Back when she was still in school, Nagia had developed a system of being to help her get through the days. It was, simply, a series of things she did each day to keep herself sane. For instance, the first thing she did each morning, without fail, was comb her hair. Not to be narcissistic, but Nagia loved her hair. She was proud of its magazine-shine and much thicker and blacker it was than her mother’s. It was a saying in their family that Nagia had her father’s genes to thank for this aspect of her. His hairline was pristine. That, or he did not get to be old enough for that to be a problem.
There were days, early on after the accident, when Nagia couldn’t get out of bed. During those mornings, she would lie on her back and comb her hair. She couldn’t get up to brush her teeth, but she made sure her hair was nice. It was the only part of her that resembled her dad, after all, and in her pain-driven delirium, Nagia must’ve thought that he could somehow look down from heaven’s clouds and pick out his daughter among the throng of people with less good hair, and he wouldn’t feel like such a ghost anymore.
Inside the other world, Nagia was greeted by a sight that made her groan. She had wanted to relax and drift off into song, but her little piece of the cosmos was taken up by three celestials. They were larger than her, with dishwater gray scales and dry black eyes. They seemed to have been playing a game before Nagia appeared, using broken Terran ships as the playthings. Their wager, judging by the planetary bodies spinning in place not far from here, was inhabited worlds.
The moment Nagia materialized, one of the grey dragons had just knocked an 8-million-ton freighter into a much smaller fighter ship that his opponent was using, shattering all the wings off its starboard side. A piece hit Nagia, who made a sound of surprise. Her presence became known, and a bout of chaos descended on the party. One dragon chased after the broken wings. The one who played the freighter abandoned the game entirely to fight for the loot, scooping into the wagering pile and coming back up with a blue planet in his jaws, only to then be slapped aside by the third dragon, the largest and meanest of them all. It was this dragon who let out a roar that shook through Nagia’s scales.
‘It’s her, you fools! Stop your skallywagging and get into position as we planned.’
Nagia was surrounded. The loot was forgotten, for now. She felt the big dragon’s breath on her whiskers as he came right up to her. ‘Nowhere to go now,’ he said, but it wasn’t like she was thinking of running. She couldn’t even if she wanted to.
‘Who are you?’ Nagia asked. Her eye stung from where the debris had glanced off her cheek. She couldn’t risk a fight right now. She had just come online, and the rest of her senses were still waking up. The colors of space still looked like a hotpot of ultraviolet and shifting translucency. One thing was obvious to her even in her state, and that was these dragons stank of magma and viciousness. They were the ones who had been chasing Brianna, and it seemed they knew she had helped in the rainbow dragon’s escape.
‘Who do you think you are, asking me that?’ The ring leader tapped a claw against the side of Nagia’s head. ‘You cost us a real fortune yesterday, you know that? What kind of idiot are you, digging those little claws into someone else’s pie? Don’t you know it’s a dragon-eat-dragon galaxy now? You'd better hope you taste good, because I have very little patience for idiots who also stink, idiot.’
Nagia had never seen these dragons before, but she knew of their kind. There were always celestials who did not follow the laws of the universe, ones who abused their size and power to bend others to their will. She would not give this group the satisfaction. She faced the ringleader and projected her voice clearly into his mind and all those nearby, ‘You ask for my name? Know this, then, for I am Oyositatu, daughter of the Eridani stars, Keeper of Secrets, and Clan of None. This is my domain, which you have soiled with your foolish games. What hubris has given you such misplaced courage to challenge the might of an Ancient?’
A ripple of thought passed rapidly between the other dragons. That name. It still had weight, even years after the war had ended.
‘Boss,’ said the dragon, whose fighter ship toy was demolished, ‘she’s being serious, isn’t she?’
‘Yeah,’ said the ringleader. ‘She thinks she’s hot stuff.’
Laughter erupted around the group.
‘I bet she’s got scale tattoos in real life! What a loser!’
Nagia was jostled from one dragon to the next. She didn’t understand what was happening, and it scared her. Why weren’t they respecting her title? She had led the celestials during the war with the Terrans and conquered worlds in the name of her mother stars. She tried swiping at the scoundrel dragons with her tail, managing to hit someone’s nose. That just made it worse. The cajoling intensified. They stopped pushing and started scratching. Nagia was knocked off kilter by a blow to her neck, and then one of the dragons wrapped his tail around her and forced her to bow before the ring leader.
‘My name is Kronos,’ said the ring leader, puffing his chest out mightily. ‘I’d tell you to remember that, but I don’t think you’ll live long enough to do that, idiot.’ Fire leapt between his fangs, scorching the side of Nagia’s face. ‘Unless you answer me this question. Where did that little rainbow idiot hide the Heaven Heart?’
Nagia strained to keep her head up. ‘What?’
‘The Heaven Heart,’ said Kronos. ‘The white hole she stole from the gods.’
‘Have you checked your hole?’ Nagia asked.
The retribution was swift. Kronos grabbed one of Nagia’s horns and vomited magma straight into her face.
Nagia’s muscles spasmed as the scales above them burned. She thrashed to get loose, but Kronos’s goons kept her still. The dragon’s rattly voice grated against her mind. ‘I ask again, where is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nagia grunted. ‘I didn’t even talk to her.’
‘Where did she log off?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Her name?’
‘Flute.’
‘Flute?’
‘I mean… Flutella.’
‘What? Man, what kind of dumb third-age bullshit is that?’ Kronos grasped Nagia by her snout and shook her. His demeanor was slipping drastically with each word. ‘Hand it over, you damn T-hard, or I swear to the sweet matrix lords that I’ll find your real body, and I’m gonna pay you a visit, and you’ll regret ever pressing play on this bastard game.’
‘Boss, you’re not allowed to say things like that,’ one of the henchdragons piped up.
‘If she logs off, then we ain’t got nothing,’ said the other.
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Kronos told them both to shut it. ‘I haven’t even gotten my pound of flesh yet.’ He twisted Nagia’s horn until the sound of splintering wood reverberated through her skull. ‘And I know you’re not going to log off,’ he told her. ‘See, I am very knowledgeable when it comes to trash like you. Your life sucks so much balls that you’d be willing to go through anything here, just so you’d have an excuse not to be in the real world. I could tear off all your scales, and you would prefer it - beg for it - over whatever miserable lot you’ve got going on the other side, you stupid idiot.’
The words hurt almost as much as the physical torture, because they were dangerously close to the truth. Maybe they were. Nagia considered logging off, was even halfway through muttering the exit command, when a blast of white-hot energy resounded through the space around them. As every dragon lost their grip on the situation, Nagia took the chance and blasted her own brand of technicolor fire into Kronos’s face, then bit the goon wrapped around her as hard as she could. The third dragon breathed a jet of ice at her. Nagia pulled Kronos in front of the blast.
The leader’s face froze into a scream of pain.
Their scrap was interrupted when a phantom chainsaw ripped through the veil between them. Tendrils of lightning reached from within the other side. Yanking away the fabric of time and space, they opened a swirling rift that produced a dragon.
It was the same gray color as Kronos’s crew, though it had one clear distinction.
This dragon was dead.
Kronos smashed his talons across his own face, shattering the ice. He turned to the corpse floating towards him, eyes widening. Inside Nagia’s mind, his voice had dulled to a whimper. ‘Xiao Ran?’
The celestial known as Xiao Ran was still. Her eyes were vacant. Her body looked like it had been ravaged by gunfire. Scales were missing. Limbs gone. Sparkles of magic slowly ate away at the flesh that once held them. There was no time to mourn, for as the dead dragon’s body exited the rift, the thing that had been pushing it forward emerged.
A Galleon-class warship, built from a world of steel and lightning, blasted into the space before them. It was large enough to put some moons to shame, and carried enough artillery to bombard an entire system. It flew towards the dragons, cannons whirring within a fountain of neon flare.
‘Aye, what the hell is that?’ asked one of Kronos’s lackeys.
‘It’s one of the models I don’t have,’ said the other one.
‘Get back, you idiots,’ Kronos ordered, but his voice was barely heard within the tumultuous psychic field that connected all of them. Not heeding his boss’s warning, one of the goons floated towards the warship. He had seen the dead celestial now, and rage twisted his features. He went right up to the warship’s windows. It was larger than he was, comparable to a human and a car. The danger was wildly disproportionate to the comparison, though, for when the warship fired without warning, the web of brilliant plasma it spread over the dragons was unholy.
Nagia curled up into a ball, tail wrapped around her snout. She heard Kronos howl in pain as his flank was set ablaze. Chunks of his gray hide disintegrated as the plasma tore at his scales to ashes. The ringleader let loose his own fire, watching in despair as his magma breath sizzled across the warship’s phantasmal shields. He turned and cried to his goons, ‘Run!’
It was too late, at least for one of them. The laser-focused bombardment had ripped through the dragon closest to the warship, riddling his majestic form to rags. The other dragon was lucky. Clutching his battered freighter toy, he desperately weaved between the torrent of fire and got most of the way free. One of his wings disintegrated from a wayward shot. He started to spiral, screaming for his mother.
Kronos swooped in, grabbed the dragon’s arm, and shot off into space.
The barrage stopped.
Nagia, who had been waiting for her own demise, slowly unraveled herself when nothing of the sort happened. She faced the warship, which was drifting closer. In her mind, she heard the cantankerous howls of a city full of Terrans inside. She could not imagine there really being that many people inside the ship, but it was possible. The population between Terran and Celestial was about a thousand to one, probably more nowadays, and she heard of people who preferred to live their other life doing monotonous tasks, such as shoveling coal into the furnace of a city-sized space vessel, if they used coal furnaces.
The ship came to a stop in front of Nagia’s nose. It radiated so much heat and light that she could barely look at it. She heard a great deal of thumping somewhere, felt the vibrations through her scales, and then, within the stream of consciousness that came from the ship, a singular voice made itself clear.
A woman’s voice, full of cold malice, asked, ‘You are The Keeper of Secrets, Oyositatu, correct?’
Nagia almost smiled. ‘Finally, someone knows who I am,’ she said, only half-joking.
The woman introduced herself as Lord Legionnaire Selien, Commander of Alpha Centauri 12th Battalion forces, and Daughter of Terra.
‘I have heard of you,’ said Nagia. ‘You killed hundreds of Terrans during the bombardment of the Stromipilis system.’
‘And just as many celestials,’ answered Selien. ‘A fair trade, made fairer when you understand that the population on that planet was a weak crop, caring for little else than lounging around in wasteful decadence. The legion became stronger without them.’
Nagia’s chest was getting tight. Her heart seemed to be beating very quickly without reason. It was a different kind of feeling than she was used to. This didn’t feel… real. Or perhaps it was too real. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t because a psychopath was facing her down in a warship capable of disintegrating her. She tried to focus. ‘What is it you want of me, Selien?’ she asked, trying to see the commander through the tiny windows. ‘ I assume you haven’t shot me to death for altruistic reasons.’
‘I wish to allow you a chance to do something for the greater good,’ Selien answered. ‘You have been in contact with a dragon oak in rainbow scales.’
It was not a question, and Nagia did not see a point in lying. ‘I did.’
‘That dragon is an enemy of the Legion,’ Seline said. ‘I require you to hand her over to me. If she gave you any artifacts or any such thing, you are to surrender possession of them as well.’
‘I thought all dragons were enemies of your world,’ Nadia said. ‘And this seems less of an option than a threat.’
‘There is no difference,’ Selien said. ‘The price of insubordination is death. You have lived long, Oyositatu. Your heroics span volumes in the Legion archives. But do not be mistaken, lest you think we have not hunted you because we do not know where you are. We know you have given up the fight, and you shall know peace as long as you know your place. Let this day be not the blight to end a legend, therefore, but an example of the good that can come when celestial and terrans cooperate.’
As Nagia listened to this spiel, her body jolted on its own. Fear prickled across the back of her neck - wait, no. Her human neck. What? Something wet trickled down her cheek. She tried to understand what it was. Sweat? That was impossible. The pods were never physically demanding to use. Something was going on outside. Something was deathly wrong.
Selien seemed to take Nagia’s silence as contemplation. ‘I will tell you this, Keeper. The rainbow dragon is a danger to both our people. She stole something that can deny all this universe of all life. I do not know her intentions, but if she were even careless for a second, it would be the end of all we knew. I beseech you, for the greater good of all life, hand over the treacherous snake and her jewel. In turn, we shall consecrate and name this stretch of space after you. You will never be harassed here again, by anyone.”
Somewhere within Nagia’s ears came a loud crash. It wasn’t psionic speech. She had to leave. Everything inside her was screaming for her to run, but not yet. She needed to address what Selien was saying to her about the deal. It was more than Nagia could ever hope for. It was a miracle they hadn’t just killed her right away. And now she had the choice to be alone and safe in this other world forever. No one would bother her. No human ship would come. She would be safe, and all she had to do was help them catch a thief. She almost agreed to it on the spot, if only her jaw hadn’t locked up.
Selien sighed, sounding annoyed. ‘I shall give you one day to ponder the frivolousness of your choices. Make no mistake, Keeper. This time tomorrow, I will have what I want, or there’ll be nothing left of this place to stand in my way.’ With that, the ship swiveled away from Nagia. It shot a ball of gaseous light into the opened space and tore the fabric of reality open. Tendrils reached out from the other side and pryed at its sides wide like a wound being stretched open, allowing the ship to enter.
Nagia waited as long as she could, making sure the ship had fully gone and the wound in reality stitched itself back up before she exited the alternate reality.
Gasping, she took off the headset and blinked in the dim red light of the room she was in. That was when she saw something that made her scream.
On the ground beside her lay a half-naked man. He was sprawled among the wires, face down, not moving. Standing above him was the technician girl, holding a shattered monitor over her head, ready to end him.
