Lance

Mandy forgot to prep the fish for dinner. Again. Normally, I wouldn’t care, and I’d gotten used to the old woman forgetting shit all the time, but my friend Nentres had stopped by for a few nights, and I wanted my guest well fed and in a timely manner. Not that he was a guest. He was one of my brothers, a fire dragon. But still, I obsessed over taking good care of people who came into my home. Probably because nobody in my life ever took care of me.

In my beast form, a blue dragon, one of four dragon Creatures of Earth, I rested on top of my castle and surveyed the calm waters around me. As I’d done every single night for the past decade, I picked out a small area of the sea and attempted to ripple the water’s surface. This time, I chose a spot near the biggest iceberg and tried to use my “gift.” As always, nothing happened. I huffed out a breath.

The full moon lit the sea, making the numerous icebergs sparkle. I caught movement near the shore, my vision thirty times sharper in beast than in human form. Something shiny zipped between the icebergs. It didn’t touch the water, so it didn’t glide. It looked like it should be flying, but not this low unless it was trying to sneak its way into my island.

An intruder.

I flapped my wings and rose from the top of my castle, releasing a shriek to warn off the cyborg. It kept coming. Wind disturbed my stance, and I snapped my head back. Nentres emerged from behind me, his forked tongue tasting the wind. Nentres was a red dragon with a pair of horns swept back and away from his face to expose his red eyes, a beak-like snout, and rows of small horns on his cheeks and between his eyes. His body was slenderer than mine, but his wingspan made up the difference in size. He appeared larger. He spoke to me via a mind link we shared in our beast form. “You have a guest,” he said.

I saw the smirk on his dragon’s face. It translated into a show of top teeth, his bottom canines, much like mine, always on display. He huffed out a breath, an equivalent to laughter. Only yellow sulfur came out. No fire.

I lifted my upper lip. “I love guests.” I hated guests. Cyborgs especially. In fact, I rarely allowed them to come to the largest iceberg in the area, park their little Cy-mobiles, and state their purpose. Usually it was to trade goods or ask about the seas. Most cyborgs knew better than to ride into my domain uninvited. And before dinnertime.

“You think it’s a cyborg?” Nentres asked.

“Mm-hm. Probably, level one.”

“More meat on the bones.”

“Exactly.”

“What does it want?” We referred to each of the Cy aliens as it since they didn’t have sexual organs and thus lacked gender. Some looked like women or men, but they identified themselves as Cy. When they’d first made contact with NASA back some fifty years before the Ice Age began, they asked permission to park their ship in Earth’s orbit. Since their population at the time was less than ten percent of Earth’s population and they had stated they came in peace, the former world leaders granted them permission to stay in our sky. The Cy advanced our technology, and humans loved them. Indeed, the Cy race kept their peace promise.

When Yellowstone erupted, the Cy had offered to help. But there was nothing they could do. Mother Nature simply couldn’t be stopped. One after the other, volcanoes erupted all over the world, causing massive destruction to all living things in the initial kill zones—the areas around the volcanoes—and spreading ash all over the United States. The entire government fell apart. The economy crumbled, and we suffered a significant loss of human, animal, and plant life.

My three buddies and I lost our jobs. When we weren’t allowed to enlist in the military, young and eager, we volunteered to help out wherever relief agencies sent us. One night, a decade ago, in the barracks south of Las Vegas, a willowy, white, almost transparent woman came to us. She introduced herself as Mother Nature. We’d just finished off a few bottles of tequila and had begun to get some shut-eye after a particularly bad day, so we sort of ignored her. To be honest, when the woman came, I thought we’d seen the Virgin Mary until the woman “gifted” us each with a beast and control over the four elements. She asked us to restore the Earth to her natural state by combining our powers with that of a spirit.

Ten minutes later, she left. After she disappeared into thin air, we laughed, because believing what had happened was simply insane. The next morning, when I walked outside the barracks to take a piss, I proceeded to change into a blue motherfucking dragon with wings and a big ol’ horn on top of my forehead. Quickly, I realized the woman really had come to us. She had given me a beast. I still didn’t know what she meant by a spirit. Through research and some self-awareness, I eventually understood she’d gifted me with control of the water element.

Nentres joined me in the sky. He stayed respectfully behind, our understanding of the dragon beast’s territorial nature innate. I was the lord of my castle. This was my home, so I dealt with intruders. The flap of his wings right behind me also helped my flying speed, propelling me toward the Cy-mobile faster. The mobile flew straight for my castle at about one hundred miles an hour, but as we began circling it, it slowed down, then stopped to hover over the biggest iceberg.

Nentres communicated via our mind link. “Looks like a bi-seater. Never seen one of those.”

“It’s made for this habitat,” I said. “Older model. Probably a level-one cyborg driver.” The Cy donated the newest advanced cars to level-three and level-four cyborgs first. Level-one and level-two cyborgs couldn’t afford the models unless they came from a high-standing family with at least one level-four cyborg as the head of the family.

“How would you know what model it is?”

“The year is printed on the back.”

“Ah, so it is. What do we do with it?”

I had no use for cars, cyborgs, or Cy anything on my property, and the habitat people as well as the aliens up on the ship knew it. My island sheltered humans and a wolf pack, another Creature of Earth nobody knew existed. Dragons were hard to hide, but the smaller beasts? Not so much. Most humans on the island were outlaws, people who stole or smuggled food, people who had trouble accepting Cy implants or who straight out refused to become cyborgs. The wolf pack was a secret pack of men and women who’d been gifted with wolf beasts, and nobody needed to know about them.

Truth be told, the Cy and the cyborgs had never wronged me. They’d left me alone, and we coexisted in our unspoken truce. But, for no particular reason, they rubbed me the wrong way. All the mechanical parts replacing skin on their bodies made my scales itch.

So when the car parked on the iceberg, I pissed on it.

It could stay there for all I cared.

Nentres and I spun around and flew back into my castle.