Chapter 1
Zeidon
The day was bright and clear, which was always a good time to expect treasure from above.
My Clan was not the superstitious type, so I kept my eye eagerly on the sky whenever I could.
Waiting. I had a good feeling about today, like something big was about to happen, something life-changing.
I couldn’t wait for that, eager to see a change in the mundane drudgery that filled most of my time.
“Are you coming or not?” I asked of the fully grown Ayala male perched on a nearby rock.
Srazz peeled back his lips to bare his long, blunt, and bright-orange front teeth at me.
The rodent hated water with a fervor and I was already halfway into the small stream; there was no way he’d come on his own steam, but leaving him behind wasn’t an option.
I raised the tip of my tail toward him, wagging it temptingly.
That made Srazz drop his snarl, but he raised the spikes along his rump instead.
My pet was a bastard, but at least my scales were too tough for him to do any harm.
Looping the tip around his pudgy belly, I picked him up and slung him over the shallow water so he could perch on my shoulder.
Once there, he chortled happily, and proving he could be nice, licked my ear in affection.
At least, I was pretty sure he meant that to be affectionate.
I couldn’t be certain, because I was no expert on that kind of thing.
As a proud member of the Water Weaver Clan, I was expected to spend most of my life out in the wilds on my own.
I was only to return to the Clan village when it was mating season, or when I had scavenged enough food or precious items together to be of use at home.
Home. That was a word that was almost as foreign to me as affection was, not that I was complaining.
I liked roaming the wilds, and I very much liked how our status as wanderers made us welcome inside any territory we wished to go.
Well, any territory except for Bitter Storm, and that’s where I was right now.
I needed to keep my wits together if I wanted to make it out of here with both treasure and my head on my shoulders.
My last drop-off of precious fabrics in exchange for gold jewels had happened in Thunder Rock, only a couple of miles away.
That hadn’t been a task I relished, but I had to admit that the weight of the gems and gold in my pouch felt good.
I would see lots of happy female faces when I returned to the village for those.
I might even receive a few invitations for nest-play.
Srazz’s blunt teeth bit down firmly on my earlobe and I yelped, “What now?” His claws dug into my shoulder, edging on pain, which I ignored.
“I’m paying attention!” I warned him, but quickly shot my eyes across the sky, worried I’d missed something important.
Srazz had much better ears than I did. If a skyship was about to fall to the ground, he would know it.
Submerging myself deeper into the stream, I clutched my trident tightly in my fist and started swimming downstream.
There was nothing yet, but I’d been on edge all morning.
Something was definitely coming. The thought had only just crossed my mind when the rodent clinging to my shoulder started squeaking.
His black and white quills quivered along his rump, and his snout went up in the air, whiskers twitching rapidly as he sniffed.
I flicked out my tongue and drew the scents into my mouth, which were carried to me over the water. I only picked up things from the woods; Hura trees, Darspines, and even the sweet sourness of a ripe patch of Exar berries. Nothing out of the ordinary yet, but I tensed and raised my weapon.
There they were, a clutch of Bitter Storm warriors led by one of their vicious females.
This one was slender and tall, with a leather vest open about her shoulders and many black stones dangling from leather strings around her neck.
She looked about as mean as they got, so I slunk away quietly, hiding myself and Srazz behind a rock.
I had no desire to fight them when I could just as easily sneak around them to get what I wanted.
It paid to be patient around here, and I was nothing if not patient, incredibly so.
Watching them go, I was looking in the right direction when the skyship came crashing down with a roaring noise and flames.
It broke into pieces, several of them, which scattered over the land. One such piece was coming down low on the mountain, and a bigger piece crashed into the mountain flank above me, deep inside Bitter Storm territory.
I debated my choices for all of two seconds before I threw my body into a quick swim downstream.
Those Naga were heading in the same direction, but the water would let me beat them there.
My chances were better downhill than up the mountain, where whole hordes of the red-scaled bastards would converge from their Hearth cave on the wreck, ready to destroy it all.
It took a few hours to reach the location.
I swam fast at first, but carefully kept my shoulders above the waterline so that Srazz kept his fluffy butt dry.
Then I had to cross a stretch of woods, which I knew I reached well before the approaching group of Bitter Storm warriors.
I would be in and out of there in a few minutes. They would never know I’d been there.
Then voices reached my ears, and I came to an abrupt stop to hide behind a tree.
I slung myself up and into it to hide when I realized those voices were getting closer.
I could not understand a thing they said.
Their words sounded like unintelligible babbling to me.
Each voice sounded worse than the last, like they weren’t even speaking the same language to each other.
I froze and Srazz did the same, clinging to my shoulder, one paw tangled in my long hair. Both of us were staring down between the leaves of the Darspine, confused at the sight that met us. Those were two-legged creatures. Well… Three of them were, one definitely wasn’t.
Two of the creatures were as jewel-toned as us Naga were, one red, one blue.
The other was a deep gray and had wings; I had never seen a creature that big with wings before, though I’d heard of the dragons that lived in the desert.
Since they wore clothing, some far less than others, they had to be more than just animals, but I had never seen anything like them before.
They passed beneath my hiding spot, the four-legged one a shadowy beast that stalked through Serant’s purple foliage like a shadow, a wraith.
I waited a long time before I dared to slide from my tree and continue my journey down the mountain to the wreck.
Even my usually endless patience had run out by that time, replaced by anxiety that those Bitter Storm Naga would be here before I had a chance to get a good look around.
I located the crashed pieces of the skyship shortly after, relief shuddering through me at the sight.
It wasn’t a lot, but there were probably some pieces waiting to be salvaged.
Parts that the females in the village would happily receive, or that would at least make a nice addition to one of the many caves I kept stocked.
Srazz leaped from my shoulder and scampered away into the underbrush for his own investigation, and I seized the chance to duck lower and make a careful approach.
That was a good thing; if I hadn’t, the discovery I made at the wreck might have been my last. It wasn’t abandoned like I expected; someone had beaten me to it.
I cursed silently, then froze in my hiding spot and just stared in absolute amazement.
There was another weird, two-legged being, and he was soon joined by the gray one and the red one from before.
They boarded a completely intact-looking gray and silver skyship that sat near the large collection of broken pieces.
Then that sky ship, a tiny one compared to some of the massive wrecks I’d explored over the years, lifted from the ground and zipped up into the air.
In less than a minute, it had vanished from the skies completely, leaving me to stare at a pale violet heaven in utter confusion.
Never, in all my life searching the broken skyships on Serant for parts, had I come across one that worked.
We only called them skyships because they fell down on the planet from above, not because we believed that they flew.
I snapped my mouth shut forcefully, my scales rattling along my back.
I was not superstitious, not like Bitter Storm or Thunder Rock, and yet…
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I just witnessed ghosts, something unnatural, something unbelievable.
Visitors from above, nobody was going to believe a story like that in the village. Nobody.
Judging it safe, I darted from my hiding spot to inspect the broken pieces of ship that remained.
These were darker in color, gray and black, but it was just parts of a wall and floor, along with several broken trunks or chests.
I made the horrible discovery that broken and burned bodies dangled from two of those chests, the third was empty.
These bodies were smaller than those of the two-legged ones from above, but they were also two-legged.
One was burned to a crisp, while the other still had pink skin and a strange, oval but recognizable face.
Poor bastard, that didn’t look like a pleasant way to go.
His expression, because I was fairly certain it was a male, even if he was small, made me think that he’d suffocated.
Intrigued by his strange shape, I got a little closer to inspect his corpse more thoroughly.
What was it like to walk on two legs instead of slithering along the ground on a tail?
What would it be like up in the sky? It couldn’t be good if it regularly made the skyships hurl themselves to death onto Serant’s unforgiving surface.
The chests didn’t look like they held much promising loot, but one side had opened enough to show all kinds of shiny wires and rope-like parts inside.
I ducked down next to it to start yanking them out with my claws in practiced moves, filling up the net-satchel I carried at my hip.
I could strip the ugly black stuff to reveal the shiny parts inside, then braid those into ropes to make bracelets or necklaces from.
I had only filled my bag halfway when Srazz hurled himself out of the underbrush at a fast clip.
He chortled wildly, the high sounds dropping lower into something that almost resembled a growl.
Whatever had him so agitated could only mean one thing.
I dropped my last handful of parts, scooped up my pet, and raced for the nearest hiding spot.
I had only just curled myself into a tree, hiding myself among the thick leaves, when the Bitter Storm warriors arrived.
As I watched them, frozen in place, my lips curled in a silent snarl when the female defiled that poor male’s body by decapitating him and keeping his head as a trophy.
I hoped she found herself haunted by his vengeful spirit.
I hoped she found her death from the skies above.
Not even aliens deserved that kind of treatment. It was wrong.
Just one more strike against the technology-hating Clan.
I should take it as a sign to leave their land and find better places to forage and scavenge for interesting parts.
Bitter Storm destroyed anything they found, anyway.
There was no point in sticking around. Yet I stared with morbid fascination as they gathered all the pieces and started torching them.
It would not destroy the metal, but as the fire blazed hot and fierce, it warped everything inside it, melting parts until they were unrecognizable.
My eyes flicked from the destructive blaze up the mountain flank from where I’d come.
High up there, another plume of smoke was filling the air.
This plume was fading, indicating that the fire had gone out, but it was a mark of where that other piece of the skyship had struck Serant.
It was far too deep into Bitter Storm territory to be safe, and yet, I knew I’d be visiting it next.
Something pulled me there; called to me. I had made the wrong choice by playing it safe and going here. The treasure was up there, and I was going to claim it. Even if I had to go into the heart of enemy territory to get it.
Beneath my hiding place high in the tree, the half a dozen Bitter Storm warriors were departing.
They had not spotted me; they had never caught so much as a hint of my presence or that of the recently departed aliens in their working skyship.
It made me wonder, did more wrecks get visited that way?
Had we just never been in time to catch them in the act?
“Come on, Srazz,” I said to my pet when it was finally safe to slither out of the tree.
“We’ve got treasure to hunt for. What do you say?
” His black nose lifted into the air. His white and black streaked body shivered with excitement as quills lifted along his rump.
Then he chortled and bared his yellow teeth. That’s what I thought.
Determined, I set out into the woods, back uphill.
My ability to navigate unknown terrain was the best in the Clan, the envy of many of my Water Weaver peers.
Today I was extremely glad that I knew how to pick the quickest, quietest paths toward the other half of the wreck.
I was tingling with excitement, certain that my discovery was going to be life-changing.