Stargazer

A many-eyed dragon with a gift of 4th-dimensional sight, Stargazer had seen a world identical to his own, but the dragons had lost their color. He stood on the sand, the storms that ravaged the Shifting Expanse unusually calm.

He stood at the edge of the Carrion Canyon, facing the Highland Scrub as the Lightning Farm buzzed busily behind him. Slowly, figures moved around the plant life, weaving in and out of sight, almost as if they were shifting in and out of the visible plane. All of them were completely black, as if made of shadow, and every now and then he caught a glimpse of red eyes peering back at him.

He would have raised a concern to his boss, as encroaching dragons from other flights were always an issue to be dealt with swiftly, but nobody else seemed to be able to see them.

This strange phenomenon continued for weeks, the strange shadowy dragons growing closer and closer to the far edge of the canyon. Stargazer made a post for himself, watching diligently... waiting...

If they got close enough, maybe he'd be able to have some kind of solid proof to present to his boss, to prove he wasn't hallucinating from lack of sleep or stress or whatever the overworked engineers were calling it now.

He'd fallen asleep, curled up under a small tarp held up by some spears, when he awoke with a start.

There, directly in front of him, stood one of the strange dragons he'd been seeing. It looked like a pearlcatcher, its entire body a shimmering black so dark is seemed to absorb more light than usual, with a pair of glowing red eyes.

Stargazer went to sit up, startled, but before he could the dragon reached out and touched his arm.

His vision went dark, the world around him suddenly plunged into silence as if he'd fallen into the depth of the ocean. A cold sensation swallowed his body, and after a moment he felt nothing, not even fear.

He looked around the darkness for something, anything at all to ground him and give some insight into what was happening. After a moment, a soft orange glow began to emanate from a point to his right, somewhere below where he was suspended.

Stargazer turned to face it, his body floating weightlessly towards the source of the light. He recognized it as a place in Emberglow Hearth, where the fire was warm but not threatening. Among the pools of lava, surrounded by flickering fireflies, were black dragons like the ones he'd been seeing. As he grew near, the three larger dragons, a pearlcatcher and two skydancers, looked up slowly, their glowing red eyes settling on their observer. A clutch of five hatchlings lie before them in the sand, chasing each other playfully.

They paused, glancing up slowly as Stargazer floated by. Three of them had red eyes just like the adults, but the other two had orange eyes, glowing like the lava they'd been born beside.

At that moment, a thousand whispers entered the silence, so faint they were barely audible at first but slowly they grew louder until Stargazer could undoubtedly make out the words

"We are here."



Stargazer awoke with a snap, finding himself beneath his tarp at the side of the cliff, but he was alone again. Across the canyon, the shadowy figures had vanished. A breeze blew across the land, rustling the dried scrub and blowing the sand around Stargazer's feet; a storm was coming.

He spread his wings and took to the sky, heading south towards the Emberglow Hearth.