[Wk47] The Fate of the Dragons, part 3
Saftal had heard whispers of the Wraicha amongst her elven kin. Many of the elves suspected that if their Sickness had not been contained and reversed, the Wraicha would have arrived to plague them, too. Neither the dragons nor the elves had had the misfortune of dealing with a Wraicha attack, but both species had been told horror stories of the pain and death wrought by the abyss within each Wraicha. Saftal had always thought of the stories as fairy tales woven to scare young ones into taking care of their auras; there was no proof that the Wraicha existed. Every species known to have dealt with them had not survived to confirm or deny the tale.
The human was by itself, standing on the mossy roof of one of the skyscrapers on Metropolis. It was practicing melding its pale green aura with purpuro sericu, a common flowering vine, bringing the large, delicate, blooms to fullness in the crevices of the moss around its feet. Saftal inhaled the flowers’ crisp scent from her perch several hundred feet above the quickly expanding rooftop garden. The human leaned over the edge of the building to drape the vine along the roof’s border.
An oily mass seeped from its neck as the vine spluttered from its fingertips. The human tried to scream, but it choked on its clenched throat; it barely whimpered. The mass slid, greasy, around the faintly squirming human, and enveloped it. Saftal saw the vine turn gray and watched the pale light of the human’s aura sour and rot, gray, along with the vine. She felt the human’s essence pierced over and over by the roiling mass, felt the silent agony of its dying soul. Each spasm of pain tore bleeding slivers across the folds of her heart.
It was a long minute before Saftal realized she was screaming, too.
Saftal flew from the planet in a panicked haze, barely remembering the horror stories she had so easily and consistently dismissed. Even as her aura mended the gashes in her heart, her fear mounted. The shapeless mass haunted her pulse and chased her breath with a terror she hadn’t realized she could feel. She had to catch her clan before the next leg of their excursion. She had to warn them the Wraicha were real.