Here Be Dragons: Book 1 of the Emergence Series

“Who is that?” Pryce demanded as Fathom placed the ammonite back into the hidden room.

“He kill Abyss with infection,” Fathom hissed, a piercing sound that alarmed Pryce on an instinctive level even if he knew the malice was not directed at him.

“Why is he here?” Pryce asked, trying to make sense of the situation. Why would this dragon show up now, so many years after the death of Abyss?

“He comes here to fight, but only agree to fight if we do not kill each other, he is like a raptor!” The dragon spat venomously.

Something about that felt wrong, but Pryce couldn’t put his finger on what exactly made him feel uneasy – perhaps it was just the adrenaline flowing in his veins.

“Alright, so what are we going to do?” Pryce asked, glancing at the rifle strapped onto the bags.

“We?” Fathom asked, looking at him incredulously. “You can not fight him.”

“I…” Pryce faltered, realizing that was true. According to Fathom, fights were rarely fatal, but that was hardly reassuring. “What if he tries to kill you?”

“He cannot,” Fathom snorted. “If we death-fight, other dragons must come watch us fight, see if one dragon no want to death-fight.”

So, death-battles required two dragons to observe the duel. “Okay, other dragons are witnesses, but what if a dragon kills another dragon without witnesses to watch?”

Fathom flicked his spines in irritation, glancing outside as another roar pierced the skies – closer this time.

“I explain later,” Fathom said dismissively as he moved to leave.

“Wait,” Pryce said, halting as he realized he had no excuses to make. “Take off the chain, it’ll slow you down,” he finished lamely.

Fathom looked down at the chain as if he forgot he had been wearing it, and reluctantly took it off.

“Good, now be careful…and don’t die,” Pryce cautioned.

“I will come back,” Fathom reassured, stepping outside to take flight.

The roar of a challenge rang through the air as Fathom vaulted up the mountainside. It was a roar that signified the intent for a no-stakes duel, just like every other fight they had before. The wretched coward had never once challenged him in a death-battle, and the fact that he was a wanderer with no territory of his own made it impossible for Fathom to find and challenge him.

He reached his destination in short order – a cliff that he knew had the strongest updraft within his territory. Fathom’s great wings snapped to their fullest extent as they caught the thermals, and he spiraled upwards to face the red dragon and to roar his acceptance of the duel.

Ighnahr renewed his own challenging cry as he whirled around to face Fathom. It only took several beats for the two dragons to close the gap between them and to begin circling the other at a distance customary prior to an engagement.

Fathom roared at his foe. «It seems you have learned nothing from our last fight!» His spines flared out with the provocation, battle-fever coursing through his veins.

«Why are you alive?!» Ighnahr spat furiously, completely ignoring Fathom’s taunt.

«Of course I am still alive,» Fathom scoffed. «If you wanted to kill me then you should have challenged me to a proper death-battle. Did you really think a few scratches would kill me?»

«It was enough-» Ighnahr abruptly cut himself off with a quick flick of his spines. «Enough talk!» He roared as if he had not paused, and flung himself into a climb.

Pryce ran through what preparations he could after Fathom’s departure, which included performing maintenance on the rifle and confirming that his shoulder wound no longer limited his range of motion.

He wanted badly to watch the duel with his binoculars, but what if the other dragon saw him? Would he attack? Pryce knew it wasn’t worth the risk when he couldn’t do anything to help, but he couldn’t resist peering outside the moment twin roars echoed throughout the mountain range.

It was harder than he expected to find the dragons in the open sky, but soon enough he located two shapes, each one attempting to climb above the other. Even with his binoculars he couldn’t see any details on the other dragon at this distance, save for his rust-red hide. Fathom must have drawn him away so that he would be less likely to notice Pryce, or The Horizon – if he hadn’t already.

With nothing else coming to mind, Pryce mentally dubbed the red dragon ‘Pathogen’ since the dragon had given Abyss a fatal infection. He raptly watched as the dragons kept ascending, occasionally coming close enough to clash, but they just as quickly disengaged to try and gain a better advantage. He wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed since the start of the duel, but it lasted long enough that the adrenaline began to ebb from his system, replacing his vigilance with gnawing anxiety.

Then he blinked, and a stream of fire shot out from one of the indistinct shapes, and the other dove to evade while retaliating with his own flame. Wait, he saw fire. This wasn’t a hydrogen flame, this was something else entirely. Countless questions whirled in his mind, but any excitement he felt was stifled by dread as the dots suddenly clashed and did not part – instead they plummeted through the skies together.

The two dragons bit and tore with equal ferocity as the wind roared past their ears, neither willing to be the first to break free from the melee. They continued to fall until a beat before impact – then almost as if rehearsed they kicked off of the other, tearing gouges into the belly of their foe as they did so.

Fathom had gained a better position a split second before they parted, and this allowed him to kick Ighnahr downwards, slowing his descent and speeding up his foe’s. They both flared out their wings the instant they were able, and what advantage Fathom had gained was lost as he struggled with his crooked left wing.

In the end they ended up at nearly the same altitude, both dragons beating laboriously as they fought past the sting of their respective wounds.

Fathom clenched his teeth and threw himself back into the climb.

Pryce tore his eyes away from the duel once he saw Fathom ascend, and focused on what he could do to prepare.

Fathom had brought his bags along with him this morning, which was good; he had the foresight to store some medical supplies and equipment within them yesterday – enough to treat a dozen humans, but a pitiful amount when he considered the fact that he had to treat a dragon. Pryce had brought some bandages and gauze from the ship as he would only ever need a fraction of it, but he cursed himself for not bringing more.

He checked the skies every few minutes as he worked, but the dragons were lost in the vast expanse of the sky and were impossible to relocate. He quickly gave up and focused on an even bigger problem than the lack of medical supplies; a lack of clean water. Pryce searched the caves and found a moderately sized tree trunk that had been hollowed along the length and filled with water; a trough.

The water within the trough was clear enough, though there was no chance of it being clean enough for medical purposes.

Fortunately, he’d brought with him a general-purpose survival kit from the ship, which included a small bottle of concentrated bleach. While known as a cleaning product, a single drop of bleach could disinfect one liter of water[1], making it drinkable. Pryce approximated the volume of the water in the trough and added the appropriate amount of bleach, then mixed it with a relatively clean stick as he chastised himself for not doing this earlier; the bleach-water mixture needed to sit for half an hour before it could completely disinfect the water.

Pryce lamented the loss of the chronometer’s functionality as he realized that there was no way to tell when half an hour had passed. He shook his head; it was pointless to dwell on a problem that he could do nothing to solve. The only thing he could do was to count the seconds until the dragon’s return.

They clashed several times more afterwards, though none were as violent as the first. It didn’t take long for the both of them to tire given how combat was far more taxing than normal flight. Knowing their opponent was nearly exhausted, they slammed into each other one final time.

Fathom gained the upper hand, driving his talons and teeth into Ighnahr’s chest while his foe flailed and scrabbled at his belly in turn, dealing far less shallow wounds.

Suddenly the red dragon stopped scratching, and instead Ighnahr pulled himself closer to Fathom, almost embracing him as he reached forth and began to tear at his wings.

Fathom kicked Ighnahr away in a panic, fortunately before too much damage had been done, but the ground was coming up to meet them, and the two wounded dragons did their best to halt their fall.

Despite the many wounds he bore, Ighnahr’s relatively unharmed wings managed to slow his descent enough for a rough landing that exacerbated his wounds, but did not inflict any life-threatening injuries.

Fathom, with his fresh wounds further impeding his flight, began to spiral.

He knew he could not arrest his fall in time, and in the split second before impact he managed to twist in the air, sparing his right wing from the brunt of the impact and sacrificing his left.

Then he pulled his limbs in tight, and braced for impact.

His wing-bone, weakened by its unnatural shape, snapped at the malunion as the bulk of his body flattened the limb against the ground.

The collision drove the air from his lungs, and even after he slid to a halt Fathom could not breathe. He gaped for several seconds before gasping for breath, filling his lungs with precious air which he immediately expelled in a pained keen. Dull pain radiated from every part of his being while his gashes stung fiercely, though it was all overshadowed by the overwhelming pain of his broken bone.

He took a few seconds to pull himself together, then tried to push himself up. It took a few attempts, and his muscles strained, but he was able to stand.

Ighnahr was a short distance away, perhaps seventy of Pryce’s meters, and he was already up; his stance low and ready even as blood flowed freely from his wounds.

Not freely enough to be fatal, but still dangerous, Fathom noted. If he ignored the condition of their wings then he was not quite as badly hurt as Ighnahr.

They could continue the fight on the ground, if they wished.

The two dragons glared at each other as they panted and wheezed, neither willing to be the one to suggest an end to their fight.

“Enough,» Fathom hissed through gritted teeth. «Any more and you will die.»

«Your wing is broken…again. And I am hurt,» Ighnahr wheezed, his pupils shifting as his limbs trembled. He did not say it, but he did not need to: they both understood that if he wanted to survive, Fathom’s only choice was to continue the fight until one of them was dead.

«...This is not a duel, so I will not kill you now, even if I would very much like to,» Fathom said, though it came out as more of a wheeze.

«What?!» Ighnahr spat in surprise. «But why? No one would care if…» Ighnahr trailed off, and a flicker of uncertainty appeared in his expression before he scoffed disdainfully. «Fine. If you are so eager to die, then so be it.» He began to limp backwards upon delivering these parting words, and turned around once it was clear Fathom was not going to attack him from behind.

Fathom had no answer to give, his own vision beginning to swim as the battle-fever faded, leaving him tired and aching. He took the first step home and keened as it pulled upon a gash in his foreclaw. Several attempts later, and he figured out how to limp without pulling on any wounds too badly. His wing ached fiercely no matter how still he kept it, so there was no helping that.

He looked to the mountain in the distance. If he could have flown, it would have taken perhaps 35 beats to get home, which translated to a distance of about two ‘kilometers’. Fathom sighed and gritted his teeth, bracing himself for the long journey ahead.

As he limped, he felt a small sense of relief that Ighnahr had not noticed Pryce or his ship. His thoughts drifted to the human, and he faintly wondered if Pryce could do anything to help him. It seemed unlikely, but for once he hoped that the strange little being would prove him wrong.

Counting had provided an unexpected benefit by distracting him; Pryce felt better by the time he’d counted one hundred seconds, but this period of calm did not last long. By one thousand seconds he was taking deep, rhythmic breaths in an attempt to calm his steadily fraying nerves.

He’d reached 1,612 seconds when he heard the scrabbling of talons against stone, and he cautiously rushed outside with rifle in tow.

The relief he felt at seeing Fathom’s familiar blue hide was short lived; the dragon was badly marred in cuts and burns, and dark red blood oozed from a few of the deeper cuts. More concerning was that he had climbed instead of flown up the mountain, and that his left wing drooped far lower than his right.

“Are you okay?!” Pryce called out, dropping his rifle to rush outside.

“I am okay,” Fathom wheezed, belying his own words.

“Go to your home, sit down, I help you heal,” Pryce said, moving to help support the dragon’s pained gait and immediately drawing away as he realized the impossibility of such a task. The blue dragon was taking short, pained gasps with each step, slowly making his way into the cave.

“What happened?” Pryce asked, sanitizing his hands with alcohol before drenching some of his spare clothes to be used as a rag. Somewhere at the back of his mind he wondered if this was a normal outcome for a fight between dragons, but he was too focused on providing first aid to worry about that now.

“I fight, we both wound the other,” Fathom hissed through clenched jaws. “I hurt his body more, he hurt my wings more, we fall and end the fight.”

“You did not kill him?” Pryce asked, stepping back to try and see which wound required attention first.

“No, dragons can’t kill other dragons without witnesses, I tell you this before,” Fathom rumbled snappishly. That was good, he couldn’t be in debilitating pain if he still had the presence of mind for sass.

“Which wound is the worst?” Pryce asked, not able to determine how to triage his injuries without running laps around the dragon and asking him to roll over.

“This,” Fathom said, hissing in pain as he rolled onto his side to reveal a long gash along his torso that already left a sizable bloodstain on the ground.

“Shit,” Pryce swore. The wound was around three meters in length, and two shallow gashes ran alongside it; the scales were damaged, but they had done their job well as there was no blood that dripped from the lesser lacerations.

This injury did not seem to have reached any internal organs, and the lack of truly excessive blood loss likely meant none of the arteries had been cut either. “This is going to hurt a little,” Pryce warned, grabbing the med kit’s pouch of sterile water to splash onto the wound. The action drew a hiss from Fathom as he kicked in pain, fortunately not striking Pryce.

“What are you doing?” Fathom demanded, twitching in pain and agitation.

“I’m cleaning the wound, and it’s going to hurt more, so get ready,” Pryce snapped, refilling the water pouch with what was hopefully sterile water from the trough. The wound had picked up an unideal amount of dirt, to say the least, so it required several repetitions before he was satisfied enough to use the towel. Pryce had no idea what a dragon could recover from, but these injuries seemed quite alarming, so he was glad to see that the blood had already clotted more than he would have expected; Fathom would need all the natural robustness a dragon had in order to fully recover from this.

Fathom twitched and growled as Pryce worked, occasionally voicing a rhetorical complaint that went unanswered. Eventually the wound was as clean as it was going to get, and Pryce poured some alcohol solution onto a rag to disinfect the wound.

“This is going to hurt a lot, please don’t move,” Pryce cautioned as he pulled on disposable rubber gloves from a sealed wax paper packet. He did have painkillers and local anesthetics aboard the ship, but those were for humans, and he had no idea what unintended effects they might have on a dragon. Unfortunately for the both of them, Fathom would have to endure it.

The dragon in question belted out a noise that was somewhere between a keen and a growl when Pryce sterilized the wounds, making him wince in sympathy.

“Why are you doing this? What is in that thing?” Fathom panted as Pryce pulled the rag away.

“This is just alcohol, alcohol kills bacteria,” Pryce explained.

“Alcohol kill bacteria but not kill me?”

“No, you drank alcohol, remember?” Pryce broke open the wax paper packet containing a length of surgical thread and a swaged needle. “I’m going to use this to make your wound close, it’s going to hurt some, you should look away,” Pryce advised.

Of course, Fathom did the exact opposite of this, peering at his own side as Pryce began stitching his wound together.

“Why are you using small thing to hurt me?” Fathom asked in alarm, moving to pull away before pain from another wound caused him to flinch back into place.

“This makes wounds close,” Pryce said impatiently. “I use this on my shoulder too,” he said, shrugging off his coat and pulling his shirt down to expose the stitches in his shoulder. By some odd coincidence he had planned to take them out today, fifteen days after he had put them in, but at least now he could use them to convince Fathom they were safe.

The dragon rumbled skeptically despite this piece of evidence, he glanced nervously between the stitches in Pryce’s shoulder and the needle.

“Trust me,” Pryce said in exasperation, then seeing that Fathom did not understand, explained, “Trust me means you think what I say is true, because I say it.”

Fathom made another hesitant noise, but ultimately nodded once and looked away as Pryce had instructed earlier.

The stitching took a long time to complete, and Pryce had to open several packets of sterilized thread just to close this one wound. He had brought ten with him since they were so small, and each had more thread than was needed for one human patient, but now he wasn’t sure if he had enough to close them all.

“Done,” Pryce said, rubbing the sweat off his forehead on the sleeve of his coat. He was forced to space the stitches apart longer than he would’ve liked to save thread, but it was an adequate job.

“You are done now?” Fathom sighed in relief.

“No, I’m done with this one, now I have to do all of the others,” Pryce said. “No, you were lucky to not get killed by infection before,” he said sternly, dismissing Fathom’s protests. “Now show me your second worst wound.”

The next injury was a long set of raking lines on his shoulders that almost lined up with his old scars, which took even more thread than the previous wound since there were three gashes on each shoulder. By the time Pryce was finished with this set of injuries he only had a few packets of thread left.

He did what he could for the rest, cleaning the smaller ones and holding bandages in place with non-medical tape. None of what he was doing was at all ideal, but it was the best he could without a sterile environment and proper medical equipment.

Pryce lit a lantern when the sun began to set, and continued cleaning, sanitizing, sealing, and stitching wounds whenever he could.

Eventually he finished treating the flesh wounds enough to begin inspecting the wings which were badly torn. Most of the injuries had long since stopped bleeding and seemed like they would heal with time and some simple treatment, but the problem was the phalange of the wing’s index ‘finger’ had broken right next to where the malunion was. Broken bones almost always mended stronger than before, but this only meant that the new weak point was the area around the callused bone, especially when it was a malunion to begin with.

“I do not want my wing to be…worse than before. Can you heal this? Fathom asked, voice quavering as he watched Pryce inspect the broken wing. Pryce could not tell if it was from pain or fear, but regardless he was unable to provide any false reassurances.

“Maybe, I don’t know, I have never done this before.” Pryce knew resetting this bone may require some degree of surgery as the tips of the broken bone were straining against the skin, and if he was to commit to some surgery then he may as well saw off part of the malunion to straighten the whole bone.

The problem was how he didn’t know if the usual surgical procedures would even work on dragon bones. They were likely at least as strong as gryphon bones, and if that was the case then he wasn’t confident in using screws, nails, or rods to hold the bones in place.

The safest bet was to use a clamp to hold a metal rod against the bones to hold it in place while it healed and forego surgery altogether, but that plan had problems too; if the bone were fragmented then the pieces would need to be removed.

Pryce turned to Fathom. “I can use metal sticks to stop your wing from moving, then it may be a little better or a little worse than before,” Pryce said to Fathom, who was listening raptly. “Or I can…carve your skin open and fix the bones, then your wing may be much better or much worse than before, I don’t know which.”

“Carve skin open?” Fathom asked, wide-eyed.

“Yes, your bone healed wrong long time ago, so there is a round part. I need to carve off the round part to make it straight again.”

“Cut…bone?” The dragon sounded a bit faint, though it might have been the exhaustion and blood loss catching up to him.

“I don’t know what to do,” Pryce said. “Cutting off skin, muscle, and bone is called surgery. I last did surgery on other humans twenty-six years ago, surgery maybe make your wing better than before, but if I make a big mistake then you maybe…cannot fly. What do you want me to do?”

Fathom was silent for a few minutes, and Pryce continued working on lesser injuries as the dragon considered his options. “I always win fights against dragon that kill Abyss with infection, but I cannot win against stronger dragons like I did before,” Fathom said, clenching his talons in frustration. “Please try to fix my wing.”

“I’ll do my best,” Pryce nodded. He worked for a few more minutes, then asked, “…why did he come here to fight you today? And why did you hurt each other so bad?”

“Normally dragons fly around their territory, but in the last twenty days I did not do that very much. If dragon finds dead dragon, he can take dead dragon’s things. He become mad when he see I am not dead,” Fathom huffed humorously, glad to disappoint his enemy.

Pryce felt a stab of guilt that he had indirectly caused this by spending so much time with Fathom but pushed those feelings aside to focus on the task at hand to ask, “What did the loser offer to give to the winner?”

“Nothing, we both hate the other, so we agree to fight,” Fathom said simply, hissing a little as Pryce disinfected another wound.

“I understand,” Pryce muttered. “So, do you want me to do surgery?”

Fathom inhaled a deep breath, and said, “When dragon get hurt like this, we sleep for long time. I will sleep maybe two or three days, when I sleep, you do surgery.”

“Are you sure? If I fail, you can not fly again, forever,” Pryce said, making the consequences as clear as he could.

This gave Fathom some pause, but only for a second. “I do not want to lose to him again. Do surgery, I trust you.”

Pryce was distantly touched by the dragon’s faith in him, but he was already redoubling his concentration for the upcoming tasks.

“I will do my best,” was all he said.

Pryce continued to work on the flesh wounds while Fathom was awake, only sparingly using the stitching thread so that he could save enough for treating the broken bone; he was going to try and stitch a metal rod against the bone to hold it in place.

“I will sleep now, in maybe ten minutes I will deep sleep, that is sleep that I can not awake from,” Fathom said a little nervously.

“I promise I will do my best to help you heal, you can sleep now,” Pryce reassured.

In less than a minute the dragon’s breathing began to slow, then he began to snore lightly, the air whistling out of his nostrils. The slow and repetitive sound calmed Pryce’s nerves as he worked into the night.

It was sometime in the middle of the night when Pryce had finally finished treating all of the flesh wounds. Fathom had indeed not stirred even as he disinfected the other injuries, so Pryce was certain he was in a ‘deep sleep’.

He began by setting the wing onto the tarp against the floor, then he palpated the site of the broken bone and saw that it seemed like a clean transverse fracture. That was good.

Next, he pulled the bones apart to fit them back into place with some difficulty, but eventually he was able to line up the bones so that they were in the same position they were before the fracture.

Then he braced the bones against a metal rod to carefully make an incision lengthwise along the bone, the tough skin resisted the obsidian scalpel, but not for long. Soon he had a clean cut where he could push the skin aside to examine the bones; plucking out two small fragments with the forceps as he did so. Aside from those fragments, the bone had broken as cleanly as he had suspected.

Now came the hard part, he retrieved the stainless-steel saw and hoped that it would be strong enough to get through the knot of malformed bone.

Pryce wasn’t sure how long it took, but he was eventually able to saw off the stubborn bulb of bone and fit the two halves together smoothly. After that, he tried to hold the screw and some metal rods into place, but the screws refused to bite into the tough bone. Having no other choice, Pryce cut tiny notches above and below the break in the bones, and then used the stitching thread to pull the two grooves together. He made two of these so that the thread made an X shape so that it would have more strength before he closed the incision.

The last step was to fasten titanium rods around the bone to keep it straight. Titanium was a softer metal than steel, so he was able to use the steel saw to add notches to the rod without too much difficulty. He made sure to use a rock to smooth out the notches so that the sharp grooves wouldn’t cut the silk stitching threads. The notches served a similar function on the rod as the ones on the bones; they helped the stitches hold the rod in place.

When he was done the bone was straight, held in place by two titanium rods on either side. To make sure the dragon didn’t toss and turn in his sleep, Pryce bundled the wing up – with great difficulty – and used the chain Fathom had been using as a necklace to keep it bundled together.

Pryce looked up and winced at a bright light poured into the cave; the sun had risen, his lantern completely cold.

“Oh,” he said vacantly, stumbling towards his bags as his exhaustion caught up to him, collapsing onto the bags as his mind and body finally gave out.