lot of the duelists from Aegis are sick of being soldiers."
"Oh?" the witch turned halfway back to the careful glasswork. "How so?"
"I am one."
The old woman turned back to meet Calder's steely gaze, and then burst out laughing. "You? Ah, my dear, you are tiny! You are no soldier, no army would take you!"
"Hyun's Dojo isn't an army," Calder ground out through clenched teeth. "They're just people who can fight for themselves."
The witch chuckled, light twinkling in her dead eyes for the first time in the last two hours. "A hidden spitfire, you are. I see now."
"I only hide it around strangers," Calder said, brushing her bangs away from her face. "I don't have any reason to hide it back in Aegis."
The witch said nothing more. She simply unbolted the mold on the table and pulled it open to reveal the completed eye, still making the air around it shimmer with latent heat from the chemical reaction.
With the counterpart sitting on the table, it stared up and matched the gaze of its owner. She swallowed her unease. "How do I need to pay you?" she asked.
The witch grinned like this was her favorite part of the process and hurried to a corner of the shack covered in empty glass casings. She picked one and returned to Calder's side.
"Spit," she said, shoving the petri dish up in the draconic's face.
"You do this for everyone or just the ones that spit kerosene and other weird shit?" Calder asked, pushing the dish out of her face and taking it. She spat.
"How long does it burn?" the witch asked, taking the dish back and closing it up.
"A minute or so. Long enough for me to punch someone."
The witch cackled giddily and retreated to another shelf. "You've done all you need for me," she said. "Get going, before dark. Those trees were never called the Dead Forest for nothing. Now scoot, and send my regards to your little ones."
Calder took both of her glass eyes--one of them still warm to her touch--and breathed in a huge gulp of fresh, salty air when she escaped the decaying inside of the witch's shack.
The sun was still well above the horizon, but this time of year meant only about an hour of daylight left. The flight would take seven hours with no anchorpoint in the East.
Calder yelled for Icy. Best to start with the smaller dragons when they'd need to ride along after completing a shift.
***
Icy didn't even last an hour. Stupid little wimp landed without warning fifty seven minutes after take-off and refused to get up. Time wasted away and the last of the sunlight dipped below the horizon as Calder tried to rouse him and get him back in the air, to no avail.
A loud snap from somewhere in the forest ended the ranting and raving. Calder felt her fight or flight set in as little eyes from various cryptid wildlife glowed through the blades of tall grass.
She slapped Icy across the back of the head one more time and yelled for Puff. He could make it the remaining six hours.
A giant green hand reached down through the foliage and plucked her from the ground. A set of jaws attached to the same body clamped around the scruff of Icy's neck and carried him into the air. Calder raised her arms to shield her face from the onslaught of sharp leaves and twigs as the forest made one last attempt to detain her.
It was over soon, and she felt the wind in her hair again as Puff dropped Icy through a size-down portal and raised his foreleg to let Calder climb from his claw to his neck. She settled in and got to work on calming her breathing. Icy returned and perched on her backpack, only to immediately climb in through an open pocket and fall asleep.
At least they'd learned a lesson. Don't send a dragon on an endurance mission when they'd only had grasshoppers for breakfast.
***
Sometime around midnight, Calder spared a glance down at the uninterrupted sea of trees and grass, only to catch sight of an interruption. A perfect circle of slightly-less-grown foliage and downed trees. Puff snarled and picked up the pace.
Aegis was in sight a minute later, and Calder still hadn't said anything about her gentle giant's weird behavior.
She leapt from her Patriarch dragon's back and landed on the roof of her dorm building, still wondering what the hell that clearing had meant.
She told Puff to keep circling. She wanted to sleep in Zebulon tonight.
The fifth floor was utterly still and quiet save for the humming of kitchen appliances. The only light was the small orange LED lamp that stayed on over the sink throughout the night. Calder tiptoed her way down the hall to her room, slipped in to drop off Icy, Gold, and one of the eyes, and slipped out without rousing any dragons or neighbors. She retreated to the roof and leapt off.
Puff caught her.
Ninety minutes to Zebulon.
***
For the first time in a long time, Calder McKaye woke up on her own volition. For the first time in a long time, she rolled over and came face-to-face with her clock reading a time later than 8 am. Puff was curled up down at the foot of the bed, still blissfully asleep.
She'd need to get up and go out for the flock's breakfast soon. They wouldn't wait much longer before storming the Zebulon house.
Eh, let 'em. Life was good right now. She could drag it out as long as she wanted. She rolled back over and pulled the sheets up again.
Puff purred down at the foot of the bed. Being Patriarch was a taxing job, after all.
It was nice to finally have a break.