It was her fault. “Damn, damn, damn. I was so stupid!” She hissed to herself. The glittering black scales both reflected and absorbed the light around them as the small snout of the dragon looked back at her, smokey translucent wings flapping quickly as it carried the sleek dark blue and green egg it was protecting. Dark eyes hazy with pain as they try to outrun the men and women chasing them. She could not let the hunters get the dragon or the egg. Onyx dragons were the most gentle, fragile dragons, far too easy to hurt. There is a reason that the Onyx dragons were almost extinct. Hunters spend their lives finding the rare and exotic creatures of the universe. They trap, steal, kill and sell them to the highest bidders. Some creatures are worth more alive, like dragons, others are hunted for their parts. These men had found the egg, the blue and green egg in the dragon’s claws and thought that it was a dragon egg. It’s not, she could tell by the markings what it was. This poor creature would be slaughtered for parts as soon as they hatched. That was why she had taken the egg, but she had been stupid, careless. She had left a trail and the hunters found not only the egg but a dragon. Her dragon. She had walked into the room on the transport to find the nets that hunters use for transporting large prey partially assembled, the men and women having stepped out for something, she could hear their voices down the hall. It took only a glance for her to see why they had felt secure enough to leave the dragon and egg alone, several metal barbs were lodged in the dragon’s body, sending massive amounts of electricity through the creature making him unable to move. The egg lay on the ground near the nets.
She saw red, how dare they do this. The electrical shocks may not be able to kill the dragon but it could and would do serious, maybe permanent damage. Hovering around were the blurry indistinct shapes of the departed that did not feel ready to pass on and chose to stay with the calming, soothing presence of an Onyx dragon. One of them had gone to fetch her, that was why she had come back before they managed to move the dragon and the egg to another part of the ship, a more secure part. She knew that she needed to act fast, they had to get out before the transport breached the planet’s atmosphere. The hazy shapes moved to cover her and the dragon, one of the unknown benefits of being connected to an Onyx dragon was that these spirits could lend their assistance when they felt like it. In this case they really felt like it, the dramatic lack of Onyx dragons left in existance has created a severe imbalance among the dead. The Onyx dragons were created to allow the dead to find comfort and passage to the next life. With so few of them left the spirits of the dead tend to be irritable and almost savagely protective of them.
The spirits threw themselves onto her and the dragon. They gave her enough protection to pry off enough of the electrical spurs to break the current, and the others gave the dragon enough strength to move through the pain and damage and pick up the egg and fly through the door to get down the hall. They had barely cleared the door before the hunters noticed their missing prey and gave chase. This is how she found herself running down the hall of a moving transport trying to find a launch bay to drop them out before they got too high to escape. One of the hunters, a large man with blonde hair going slightly silver, loaded a canister into some long-range launcher and took aim. Dread filled her heart as seconds later she heard a deep scream in front of her, her feet slipping momentarily on blood. She desperately wanted to know what damage they had done but couldn’t afford to take her attention off of the men and women giving chase and the walls for a launch bay. It was another minute when she saw the sign proclaiming that the launch bay was a few meters ahead down the next hallway. Yelling out directions in a language that was long dead she made the turn mere seconds after her companion. The men and women had split up, probably to try to box them in. She scanned the walls for the button she knew would open the door in the bay. She had to get them open, if it was the last she did. A scaly dark figure collapsed into the bay and she caught sight of the controls. The blonde man who had shot the canister was now holding a small gun in his hand. She locked eyes with the man and knew that she only had one shot at this. She ran full tilt at the control button, the man saw her and took aim, locking eyes she took in every detail she could. She knew that if she ever came across this man again she would kill him. The last thing she thought before the shot went through her head was the hope that the momentum would be enough to get them to safety.
No matter how many times they had gone through this it never became any less magical. Never before had the need to get back been so urgent. As always the spirit realm was beautiful and terrible. As if sensing the sheer panic in this particular soul, an outbound soul who was not ready to rejoin the living gave them their body. The Guardian, those who regulated the flow of life and death, did the exchange in record time. This was far from the first time that they had been in this position, there is always a soul who was not ready to go back and was willing to give them the body they would have had. The guardian then did some strange spooky otherworldly magic that always brings them back to their other half, starting over at the age where they had first met. Fear for the wounded dragon and helpless egg made the progress of being reborn feel far far too slow. Once they had found it strange how their body became the one that the other soul was assigned, they had become many different species, and had switched between being different sexes enough that it no longer bothered them. Through the hazy mist of the guardian’s magic they took stock of their current body, they were a bipedal species, human most likely, and he was male this time. Despite being very adaptable to whatever was available, male human was the skin he was most comfortable in. It was after all the skin he had been born with all those many years ago. He took stock of his body and facilities as the mist of the magic began to fade and he gained control of his body. As soon as the magic faded and he could move he wasted no time in searching for his partner.
Fear that he had been too slow in the transport and that they had been captured. A quick scan of his environment showed him that they were not in custody, they were most likely still on the planet they had been trying to leave when the hunters had found them. The large trees and thick canopy overhead gave them cover and told him that they had made it back to the ground. He vaguely registered that the egg had been submerged in the small pond near them, but all of his attention was on the bloody burned body of the Onyx dragon. “No, no, no, no, no” he whispered, kneeling by the dragon’s limp head. It looked as if that canister the blonde man had fired had held some kind of acid, the bleeding burns that scoured the small body. The dragon was not much larger than a teenage human. Even in his small young new body the dragon was not much larger than him. He cradled the delicate black head in his lap, tears running down his face. Slowly the deep brown and black eyes opened to look at him. The joy was evident even through the haze of pain. “I am so so sorry.” He whispered, “This was my fault. They followed me onto that transport. Remember our promise, together to the end and beyond. I will stay with you in this life and follow you into the next. I know that these injuries won’t kill you, but that they hurt so much. It is your choice, if you choose to lay an egg and start that next adventure I will be there with you all the way. You and me, they promised.” He stroked a hand gently over the head of who was the other half of his existence as tears fell down his face and waited to see what they would do next.
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