A Scale of Sapphire

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The sky had flickered.

I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. One moment, it was bright and sunny, the next, the whole world just flicked off, then it flashed bright, and then it returned to normal. It flickered. As I sat there, in the grass outside the house, pondering over what could have caused such a thing, I felt a rumble from below.

Then I heard a scream.

Dad?

I jumped to my feet and rushed towards the house, hardly noticing the rapidly growing grass, or the writhing songbird that had dropped from the sky, or the way the ivy growing up the side of the house now seemed to be reaching towards me. My father was screaming, and he sounded hurt. I smashed through the front door.

“Dad?!?”

My mother’s voice called from the kitchen.

“In here!”

She sounded hoarse. I quickly made my way down the hallway, jogging to the kitchen, only to stop dead in my tracks. The kitchen table had been toppled over, and my dad was convulsing and… bubbling on the floor next to it. My mother was holding his hand in hers, her other holding her phone to her ear. Dad just continued to shake and groan as his skin continued to boil and pop, and he was changing. He was getting paler and paler, his hair was growing longer and redder with each passing moment, and I think I heard cracking sounds.

“Dad…”

My voice broke.

Mom looked up at me, tears shining in her eyes. She stared at me for a long moment until eventually, she spoke.

“I-” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know what’s happening, sweetheart. I just… Can you take the phone for me? I’ve already dialed 9-1-1, when they answer, just tell them what’s happening and answer whatever questions they have. I need to focus on your father…”

Numbly, I took the phone from her and raised it to my ear, holding my breath and waiting for someone to pick up. For a few seconds, I just sat there listening to the phone ringing, my mother’s weeping, the distant sirens, and my father’s burbling groans. Then one of the sounds stopped. The phone was still ringing, my mother was still crying, and the sirens were still whirring in the distance, but I could no longer hear Dad.

I looked back towards the horrible scene in our kitchen, only to find it wasn’t quite the same as before. Mom was still there, still holding someone’s hand, but that someone was unfamiliar to me. An exceptionally pale woman, with blood red hair and dark gray eyes was lying on the floor, unbreathing, and staring vacantly up at the ceiling. She looked like a corpse, and I thought she was one… until she growled. It was a deep, guttural thing, and it only grew louder as her eyes began to focus, quickly zeroing in on my mother. I stood frozen as my mother squeezed this stranger’s hand.

“Ethan..?”

I took a tentative step towards the pair when the woman exploded upwards, I saw a brief flash of pointed fangs before they were buried in my mother’s neck. She cried out, calling my father’s name over and over and over again as her blood began to paint the floor, and I just stood there, watching, as the woman continued to bear down on her. There was so much blood. Too much. I didn’t even realize the human body had that much. I stayed rooted to the spot, frozen with fear as the woman stood up and turned away from what had once been my mother. The blood on her face made tracks from her eyes like tears, and she opened her mouth wide, fangs shining as she-

“Matt!”

I awoke with a start, my heart racing as strong arms shook my shoulders. It was just a dream. Three months after the flicker and I still couldn’t get that memory out of my head. My mother’s lifeless body, the bloody tears of that thing that had been my father, the sound of bubbling and hissing and popping and groaning.

Thank God Cyrus had found me.

Aoife

After we finally decided that we’d walked far enough, we’d set about finding a place to stay. A place to make a home for the four of us. Eventually, we came across a lake, with a few (mostly) undamaged houses near its edge. We’d ventured far from the city by now, and the whole neighborhood had been completely overtaken by the newly enlarged plantlife, leaving us with good cover overhead. The decision to stay here had been unanimous, and Willow had immediately started establishing a dialogue with the local plant population, along with rehoming all the plants from her home garden that had chosen to accompany her. As she did, Cass, Erica, and I started to explore the nearest houses, checking for any obvious threats and scavenging for resources.

It was around then that we met the Fletcher family.

I was exploring one of the larger houses, two stories with a fully finished basement, and had just stepped into one of the bedrooms when I heard a click to my left. A revolver.

“Oh you're kidding me.”

I swear, half my life at this point has been spent either unconscious or getting held at gunpoint.

I reached deep within myself, grabbing tightly onto that strange power that I’d only just begun to understand. There was a stabbing pain in my skull as the world slowed to a crawl. Ow. Through my pain fueled haze, I recognized that I’d only have a couple seconds like this. Odds are, the only reason I’d been able to use whatever this was for so long against Cyrus was because my body was in full fight or flight mode.

Faster than thought, I whirled around and ripped the gun from the stranger’s hand, coating my body in bulletproof scales as I grabbed them by the shirt and pinned them against the wall. With that, time resumed its steady march and I heard a voice shouting behind me.

“Let him go!”

Something smashed into my head, bouncing harmlessly against my scales. I turned to look at the source and found a human, winding up a baseball bat for another swing. Two children, one human and one… not, were cowering behind this human’s legs.

“Do you really-” The bat bounced off my skull again “-think that’s gonna do anything?”

“Let! Him! Go!”

I looked back at the person I currently had pinned, ignoring the repeated blows to the back of my head. He was small, about my height, maybe a little shorter even, and looked like what you’d get if you crossed a man, and a brown rat. From an objective standpoint, this was a pretty cute fella.

“Ok. I have your gun now, anyway.”

I let the little rat guy go, and he immediately scurried over to stand protectively in front of the human. Adorable. The human shot me an accusatory glare.

“Who are you? What do you want from us? Why did you attack us?”

“I attacked you? You pointed a gun at me!” I said, pointing at the rat fella. “I’m speaking from experience here, that’s not a great way to start a conversation!”

I took a moment to collect myself before I continued.

“Anyways… My name’s Aoife. She/her, by the way. I’m a dragon, currently on the run from another, bigger dragon, and my friends and I were hoping to set up shop here. Now it’s your turn. Who are you?”

The rat was the one who replied.

“My name’s Eric Fletcher, this is my wife, Nori, and my kids, Jess and Sammy. We’ve been staying here ever since things fell apart.”

“See, was that so hard?”

Eric and his youngest daughter, Sammy, had been turned into rat people during the acid trip, and they both responded similarly. Overpowered by new instincts, they had hidden in the dark corners of the house, using their smaller size and minor magic to keep out of sight even through Nori’s fervent searching. Eventually, Eric had come to his senses, and brought himself and Sammy out of hiding, apologizing frantically to his wife. The very next day, some kind of lion with tentacles came rampaging through their home, and they had to flee. The four of them had been quietly surviving in this house for the last few weeks.

After introducing them to Cass, Willow, and Erica, I proceeded to explain to them exactly what kind of threat Cyrus posed, not just to me, but to all nonhumans. Willow then told them of the steps she’d take to prevent our detection and pitched to them the benefits of working as a community. Nori and Eric took a few minutes to discuss in private, but eventually, they came to a decision.

“If everything you say is true.” Nori said. “Then we’d be foolish not to accept your help. This ‘Cyrus’ you speak of would surely sniff us out eventually, and then…”

She and her husband shared a meaningful look.

“You can stay.”

Willow

Things had been pretty relaxed since that day. For a little over two months now, I’d been spending my days tending to the new garden, making sure we’d all have plenty of fruits and veggies. Cass had found some sewing supplies in one of the houses, and had been making adjustments to a variety of shirts, pants, skirts, dresses, and even jackets. She’d even started scrapping certain garments for fabric, and making simple clothes that fit Erica and I. Speaking of Erica, she and Aoife had taken up fishing (when they weren’t out hunting or scavenging, that is). Erica fished in the lake via more traditional means, but Aoife was now regularly soaring above the lake in draconic form and dive bombing fish from above.

Nori Fletcher was apparently a skilled engineer, and her husband was pretty damn good with his hands. The two of them built and maintained a water filtration system, the mechanisms of which were completely beyond me, and they had been slowly but surely repairing the damage done to the houses when the plants had first shot up.

All told, things were going well. I slowly began to believe that we might be able to live here peacefully after all. Then came a red haired woman with deathly pale skin. Dried blood and grime were ground into her face. She opened her mouth as though trying to speak.

And then she collapsed.