Amson
(#15191476)
Level 25 Bogsneak
Familiar
Disappearing Pisces
Click or tap to view this dragon in Predict Morphology.
Energy: 0/50
This dragon’s natural inborn element is Arcane.
Male Bogsneak
Expand the dragon details section.
Collapse the dragon details section.
Personal Style
Apparel
Skin
Scene
Measurements
Length
1.34 m
Wingspan
1.41 m
Weight
1.69 kg
Genetics
Azure
Skink
Skink
Lemon
Seraph
Seraph
Ice
Runes
Runes
Hatchday
Breed
Eye Type
Level 25 Bogsneak
Max Level
STR
103
AGI
17
DEF
55
QCK
60
INT
5
VIT
32
MND
5
Lineage
Parents
- none
Offspring
- none
Biography
Got Seraph 08/15/17
Got Bog Scroll 04/18/18 - Originally a Tundra
Arcane eggs have a tendency to wander away from their nests. Sometimes this works out alright, landing young adventurers in foreign lands to explore with an Arcanite’s voracious curiosity. Other times, though, fortune rolls its eyes.
Many centuries ago, a vicious radioactive storm that was not at all connected to the Arcanist’s experiments swept through the Starfall Isles and caught an egg in its gales. The egg was carried by flurries of wind and snow towards the Southern Icefield, where it might have hatched into a confused but safe dragon had it reached land. Arcane eggs are, after all, capable of withstanding a hefty bit of rough treatment.
But the winds died. The egg fell to the lulling sea. And everyone knows this - no (non-water) dragon eggs are sturdy enough to protect a hatchling from the frigid, capricious depths of the ocean. Eggs lost at sea are considered dead, and circumstances where the hatchlings within survive are nothing short of miraculous.
It would be the only miracle Amson received.
By the time the young tundra hatched, he was not quite alive, but he wasn’t dead, either. He was somewhere in between, a trait that radiated from him in an unnerving aura, showing in his every mannerism. No predator dared approach the newborn who clung to a driftwood plank, running on instinct and kelp bits alone, and so the currents carried him all the way across to the Southern Icefield.
While the Ice Flight’s territory is known for its brutal cold, the coldness of the dragons there burns still fiercer. No one dared approach Amson, fearful of his aura despite his helplessness. They called him a monster. They said he should have been taken by the sea. They gave him nothing but unkind words he could barely understand and scathing looks he understood the cruelty of fully. So he fled, praying there would be someone out there who would give him warmth.
But, it would have been a miracle, and that second miracle did not come.
No matter where he went, Amson was barred from clans and rejected by travellers, left to fend off bandits alone while holding no knowledge of how to provide for himself. His only choice was to learn how to steal, and he took to it well. So well, in fact, that before long it was the only life he’d ever known.
By adulthood, Amson had amassed a crew, some intimidated into servitude and some inspired by his ruthlessness. Bandits, they were first known as, and when they took to the sea, they were feared as pirates. They worked on a code of fear and power, never sparing a moment for empathy - just as no one had to Amson himself. It was a policy that kept their ship sailing, at least, which was good enough for a long time. Just not forever.
It seemed Amson had control over everything. So what if he was different? So what if others feared him? He used this fear, and used it freely. He enjoyed the terror that made some flee from him, and others to obey him. He had everything in his hands, he thought, and he was, for a while, fiercely happy.
And then he met her.
It was not unusual for the pirates to raid a harbor, and things were going well for the pirates. Though, not so much for the harbor’s residents. Amson, bloodlust as deeply engraved in him as it was, had ordered his crew to raze the harbor to the blood-salted earth. The residents fled, but none escaped. Not one.
At that moment, Amson’s victory seemed inevitable. Why wouldn’t it be? He was always the victor. He inspired fear in everyone and everything. Nothing could stand in his way. Nothing could stand against him.
But she did.
Alone. Defenseless. Sides dripping with blood. Yet she stood there, eyes fierce and fangs bared, wings spread as if to protect the residents huddled behind her. Amson loomed over her, canines dripping with blood, and when she didn’t even twitch, he spoke in a hard growl, every ounce of malice he had in him focused on her: “Move. Or I’ll kill you along with them.”
She didn’t look away. She didn’t back down. She met his eyes and held them unflinchingly.
His eye twitched. His growl rose to a roar. “Move! Don’t you care that you’ll die, too?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Her voice was small, cold. “I’m not alive. I’m not dead, either, I’m in between. I’m an unnatural freak, and everyone here knows it. And they hate me.”
She glanced to the dragons behind her, trembling, then locked her eyes back on his, then took a hard step forward. “They. Hate me. They won’t miss me. But I’ll still protect them from monsters like you.”
Her words hit Amson like a meteor. His eye twitched. His crew watched him, some curious and others fearful, as the stranger continued her speech.
“You’re one, too, aren’t you? You’re like me. We’re both monsters, it’s true. But it doesn’t mean we have to act like ones.”
“... Maybe not. But it won’t stop them from treating us like one.” Amson’s voice had lowered to a soft, menacing growl. “In spite of that, you would protect them? Protect those who hate you?”
She met his gaze evenly. “I will protect those who deserve to be protected.”
All at once, anger - and something else he couldn’t quite describe - clouded his vision. He stayed there only to growl, “Then you are a different monster than me,” before he whirled around, stalking back to his ship and roaring for his crew to abandon the harbor. The lone defender watched him go, the fear she hadn’t shown making her quake for a moment, only for her to make a decision she knew she was more likely to regret than not.
She followed him.
And he caught her.
There was no way a stowaway could last long on Amson’s ship. The security there was far too tight for such things. Even so, the dragoness was canny enough to evade Amson for a while… until he literally crashed into her, disrupting her invisible shield and finding her staring at him with the half-glazed eyes of a dragon between life and death. And for the second time, he was startled, for while no life had ever shown in his eyes, hers were bright and fierce, reaper’s mark and all.
They were far enough from any land that taking her back would be more trouble than it was worth, and walking the plank is pointless for winged dragons. Amson thought about killing her, but for some reason, he didn’t. Instead, he threw her into the ship’s cells and locked her there, telling his crew that if she tried to escape, he’d feed her to the sharks himself.
For the first few weeks, he kept the stranger unfed and let his crew use her for target practice. She never complained, just looked at him with those dead eyes - the eyes too alike his own. She suffered silently, spoke patiently when spoken to, laughed at him when he stalked down to the holding cells to torment her.
“We may be monsters, but we don’t have to act like ones.” She would always say. Always smiling. “Does it make you feel better that you’re doing this? Or do you just believe you have to?”
“You wouldn’t know,” he’d said. “You’ve never been through what I have.”
“I have been discriminated,” she replied. “I have been beaten, hated, chased away, and attacked more times than I can count. I have been left in the cold to starve, to die - ha! If only. I have been tortured. I have been backstabbed. I protected an entire harbor of dragons, I stood up to a dragon not unlike myself, and none of them thanked me. I came after him, to help him, and he told his deranged, seasick lackeys to make me a punching bag. I’ve been through damn near everything, and the list keeps getting longer. And yet, here I am. Still standing.”
She leaned forward. “Do you want to know why?”
He was silent.
“Because while I cannot change my heritage, I can change my legacy. I will always be a monster, but I’m a proud monster, and I won’t let the disgust of others glances define me.”
Amson figured she was absurd. Figured her philosophy was delusional. They were monsters - no one would ever treat them as more. No one would ever be kind, no one would ever understand. No one would ever love a monster.
But she asked him - “Am I delusional? Or hopeful?”
As the months dragged on, as more harbors were raided, as Amson’s bounty went through the roof, he found himself going to her more often, if only to snap at her or vent his rage, having forgotten how he even found her. And yet he started to listen, to really listen to her. She was a monster, but she didn’t mind. She accepted it, she cherished it. She didn’t care what others thought of her, because she chose to be who she was.
Eventually, her words dissolved the frosty barriers around Amson’s heart and mind, and he found himself talking to her about his impressions of his childhood - things he’d never told his closest crew members, for fear that one day they would turn against him. She listened, never to reply, only to understand. And while there were things she admitted she would never understand, she respected him, with the kind of respect that comes through neither power nor fear, but through acceptance.
And he mellowed, like the soft bits of melting snow under the first spring sun. His raids on harbors became more infrequent, then stopped altogether, until he had nearly forgotten they had happened. Finally, he told his crew it was time they made an honest living. Profiting off of others made them no different from leeches, he said, and by the Arcanist’s name, he really hated leeches.
His crew was not pleased. Where had their strong, fearless leader go? Where had the days of looting and pillaging disappeared to? Where were the celebrations after a successful raid? Where were the encouragements and demands that they become more ruthless?
One by one, his crew turned against him, but Amson was oblivious, believing they would find reason in his words. They didn’t, and he found out the hard way: Mutiny.. All at once, Amson found himself pinned down by the magic and brawn of his own furious crew members, determined to kill him and put a more capable leader in his place. They had no use for a soft-hearted monster.
Yet all Amson did was close his eyes. The cruel sound of metal was unbearable, but finally, he knew he didn’t mind. He didn’t mind that he was going to die this way. This was the path he chose, and he didn’t regret it.
Amson figured the cold point of a dagger on his neck was the last thing he’d ever feel, but then that dagger clattered to the ground as the ship rocked, and the sharp scent of blood that wasn’t his filled the air. When Amson’s eyes blinked open, he saw the not-so-stranger dragoness seated on a pile of defeated foes, the rest of the crew members kept back with a magical barrier.
She smiled. “Lesson number one. Metal cages don’t really work on monsters.”
From behind the barrier, one of the pirates snarled - “Don’t meddle. There’s no escape for you. Let us by, and we’ll consider sparing you, yeah?”
“Lesson number two,” she replied cheerily, turning to look across the crew. “I will meddle, whether you want me to or not. Lesson number three: This is a ship, I have wings, and bye.”
A haze of smoke shrouded the ship, blocking light with grey smog. When it cleared, the ex-captive was gone, and so was Amson.
It took a lot of conversation, and a lot of careful prodding on both sides, but the two agreed to travel together, setting their past differences aside in favor of their current similarities. Between Amson’s uncontrollable urge to steal and her intense protective instincts, a perfect solution was found: Vigilantism. Their next attack was on a slave caravan ship - spaceship, mind you, which was new - and it went off without a hitch. That one battle was all they needed for something to become startlingly clear: The two of them were virtually unstoppable together.
And so something wonderful began.
One enemy downed became five, then ten, then they lost count as they spread their own sort of justice through the stars. The world didn’t seem so hateful when they were at each other’s backs, and for once, things were really, truly looking up. Everything made sense. It seemed like a miracle.
But he’s only ever had one.
On one journey, after a successful raid, the two heard of a lab conducting experiments on unhatched eggs. It was said that the scientists involved wanted to produce monsters - dragons half alive, half dead. They wanted to do research on those monstrosities, because all that mattered to them were their research, and not the lives involved.
Amson was enraged beyond rationale. He took to their ship’s control panel and set a fuming course to the lab, without a single plan, without a single thought. The dragoness followed him, moving to pull him away from the controls.
“This isn’t a good idea!” Her eyes darted, hands finding a grip on his shoulder. “We should wait and -”
“How can we wait, when so many lives are at risk?” Amson thundered. “We have to stop those experiments. We can’t let those hatchlings turn out like… like…”
There was understanding in her gaze, along with some reluctance. But still the two went off, together, as they had been since she rescued him.
The guards at the laboratory were no match for them. The researchers, though passionate about their work, were easily beaten. Amson fought his way into the lab, breaking through the walls and supports as needed, until he found the place where the eggs were being incubated.
And the laboratory started to collapse.
Perhaps it was the researchers, who were determined to sacrifice their research if it meant taking down the two vigilantes. Perhaps it had been Amson himself who had broken one too many support pillars. Whatever the case, the entire room shook, and the vigilantes found themselves and the motley clutch trapped inside the room. The ceiling fell in, crushing several metal beams, and to the horror of them both, a glass vat of unidentified liquid tumbled towards the defenseless eggs.
Amson was in shock, but she was not - not so much that she couldn’t rush to the eggs. But before she could get to them, the vat shattered on the floor, leaving Amson to watch in wordless terror as a massive shard of glass pierced her through.
He ran to her. The building fell apart..
Glass and wreckage were thrown about, drawing ragged gashes in his hide. A cement block fell between them and before he lost sight of her, he saw her stiffen as she was skewered by multiple pieces of the falling ceiling, her wings and body curled protectively over the unhatched eggs. He screamed, a spell forming around his claws, but a wave of the vat’s repugnant liquid washed over him, and he was pushed aside, choking on the alchemical stew. His head slammed against something hard. He passed out.
It’s anyone’s guess, how long it took for him to wake up, but the first thing he noticed was a flaring pain in his chest. He looked down, and caught sight of the metal pole sticking out of his chest, and it sank in almost immediately: He was going to die. A lung wound, and once the pole was removed, he would suffocate, assuming he didn’t bleed to death first. He wondered, for a moment, why he hadn’t died sooner, but then he looked to the side.
Despite her grievous injuries, she had dragged herself to him and was using what was left of her magic to heal him. Horror flooded his face, and the hot tears that had already welled in his eyes from the pain dripped down his face.
“I’m not a monster who deserves to live,” he croaked, voice weak. “Please, don’t… don’t interfere with my death.”
She had been stabbed in a dozen places, crushed by rubble, and yet she smiled.
“You are a good monster, Amson,” she said. “A brave one. You do what is needed to help others. Since I’ve met you, since we’ve started this work, nobody’s ever thought of you as a bad monster. The only one….the only who still believed that you were a true monster is you.” She coughed, and her blood splattered across him. She was dying, he realised, and here she was, saving him.
“You have to promise to save those eggs.” She said, her words firm, despite her faint voice. “Promise me… promise me they won’t turn out like us. Let them grow up. Be healthy. You… you have to… have to… “
The healing glow over Amson’s chest faded, and the metal pole disappeared in a flash. He waited, breathless and healed, to hear what she had to say. But she was silent, slumped in on herself. Blood pooled around her, an endless lake of scarlet. And when the moon rose over the ruins of the laboratory, over her glazed eyes and unmoving body, he finally understood she’d sacrificed herself to save him.
Finally, he moved. He found the eggs, rubble pushed off from around them, surely by his late partner in crime. He stared for a while, then, without speaking, gathered them into his tattered coat, and carried them out of the laboratory.
He’d transformed into a bogsneak before the eggs hatched, and by that time, he’d forgotten much of what happened. All that was left when his fur became thick serpentine hide was a pain, deep and profound, and the eggs he knew he had to care for. And so he did. He found an abandoned clan site, and tucked the eggs into a nest, and waited.
One by one, the eggs hatched, and a motley of hatchlings came into this world under Amson’s care. None of them were half-alive. He raised them as best as he could, wandering from place to place with them, teaching them to take generosity and kindness where they could but to never, ever expect it or rely on it. They grew strong.
It took time - a long time - but the children, dragons grown then, found a dragon that would accept them all into her care, into her clan. They became space pirates, based in the Starfall Isles but wandering the cosmos as Amson himself once did. The first time he joined the stars again, something he couldn’t identify panged in his heart, but he pushed it down. No time for that. He had work to do.
And work he did, immersing himself wholly in the clan’s affairs. It was easy to let himself forget what he’d already forgotten. The kids loved Starbrite like a sister, and he in turn, came to think of her as a daughter… not that he’d ever ADMIT that to anyone, he had a reputation to keep. Someone had to be the bitter old wyrm barking advice to the whippersnappers so they didn’t break their collective necks.
Maybe it was all he could be.
Then, one day, while going through his quarters to ditch whatever old junk he had in there, he found his old travelling satchel. The satchel he carried the eggs from the lab in. Empty, then, except for a necklace. Podid tooth and sea glass. She had made it.
Starbrite found him crying, curled around the necklace, rocking slowly back and forth. With great reluctance, he told her his story, in as much detail as he could recall - which wasn’t grand, but the impressions it had left on him had lasted a lifetime. It was then that he realized it hurt more to not remember her. It hurt more to not remember his best friend, the dragoness who saved his life more ways than he could count. He will never remember her face, or her name, but he will always remember her smell.
Like a friend.
And he will always remember the lessons she taught him, and he will use them to move on, to pass them on to the kids now under his tattered wings and watchful, half-dead eyes. It’s what she would want him to do.
Got Bog Scroll 04/18/18 - Originally a Tundra
|
Bio template by Mibella, find it here.
|
|
Arcane eggs have a tendency to wander away from their nests. Sometimes this works out alright, landing young adventurers in foreign lands to explore with an Arcanite’s voracious curiosity. Other times, though, fortune rolls its eyes.
Many centuries ago, a vicious radioactive storm that was not at all connected to the Arcanist’s experiments swept through the Starfall Isles and caught an egg in its gales. The egg was carried by flurries of wind and snow towards the Southern Icefield, where it might have hatched into a confused but safe dragon had it reached land. Arcane eggs are, after all, capable of withstanding a hefty bit of rough treatment.
But the winds died. The egg fell to the lulling sea. And everyone knows this - no (non-water) dragon eggs are sturdy enough to protect a hatchling from the frigid, capricious depths of the ocean. Eggs lost at sea are considered dead, and circumstances where the hatchlings within survive are nothing short of miraculous.
It would be the only miracle Amson received.
By the time the young tundra hatched, he was not quite alive, but he wasn’t dead, either. He was somewhere in between, a trait that radiated from him in an unnerving aura, showing in his every mannerism. No predator dared approach the newborn who clung to a driftwood plank, running on instinct and kelp bits alone, and so the currents carried him all the way across to the Southern Icefield.
While the Ice Flight’s territory is known for its brutal cold, the coldness of the dragons there burns still fiercer. No one dared approach Amson, fearful of his aura despite his helplessness. They called him a monster. They said he should have been taken by the sea. They gave him nothing but unkind words he could barely understand and scathing looks he understood the cruelty of fully. So he fled, praying there would be someone out there who would give him warmth.
But, it would have been a miracle, and that second miracle did not come.
No matter where he went, Amson was barred from clans and rejected by travellers, left to fend off bandits alone while holding no knowledge of how to provide for himself. His only choice was to learn how to steal, and he took to it well. So well, in fact, that before long it was the only life he’d ever known.
By adulthood, Amson had amassed a crew, some intimidated into servitude and some inspired by his ruthlessness. Bandits, they were first known as, and when they took to the sea, they were feared as pirates. They worked on a code of fear and power, never sparing a moment for empathy - just as no one had to Amson himself. It was a policy that kept their ship sailing, at least, which was good enough for a long time. Just not forever.
It seemed Amson had control over everything. So what if he was different? So what if others feared him? He used this fear, and used it freely. He enjoyed the terror that made some flee from him, and others to obey him. He had everything in his hands, he thought, and he was, for a while, fiercely happy.
And then he met her.
It was not unusual for the pirates to raid a harbor, and things were going well for the pirates. Though, not so much for the harbor’s residents. Amson, bloodlust as deeply engraved in him as it was, had ordered his crew to raze the harbor to the blood-salted earth. The residents fled, but none escaped. Not one.
At that moment, Amson’s victory seemed inevitable. Why wouldn’t it be? He was always the victor. He inspired fear in everyone and everything. Nothing could stand in his way. Nothing could stand against him.
But she did.
Alone. Defenseless. Sides dripping with blood. Yet she stood there, eyes fierce and fangs bared, wings spread as if to protect the residents huddled behind her. Amson loomed over her, canines dripping with blood, and when she didn’t even twitch, he spoke in a hard growl, every ounce of malice he had in him focused on her: “Move. Or I’ll kill you along with them.”
She didn’t look away. She didn’t back down. She met his eyes and held them unflinchingly.
His eye twitched. His growl rose to a roar. “Move! Don’t you care that you’ll die, too?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Her voice was small, cold. “I’m not alive. I’m not dead, either, I’m in between. I’m an unnatural freak, and everyone here knows it. And they hate me.”
She glanced to the dragons behind her, trembling, then locked her eyes back on his, then took a hard step forward. “They. Hate me. They won’t miss me. But I’ll still protect them from monsters like you.”
Her words hit Amson like a meteor. His eye twitched. His crew watched him, some curious and others fearful, as the stranger continued her speech.
“You’re one, too, aren’t you? You’re like me. We’re both monsters, it’s true. But it doesn’t mean we have to act like ones.”
“... Maybe not. But it won’t stop them from treating us like one.” Amson’s voice had lowered to a soft, menacing growl. “In spite of that, you would protect them? Protect those who hate you?”
She met his gaze evenly. “I will protect those who deserve to be protected.”
All at once, anger - and something else he couldn’t quite describe - clouded his vision. He stayed there only to growl, “Then you are a different monster than me,” before he whirled around, stalking back to his ship and roaring for his crew to abandon the harbor. The lone defender watched him go, the fear she hadn’t shown making her quake for a moment, only for her to make a decision she knew she was more likely to regret than not.
She followed him.
And he caught her.
There was no way a stowaway could last long on Amson’s ship. The security there was far too tight for such things. Even so, the dragoness was canny enough to evade Amson for a while… until he literally crashed into her, disrupting her invisible shield and finding her staring at him with the half-glazed eyes of a dragon between life and death. And for the second time, he was startled, for while no life had ever shown in his eyes, hers were bright and fierce, reaper’s mark and all.
They were far enough from any land that taking her back would be more trouble than it was worth, and walking the plank is pointless for winged dragons. Amson thought about killing her, but for some reason, he didn’t. Instead, he threw her into the ship’s cells and locked her there, telling his crew that if she tried to escape, he’d feed her to the sharks himself.
For the first few weeks, he kept the stranger unfed and let his crew use her for target practice. She never complained, just looked at him with those dead eyes - the eyes too alike his own. She suffered silently, spoke patiently when spoken to, laughed at him when he stalked down to the holding cells to torment her.
“We may be monsters, but we don’t have to act like ones.” She would always say. Always smiling. “Does it make you feel better that you’re doing this? Or do you just believe you have to?”
“You wouldn’t know,” he’d said. “You’ve never been through what I have.”
“I have been discriminated,” she replied. “I have been beaten, hated, chased away, and attacked more times than I can count. I have been left in the cold to starve, to die - ha! If only. I have been tortured. I have been backstabbed. I protected an entire harbor of dragons, I stood up to a dragon not unlike myself, and none of them thanked me. I came after him, to help him, and he told his deranged, seasick lackeys to make me a punching bag. I’ve been through damn near everything, and the list keeps getting longer. And yet, here I am. Still standing.”
She leaned forward. “Do you want to know why?”
He was silent.
“Because while I cannot change my heritage, I can change my legacy. I will always be a monster, but I’m a proud monster, and I won’t let the disgust of others glances define me.”
Amson figured she was absurd. Figured her philosophy was delusional. They were monsters - no one would ever treat them as more. No one would ever be kind, no one would ever understand. No one would ever love a monster.
But she asked him - “Am I delusional? Or hopeful?”
As the months dragged on, as more harbors were raided, as Amson’s bounty went through the roof, he found himself going to her more often, if only to snap at her or vent his rage, having forgotten how he even found her. And yet he started to listen, to really listen to her. She was a monster, but she didn’t mind. She accepted it, she cherished it. She didn’t care what others thought of her, because she chose to be who she was.
Eventually, her words dissolved the frosty barriers around Amson’s heart and mind, and he found himself talking to her about his impressions of his childhood - things he’d never told his closest crew members, for fear that one day they would turn against him. She listened, never to reply, only to understand. And while there were things she admitted she would never understand, she respected him, with the kind of respect that comes through neither power nor fear, but through acceptance.
And he mellowed, like the soft bits of melting snow under the first spring sun. His raids on harbors became more infrequent, then stopped altogether, until he had nearly forgotten they had happened. Finally, he told his crew it was time they made an honest living. Profiting off of others made them no different from leeches, he said, and by the Arcanist’s name, he really hated leeches.
His crew was not pleased. Where had their strong, fearless leader go? Where had the days of looting and pillaging disappeared to? Where were the celebrations after a successful raid? Where were the encouragements and demands that they become more ruthless?
One by one, his crew turned against him, but Amson was oblivious, believing they would find reason in his words. They didn’t, and he found out the hard way: Mutiny.. All at once, Amson found himself pinned down by the magic and brawn of his own furious crew members, determined to kill him and put a more capable leader in his place. They had no use for a soft-hearted monster.
Yet all Amson did was close his eyes. The cruel sound of metal was unbearable, but finally, he knew he didn’t mind. He didn’t mind that he was going to die this way. This was the path he chose, and he didn’t regret it.
Amson figured the cold point of a dagger on his neck was the last thing he’d ever feel, but then that dagger clattered to the ground as the ship rocked, and the sharp scent of blood that wasn’t his filled the air. When Amson’s eyes blinked open, he saw the not-so-stranger dragoness seated on a pile of defeated foes, the rest of the crew members kept back with a magical barrier.
She smiled. “Lesson number one. Metal cages don’t really work on monsters.”
From behind the barrier, one of the pirates snarled - “Don’t meddle. There’s no escape for you. Let us by, and we’ll consider sparing you, yeah?”
“Lesson number two,” she replied cheerily, turning to look across the crew. “I will meddle, whether you want me to or not. Lesson number three: This is a ship, I have wings, and bye.”
A haze of smoke shrouded the ship, blocking light with grey smog. When it cleared, the ex-captive was gone, and so was Amson.
It took a lot of conversation, and a lot of careful prodding on both sides, but the two agreed to travel together, setting their past differences aside in favor of their current similarities. Between Amson’s uncontrollable urge to steal and her intense protective instincts, a perfect solution was found: Vigilantism. Their next attack was on a slave caravan ship - spaceship, mind you, which was new - and it went off without a hitch. That one battle was all they needed for something to become startlingly clear: The two of them were virtually unstoppable together.
And so something wonderful began.
One enemy downed became five, then ten, then they lost count as they spread their own sort of justice through the stars. The world didn’t seem so hateful when they were at each other’s backs, and for once, things were really, truly looking up. Everything made sense. It seemed like a miracle.
But he’s only ever had one.
On one journey, after a successful raid, the two heard of a lab conducting experiments on unhatched eggs. It was said that the scientists involved wanted to produce monsters - dragons half alive, half dead. They wanted to do research on those monstrosities, because all that mattered to them were their research, and not the lives involved.
Amson was enraged beyond rationale. He took to their ship’s control panel and set a fuming course to the lab, without a single plan, without a single thought. The dragoness followed him, moving to pull him away from the controls.
“This isn’t a good idea!” Her eyes darted, hands finding a grip on his shoulder. “We should wait and -”
“How can we wait, when so many lives are at risk?” Amson thundered. “We have to stop those experiments. We can’t let those hatchlings turn out like… like…”
There was understanding in her gaze, along with some reluctance. But still the two went off, together, as they had been since she rescued him.
The guards at the laboratory were no match for them. The researchers, though passionate about their work, were easily beaten. Amson fought his way into the lab, breaking through the walls and supports as needed, until he found the place where the eggs were being incubated.
And the laboratory started to collapse.
Perhaps it was the researchers, who were determined to sacrifice their research if it meant taking down the two vigilantes. Perhaps it had been Amson himself who had broken one too many support pillars. Whatever the case, the entire room shook, and the vigilantes found themselves and the motley clutch trapped inside the room. The ceiling fell in, crushing several metal beams, and to the horror of them both, a glass vat of unidentified liquid tumbled towards the defenseless eggs.
Amson was in shock, but she was not - not so much that she couldn’t rush to the eggs. But before she could get to them, the vat shattered on the floor, leaving Amson to watch in wordless terror as a massive shard of glass pierced her through.
He ran to her. The building fell apart..
Glass and wreckage were thrown about, drawing ragged gashes in his hide. A cement block fell between them and before he lost sight of her, he saw her stiffen as she was skewered by multiple pieces of the falling ceiling, her wings and body curled protectively over the unhatched eggs. He screamed, a spell forming around his claws, but a wave of the vat’s repugnant liquid washed over him, and he was pushed aside, choking on the alchemical stew. His head slammed against something hard. He passed out.
It’s anyone’s guess, how long it took for him to wake up, but the first thing he noticed was a flaring pain in his chest. He looked down, and caught sight of the metal pole sticking out of his chest, and it sank in almost immediately: He was going to die. A lung wound, and once the pole was removed, he would suffocate, assuming he didn’t bleed to death first. He wondered, for a moment, why he hadn’t died sooner, but then he looked to the side.
Despite her grievous injuries, she had dragged herself to him and was using what was left of her magic to heal him. Horror flooded his face, and the hot tears that had already welled in his eyes from the pain dripped down his face.
“I’m not a monster who deserves to live,” he croaked, voice weak. “Please, don’t… don’t interfere with my death.”
She had been stabbed in a dozen places, crushed by rubble, and yet she smiled.
“You are a good monster, Amson,” she said. “A brave one. You do what is needed to help others. Since I’ve met you, since we’ve started this work, nobody’s ever thought of you as a bad monster. The only one….the only who still believed that you were a true monster is you.” She coughed, and her blood splattered across him. She was dying, he realised, and here she was, saving him.
“You have to promise to save those eggs.” She said, her words firm, despite her faint voice. “Promise me… promise me they won’t turn out like us. Let them grow up. Be healthy. You… you have to… have to… “
The healing glow over Amson’s chest faded, and the metal pole disappeared in a flash. He waited, breathless and healed, to hear what she had to say. But she was silent, slumped in on herself. Blood pooled around her, an endless lake of scarlet. And when the moon rose over the ruins of the laboratory, over her glazed eyes and unmoving body, he finally understood she’d sacrificed herself to save him.
Finally, he moved. He found the eggs, rubble pushed off from around them, surely by his late partner in crime. He stared for a while, then, without speaking, gathered them into his tattered coat, and carried them out of the laboratory.
He’d transformed into a bogsneak before the eggs hatched, and by that time, he’d forgotten much of what happened. All that was left when his fur became thick serpentine hide was a pain, deep and profound, and the eggs he knew he had to care for. And so he did. He found an abandoned clan site, and tucked the eggs into a nest, and waited.
One by one, the eggs hatched, and a motley of hatchlings came into this world under Amson’s care. None of them were half-alive. He raised them as best as he could, wandering from place to place with them, teaching them to take generosity and kindness where they could but to never, ever expect it or rely on it. They grew strong.
It took time - a long time - but the children, dragons grown then, found a dragon that would accept them all into her care, into her clan. They became space pirates, based in the Starfall Isles but wandering the cosmos as Amson himself once did. The first time he joined the stars again, something he couldn’t identify panged in his heart, but he pushed it down. No time for that. He had work to do.
And work he did, immersing himself wholly in the clan’s affairs. It was easy to let himself forget what he’d already forgotten. The kids loved Starbrite like a sister, and he in turn, came to think of her as a daughter… not that he’d ever ADMIT that to anyone, he had a reputation to keep. Someone had to be the bitter old wyrm barking advice to the whippersnappers so they didn’t break their collective necks.
Maybe it was all he could be.
Then, one day, while going through his quarters to ditch whatever old junk he had in there, he found his old travelling satchel. The satchel he carried the eggs from the lab in. Empty, then, except for a necklace. Podid tooth and sea glass. She had made it.
Starbrite found him crying, curled around the necklace, rocking slowly back and forth. With great reluctance, he told her his story, in as much detail as he could recall - which wasn’t grand, but the impressions it had left on him had lasted a lifetime. It was then that he realized it hurt more to not remember her. It hurt more to not remember his best friend, the dragoness who saved his life more ways than he could count. He will never remember her face, or her name, but he will always remember her smell.
Like a friend.
And he will always remember the lessons she taught him, and he will use them to move on, to pass them on to the kids now under his tattered wings and watchful, half-dead eyes. It’s what she would want him to do.
Click or tap a food type to individually feed this dragon only. The other dragons in your lair will not have their energy replenished.
This dragon doesn't eat Insects.
Feed this dragon Meat.
This dragon doesn't eat Seafood.
Plant stocks are currently depleted.
You can share this dragon on the forums by either copying the browser URL manually, or using bbcode!
Exalting Amson to the service of the Arcanist will remove them from your lair forever. They will leave behind a small sum of riches that they have accumulated. This action is irreversible.
Do you wish to continue?
- Names must be longer than 2 characters.
- Names must be no longer than 16 characters.
- Names can only contain letters.
- Names must be no longer than 16 characters.
- Names can only contain letters.