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numerousbees1106 · 5 months

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WASTELANDS PART 2: PRIMARY SUCCESSION (TEASER/PROLOGUE)

I do not know when the actual Primary Succession story will be posted. This is a teaser/prologue made for angstpril2024 and to assure readers that yes, there is in fact a second part of this series in the works. It may not be ready to start posting until next year, or it could be ready next month. I simply do not know. I apologize for the wait, but I have provided small snippets of this series in between to hopefully quench your appetites.

Enjoy!

Leia was nine years old.

The night was cold and quiet in that way that only snow can make something quiet, a light blanket of it muffling the wide, wild expanse. This was their smaller palace, the one she lived in with her parents, far from the bustling cities and their stone-metal-glass structures that felt like grit against her animal bones.

As she drifted half-asleep in her giant bed, wrapped in her soft fur blankets (blankets her mother had originally disapproved of, citing animal welfare, but Leia always had a talent for picking out clothing and blankets and such made of fur of animals that had lived happy lives: she insisted that she could feel the creatures’ creature-ness still living on in the items, but she got the feeling that nobody really believed or understood her), she dreamt faintly of a great, icy dragon wrapped around a snow-covered peak, snow geese and winter ptarmigans flying around its mighty head.

And as that dragon lifted its snout to bellow out across the frozen tundra, she first smelled the smoke.

It was an acrid thing, pervasive and invasive, pungent and miasmic. It curled and coiled like some great, heinous beast from another world, a silent yet ravenous monster creeping ever closer.

Terror clenched at her chest. She’d only ever smelled smoke outside before, near the crackling campfires that had always filled Leia with an instinctual dread. But why was it here now, in the house? She didn't understand.

Cowering under her beloved blankets, she waited with baited breath as distant shouts began to echo through the halls, morphing quickly into screams of pain and terror. A whimper of fear escaped her, but she hardly dared to breathe, bundling even deeper into her nest of blankets and pillows and sheets despite the oppressive heat. Maybe if she burrowed deep enough, she would fall asleep, and when she awoke maybe everything would be back to normal.

She stifled a gasp of pain. In her mind’s eye, the soft lights that ebbed and flowed around her began to disappear, some slowly dimming and fading into nothingness, others suddenly vanishing. They left shadowy voids in their wake that felt to Leia like someone was twisting her stomach inside-out, like she was losing all her teeth at once.

Physically, she wasn’t doing much better. The room was unbearably hot now, the dry, scorching air burning her eyes. The air was nearly unbreathable, choked with caustic smoke, and the screams now echoed from everywhere at once.

“Leia!” She heard her mother’s frantic voice scream. “Leia, where are you?!”

Trembling, Leia slowly peeled some of the blankets away from her face, but was immediately met with a blast of billowing heat and toxic smoke. Something collapsed nearby. The castle was falling apart around them.

Leia wanted so badly to burst out of her protective cocoon, to run into her mother’s arms, but she felt paralyzed, trapped within her own body, pure animal fear spidering her senses. All she could think about was the smoke that had furled and snapped, its silent, intense malevolence staining the air, its gaseous jaws lying in wait to snatch her up.

“Leia!” Her mother’s cry sounded farther away now, hoarse as she broke into a coughing fit that faded with distance.

“Momma,” she whimpered as her head spun, her chest aching and the heat oppressive. Closing her eyes, even as the fire roared on like the rumble of a faulty engine, she felt tears streak down her cheeks.

An ungodly bang resounded through the room, shaking Leia to her bones and dragging her back into a consciousness she hadn’t realized she’d lost.

In her mind’s eye, she saw herself, a tiny and helpless baby dragon of ice and snow, her white scales dull and stained with smoke and soot, wrapped in blankets like broken eggshells, small and weak and vulnerable. With quasar-eyes, she, as the dragon, gazed up to see a silhouette forming in the suffocating heat, chasing the smoke and flame away with large shakes of its massive head, its legs and tail brushing literal tons of debris off to the side effortlessly.

Another dragon stood in the awning of her room, its scales the same color as the soot that haunted the now-smoldering fires, its eyes a deadly crimson red that somehow felt infinitely sorrowful to her. Chains, glowing red-hot in the near-darkness, bound the dragon’s wings to its side, a collar of thorns dribbling supernova blood onto the once-white diorite tile. It moved towards her like vapor, reaching out with misshapen talons to cradle her gently against its chest, a bubble of silence and tranquility encasing her as if the dragon had reassembled the shards of her eggshell back around her.

Wrapped in her favorite blanket, she felt massive, stiff arms carry her, through what felt like infinite twisting hallways and dozens of doors that crumbled to ash at the stranger’s touch, out into the sudden and stunning frigidity of the mountain air, away from the hellish atmosphere of the burning palace and into the arms of a man she didn’t know.

She blinked up at him, momentarily blinded by the harsh glint of the full moon against the snowy mountain fields, shivering despite the thick blanket she was wrapped in as the stranger called out to the dragon-man as he raced back inside.

The stranger cursed, readjusting his grip on Leia, turning soft, intelligent eyes down onto her. She couldn’t quite make out what he was saying - her mind was racing far faster than it ever had before, and though she heard the words she couldn’t understand them. The stranger looked familiar -

“Tide-Tail?” She croaked, her throat feeling scratched and torn from the inside, a foul sulphuric taste lingering in her mouth. Each breath sent shivers of pain through her upper chest, a violent coughing fit overtaking her until a mask was pressed against her face, Tide-Tail giving her a strained smile as he nodded. The air that rushed into her lungs was oddly sweet, calming her minutely as she turned her head to watch her home burn so fiercely that it stained the ebony sky a wretched pale gray.

The dragon-man emerged from the inferno, carrying a woman draped limply in his arms.

Leia’s heart twisted with panic as she recognized the soot-stained face as her mother’s.

The dragon-man turned once more, racing back into the rapidly collapsing palace, his retreating form quickly obscured by the rabid flames and billowing smoke. Leia twisted and wriggled out of Tide-Tail’s grasp, racing over to her mother’s side, ignoring the sharp sting of the snow against her bare feet.

“Mom,” she whimpered, curling up against her, watching as her mother’s eyes twitched open for a brief moment.

Tide-Tail was by her side in an instant, pressing another mask to Leia’s mother’s face before turning and rewrapping Leia in her blanket.

“You’ll get frostbite,” he scolded gently, pulling out a silvery emergency blanket from a large bag that he had draped over his shoulders.

“Please,” Leia’s mother gasped as Tide-Tail gently laid the blanket over her. “Please, take care of her.”

“Of course, your majesty,” Tide-Tail murmured softly, his eyes filled with sorrow as the Alderanian queen’s already rapid, shallow breaths became strained gasps, the oxygen mask dutifully delivering air to lungs that simply couldn’t take it in. Leia remembered the mysterious illness her mother had, the illness that nobody really told her about other than that it affected her mother’s lungs.

Still, trembling as she pressed against her mother’s side, she found that they needn’t had told her anything about it at all - knowing about it wouldn’t have saved her mother’s life, their words would have meant nothing, their words did mean nothing as the star-speckle Leia kept close to her heart dimmed and faded away.

The dragon-man reappeared, holding Papa’s body. Leia didn’t need to look up to know that it didn’t matter now - his star had vanished, too.

“We must move quickly,” a voice that felt like 10,000 flickering embers said, gently yet with an urgency that belied the peril they were in. “This was no accident - nobody is here because nobody was called.”

Tide-Tail - that wasn’t actually his name, she knew, but didn’t much care - stood, gently scooping Leia up into his arms. She screamed. How could they expect her to leave her mother and father lying there, cold and motionless in the snow? How could they expect her to allow herself to be dragged away from everything she’s ever known and loved?

Tide-Tail flinched, a sort of nervous fear uncurling in his presence as he shot an uncertain look over his shoulder at the darkened woods beyond.

Silently, the dragon-man held out his arms, and Tide-Tail handed her over to him.

Darkness, like wings, soothing and promising a safer tomorrow, wrapped around her mind.

She fell unconscious.

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