It was an hour later, after two courses and dessert, when Khalise stepped out of the small hut into the glow of the evening sun. Lucha was just a few steps behind him.
"We better get going if I'm to take you flying, Lucha. The sun's getting low." Lucha had been begging for years to let Khalise take her flying, but her parents had forbidden it until now; it was her special birthday gift.
"Then hurry up and transform already!" She pouted a little. Khalise smiled as a gleaming white light emanated from his body, engulfing him and growing in size until it was about twice the height of a Human. A pair of great wings erupted from the brilliance as the light began to fade, revealing a noble black Dragon where once the Human had stood.
~How's that?~ Khalise asked Lucha, through a form of telepathy singular to the Dragon tribes. Dragons did not have vocal cords as most creatures did, and therefore had to communicate through their thoughts. Khalise found it was an excellent means of correspondence, as it offered the ability to "focus" one's thoughts directly at another creature and consequently have a private conversation, even in a crowd.
Khalise stooped low to the ground and spread his wings, allowing the Rahmi girl to clamber onto his back. With her parents watching nervously, he flapped his wings and lifted into the air. After instructing Lucha to grab a hold of his dorsal spines, he made sure she had a firm grip before slowly coasting off towards the canyon.
Lucha seemed slightly nervous at first, but gradually became used to the sensation of flight, and was soon urging Khalise to soar higher, faster, farther. He complied, looping and twisting into the air until the Rahmi village was nothing but a speck on the horizon. From below, the Aldryn's antics may have elicited some raised eyebrows, but Khalise didn't care. He was with the one person he truly considered a friend, and that was all that mattered.
Until they appeared.
The two friends had been flying for almost an hour, and the sun hung low in the sky, casting a warm orange glow across the desert. The pair was a few miles away from Lucha's village, and Khalise had just finished an elaborate figure-eight loop, much to Lucha's delight. As he was pulling out of the final dip, he spied something in the distant sky. Then two somethings. Then four, five, six... then hundreds. Thousands. Soon, the entire skyline was crowded with little black dots, distant figures speeding straight towards them. Khalise looked down; the ground was also flooded with dots -- hundreds upon hundreds of horsemen, stampeding across the desert floor like an unstoppable tide.
"Hey Khalise," Lucha called cheerfully, not fully grasping the situation, "What are those things?"
~I don't know, Lucha, but something tells me we'd better move!~ The black specks were rocketing towards them, faster than Khalise had ever seen any non-dragon fly. ~Alright, I'm turning around; we need to... ah!~ He swerved violently, barely evading an arrow launched from the ground. Lucha screamed and Khalise flew higher, away from the bowmen below. The airborne figures were nearer now, and Khalise's eyes could just make them out.
~Lucha! Wyverns! Hold on!~ The Aldryn banked hard, turning towards the canyon.
"What's happening, Khalise?" The Rahmi girl was frightened.
~I'm not entirely sure, but we need to get out of here. Now!~ With a great cry, Khalise dove towards the shelter of the canyon, swerving to dodge the arrows that were becoming more and more numerous.
'Why in the world are they attacking?' Khalise thought to himself. 'Just who are they?' Suddenly, a sharp pain erupted in his leg as a thrown javelin pierced his knee from behind -- the wyverns were in range. His flight path dipped as he struggled to maintain his balance through the fog of pain that was settling in. With a bitter shriek, a wyvern blasted past Khalise, its rider attempting to stick the Aldryn with his spear. Khalise tipped to the right to avoid him, momentarily forgetting about Lucha clinging to his back. She suddenly found herself sideways, and lost her grip.
With a startled cry, Lucha began plummeting towards the desert far below. An arrow whizzed by her ear as she fell faster and faster, the ground rapidly gaining in detail. She shut her eyes tight and muttered a small prayer, the tradition of the Rahmi tribe when in life-and-death situations. No sooner had the words left her lips than she felt herself jolt to a sudden stop. Lucha opened her eyes to see Dragon skin beneath her, and exhaled.
~Sorry about that,~ Khalise said, resuming his flight path towards the canyon.
The archers were gone now, the horses galloping off on their original course, but the wyverns were all around them, a writhing mass of beating wings and slashing spears. One of the beasts pulled even with Khalise and its rider brandished a sword, obviously intending to try and slice Lucha off of his back. The eyes beneath his full-face helmet glared red and angry.
'No chance in hell,' Khalise thought, turning his head and belching a ball of fire towards the armored figure. His mount screeched horribly as the scorching flames seared its flesh, bucking in agony and sending its rider flying from his saddle. The swordsman tumbled to the ground below, and moments later his wyvern followed suit, crashing violently into the desert sands.
Khalise nosedived as the canyon drew closer, swerving once or twice to avoid each new threat. A moment later they were in the gorge, the hundreds of wyverns still swarming overhead. A few attempted to follow the Aldryn, but Khalise knew the twists and turns of the canyon so intimately that the beasts were unable to keep up. A cave appeared to Khalise's left and he banked into it, relieved to have found shelter. Inside, Lucha slipped off the Dragon's back as he proceeded to painfully extract the javelin from his leg. As soon as the tip of blade was wrested from his skin, a flash of light engulfed the cave and Khalise reverted to Human form, collapsing against the cave wall as his head swam from the pain.
"Are you okay?" Lucha asked, concerned.
"I'll be fine, Lucha, don't worry. I just need to sit for a while." This he did, and Lucha sat down next to him.
"Khalise... what's going on? Who were those men? Bandits?"
"Absolutely not. They were too skilled and far too numerous to be bandits. Besides, what bandits have you encountered that could afford a full suit of armor... let alone a flock of bred-for-combat wyverns?" Lucha was silent for a moment and Khalise ventured a look at his leg. It was worse than he'd thought -- his pants leg was already stained deep crimson. He would need to get back to the Rahmi village as soon as possible; they would have herbs there that would help the healing process.
"...The horsemen," Lucha spoke after a long pause, "They were headed in the direction of the village." With a pang, Khalise realized she was right. "Do you think... do you think... Father and the others...?"
"I wouldn't worry about Fuers, he can look after himself and then some." All the same, Khalise was worried. Using a trick only the Aldryn knew, he extended his consciousness outwards, trying to sense the presence of the mighty warrior and his tribe. What he found was a complete absence of life in the immediate vicinity. This troubled him greatly: not only did it hint at a horrible fate for Fuers and the Rahmi, but Khalise knew he should have felt a blizzard of activity from the swarms of wyverns -- there was absolutely no way that they could have gotten that far in such a short time.
'Living beings that do not exude a detectable life force? Something isn't right...'
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