Black Powder & Dragon's Fire

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The Valley wasn’t always a barren wasteland. Once, it was a lush and fertile place, resplendent with fields, paddies, and arbors that fed the great cities of the Imperial provinces; an emerald expanse that gave succor to teeming thousands. It was a simpler time, before factory stacks raked the sky, poisoning the winds and waters, before the war-drum beat of the oil drills sounded the death-knell of the earth below. The Empire caged the Valley in brick and steel, and all that was green and good could no longer breathe. Hitherto came the dragons from the jagged crown of the world, aloft on wings of retribution. The Valley is a different world now; one of scorched earth and ashen winds, scoured by the vengeful tyranny of the old gods above.

Farmland had given way to earthworks and trenches, once-verdant hedgerows replaced with miles of concertina wire and artillery batteries. Sullen and iron-gray clouds hung low over the despoiled Valley, pregnant with a storm of acid rain waiting to break. Like so many refugees of the Dragonfall, Tetsurou huddled in the trenches that marred their home like varicose veins, a rifle thrust into their hands and pressed into service.

They had already lost so much, but they could still give their lives for the Empire. Tetsurou suppressed a shiver, clutching his musty cloak tighter across his shoulders as he peered through the scoured expanse beyond the frontline. Not a hundred paces from where Tetsurou marched, a town once stood. He would descend from his village with his father and siblings to trade pelts, and if he was lucky, Tetsurou would have a steamed bun to nibble on the way back up the winding path home. Now, hardly even the foundations remained. Even the bakery’s ovens and the kiln at the forge had been liquified. Only wisps of smoke remained, coiling out of the tumorous ruins like the souls of the dead.

Tetsurou clutched his rifle right, his knuckles aching against the cold and the damp that brought the acrid fog, and he set his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. Whether it was from the temperature or from frayed nerves, he didn’t know. In times such as these, why just choose one?

“I hate this weather. Fouls the powder, and everything smells like soggy feet…” said Sano, running his spidery fingers through the stubble of his hair. Like Tetsurou, and all conscripts, they had their hair shorn short to the scalp to combat lice, fleas, and ticks that were so common a companion in the earthworks. Only the officers were permitted the long hair befitting a noble or a warrior-caste.

“Sano, you could have your feet up with a belly full of brandy and you would still find something to hate about the circumstances,” Tetsurou said, his breath casting the faintest curl of gossamer fog.

“A year ago, maybe,” Sano muttered, scrubbing his fingers along the surly pink penal-brand that replaced one of his eyebrows. “I am a man of complex tastes. A mountain-bumpkin like you wouldn’t understand.” Reaching across the narrow span between them, Sano flicked Tetsurou on the ear.

“Itai!” The younger conscript snarled in surprise, staggering Sano a step with a jab to the shoulder in retaliation. The convict stumbled into the next soldier down the line, who spared no expense on choice expletives for Sano before roughly shoving him back. Sano was cackling like a jackal all the while.

“Silence!” The sharp order of their Captain descended with the sharpness of a cracking whip, though Captain Goro was never one to shy from using his riding crop. “Undisciplined animals, the lot of you!” The Captain’s waxed mustache trembled like an oil slick beneath the man’s thin nose, while his pristine white-gloved hands seemed at a loss as they alternated between his crop and the hilt of his curved officer’s sword. Tetsurou, Sano, and the rest of their regiment watched their Captain in silence, with all the expression of an anvil.

“Fix bayonets. We are pushing the front line in twenty minutes,” Goro spat, and turned on his bootheel. The order was passed down the line, and all the soft murmurs of nervous conversation died. This was not their first push, and Goro was not their first Captain. Every officer was a citizen of the Empire, usually a child of a merchant or noble house who gained their commission on family clout. They were the noble shepherds to the non-people of the conscript forces - refugees, criminals, vagrants, and outcasts. Each officer was just like the last, hungry for personal glory, eyes set on a dazzling new medal earned in blood.

“How many times does this make?” Sano whispered, drawing his bayonet from the scabbard at his belt.

“This will make the fifth push to retake the town, I think,” Tetsurou replied, socketing his bayonet to the lug on his rifle, the steel yari-blade gleaming dully.

“How many times do we have to retake a pile of slag and cinders?” Sano tutted, wiping his brow on the murky gray sleeve of his uniform jacket. Once, the conscripts had the same blue uniforms as the Imperial Army, but months out in the valley, in the muck and ashes, had long since wiped away any color.

“Why so grim, Sano?” Tetsurou asked with a wan grin, “There’s no human casualties in the Forsaken Regiment, remember?” Tetsurou cast his gaze over Sano’s shoulder, following after their Captain as he passed orders along to his under-officers, all wearing the lacquered breastplates of bushi over their uniforms. There was one figure among the officers that stood out.

They were of a masculine build and dressed in a fashion that many would consider antiquated, like the kensei of the days before the rifle and cannon, in pleated hakama trousers and haori. Both in black silk and dashed with the same golden chrysanthemum crest that the officers had lacquered on their armor. A tiger-demon mask covered the lower half of the man’s face, and his dark eyes paid no heed to Captain Goro, never parting from the horizon of the badlands beyond the wire.

“Sano,” Tetsurou hissed, nudging the lanky man with an elbow, “What do you make of our guest?” Sano looked up from checking his rifle’s flash pan to follow Tetsurou’s gaze, then scoffed so hard his whole body lurched.

“Some noble lord with more time and money than common sense,” Sano said. Tetsurou wasn’t so sure. The noble-caste like the officer’s corps were a nervous bunch, but the man in the tiger-mask was so still that he had almost escaped notice.

“A nobleman out here? Dressed like that?” Tetsurou asked, quirking a brow.

“Tetsu, my dear mountain-bumpkin, if I could afford to wipe my ass with silk every day, I too would do all manner of questionable things.”

The officer’s whistles blew high and shrill, cutting the silence like a knife. At their command, the measly line of support artillery thundered from behind the front line in waves, the cannon crews increasing the angle with each volley to sweep the badlands like the iron hand of some wrathful god. Tetsurou could feel the report of the cannons as much as hear them - rattling his teeth and shaking the jelly of his eyes. Through the murk of no-man's-land, Tetsurou could see the bloom of shell impact as they hammered the earth. Great geysers of pulverized earth sprayed skyward, sprinkling the forward line with blackened detritus. It could be soil, it could be wreckage, it could even be people. It was best to not dwell on what came from the skies these days.

With his ears ringing in the silence that followed, Tetsurou could hardly hear the two-note for the infantry push. Having done this enough times, though, he could feel the bodies moving around him. He took a deep breath, tasting the acrid tang of black powder on his tongue. Tetsurou grimaced at taste and grit as he shrugged out of his cloak. The hand-knit scarlet scarf around his neck was the nicest thing that Tetsurou owned, and the last piece of home that he possessed.

Vaulting up and over the trenches, the Forsaken trickled through the spaces in stakes and barbed wire to form a skirmish line. Tetsurou held his rifle at the low-ready, his right hand resting at the doghead hammer, poised to cock the action back and fire. Traditional doctrine and the adherents to its codex of arms would turn their nose at the Forsaken and their tactics, but their war was not a proper one. Their enemy wore no uniform and fought like savage beasts, following the commands of an ancient creature of primordial malice. A force of nature with scales, fangs, and talons.

Underfoot, the feel of the ground changed. Pliant soil gave way to something dense and solid. Rolling remains of slagged buildings spread like boils. Flash-burned fossils once-living things were fused into the ground, or each other, in their final moments of agony. A chill crawled down Tetsurou’s spine like an icy scarab as he pushed through the petrified remains of an old life. Memories haunted his vision with ghosts of the places and people that once stood in that accursed place. Once, it may have brought him to tears or drove him to pray, but dragon-breath and cannon fire had blown the gods out of his head.

Something was wrong. Tetsurou could feel it. It was in the air, a pressure like a coiled spring or lightning ready to strike.

Lightning ready to strike…

“Shit…” Tetsurou cursed quietly, casting his honey-hazel eyes skyward. The storm had come suddenly, clouds gathering and burgeoning without warning, and growing worse every day. Mist and smoke swirled in languid flurries to reduce vision to mere meters. Just as many conscripts perished to foul footing in the murk as they did to enemy charges, and it was as Sano said, the dam can foul their powder.

Even the weather seemed to be against them.

It was in that moment of realization that the enemy struck back. Not with cannons or rifle volleys, but a searing lance of lightning from the sky. In an instant, the world flashed white. All detail was wiped, but not before getting seared into Tetsurou’s retinas. A clap of thunder struck him like a physical blow, wiping Tetsurou off his feet. The molten ruins hit him in the back in a cruel counterstroke, and Tetsurou tasted copper. Blinking and bleary-eyed, Tetsurou tried to focus, to find what shade of gray was sky and ground.

Rifle fire came to Tetsurou in a muffled snarl as the enemy burst from the ashes, ruins, and fog. They were people, once. Farmers, fishers, and craftsmen of the valley or the soldiers drawn to defend it, but they lost their humanity when they became scalesworn. Twisted and mutilated figures in the varying levels of transformation. Tetsurou’s eyes focused on a nearby shape as it slithered into clarity. A scalesworn that had once been one of the yousei of the valley, as he could tell by what remained of her long, fur-tufted ears. Nimble seamstress hands had twisted into savage dragon talons, the youthful glow of a blushing village maiden turned to a scabrous pallor by thick patches of mottled scales that pushed through her skin. Her mouth was too wide, lips torn to her ears to accommodate the rows of serrated teeth. Their eyes met, and Tetsurou saw nothing human in the luminous blue of her gaze.

The howl was terrible, something dragged up from the pits of the damned; all agony and rage that was too wild and old for the body that created it. With an ape-like gait, the scalesworn charged at Tetsurou, who scrambled back on shaking limbs. Where was his rifle? Claws lashed and raked at Tetsurou, tearing through his jacket with a flash of fresh agony. The scalesworn’s grotesquely wide mouth gaped in another haunting roar as she lunged for Tetsurou’s throat. With a desperate cry, Tetsurou swung his leg in a savage kick, catching the scalesworn in the jaw with a crunch of bone and the snap of teeth. A yelp akin to that of a canine creature tore from the creature’s gangly throat, horned head shaking. Continuing to shuffle back, Tetsurou’s hand finally found the comforting heft of his rifle.

The scalesworn lunged with a bloody roar, claws outstretched and fangs bared. Even as Tetsurou leveled his bayonet, there was nothing in those eyes but hate and pain as she impaled herself on the arm’s length of steel. Though pierced through the heart, the scalesworn swung wildly in her death throes dark blood bubbled up her throat and streamed down her chin. Tetsurou earned a score of ragged cuts on his forearms before the scalesworn finally realized it was dead.

“Tiger’s Balls…” he spat, shucking the mutated woman to the side like he was baling hay with a pitchfork. All around him, rifles shouted their report with buffs of pale powder smoke and the cherry blossom flare of fire. Bullets buzzed like hornets around his head.

“Tetsurou! Come on, boy. Get off your ass!” Sano’s voice called from behind him, the convict’s thin fingers hauled Tetsurou up by the scruff of his uniform. Still dizzy from the lightning strike, Tetsurou staggered and blinked, but Sano steadied him with a fortifying hand on the shoulder. “Are you broken, bumpkin?”

Tetsurou shook his head as he wrenched his bayonet free.

“Good. The regiment is regrouping after the lightning strike, and we don’t want to be left out here in the open with these things.” Sano pat Tetsurou firmly on the back with a puff of dust. Tetsurou bit back the pained grunt and turned to follow. Nearly a hundred meters from where he tread, the ground glowed with a fresh, jagged wound.

“Was that…” Tetsurou panted, and Sano nodded.

“Dragon-breath. Mark me, the bastard is still up there.” Unable to help himself, Tetsurou glanced upwards at the dark clouds overhead, which had begun to swirl like a gathering typhoon. Tearing his eyes away, Tetsurou focused on the landscape ahead. Ravaged corpses of their fellow Forsaken paved the way back, pulled apart or cooked with lightning breath. He counted three of their dead for every scalesworn, and his heart sank. The longer they had to go through their metamorphosis, the more they acclimated to the blessings of their lord and master, and the harder they were to kill.

“Sano,” Tetsurou said, “Where is the regiment?”

“They said they were regrouping. The, uh…” he snapped his fingers rapidly, as if trying to literally spark a memory. “The magistrate building.”Sano cast himself about, looking over the tumorous ruins that surrounded them. “They should be here! Shit!”

“Sano, quiet.”

“May the gods wipe their asses with the souls of cowards!”

“Sano!”

“I hope that damned dragon shits on your houses!”

“Sano, gods damn you, shut up!” Tetsurou hissed. He clasped the cuff of Sano’s collar with one large hand and gave the man a firm shake before bringing him about. There were shapes in the fog, large and inhuman. Pale eyes shone in the murk like fireflies. Dozens of them.

“Tiger’s Balls, there are a lot of them…” Sano rasped, raising his rifle shakily to his shoulder. Tetsurou followed suit, pressing his cheek to the worn stock and stroking the trigger. “What do we do, Tetsurou?” Sano asked, his voice dry and hoarse. Tetsurou’s throat felt thick as he struggled to answer. What were their options? Fight and die, or run and die? He opened his mouth to answer, but he felt the words die on his tongue as a shadow emerged from the eye of the tempest.

The titanic serpentine shape of the dragon slithered free of the clouds, it's great silver mane swirling in the coalescing winds. Great, jagged horns coiled from a massive head. Just like its servitors below, the dragon’s eyes crackled with the light of a thunderhead. Deep in the dragon’s long throat, another light grew brighter. Tetsurou could feel that change in the air again, and his stomach dropped.

“Run!” Tetsurou shouted, snapping his rifle to the closest set of glowing eyes. Leveling the sights just beneath the bobbing lights, Tetsurou squeezed the trigger. Pan and muzzle flashed with a crack and the familiar mule-kick of the stock against his shoulder. The scalesworn snapped back from the impact of the bullet, but didn’t go down. Sano had already put his lanky legs to work, running back towards the trench line. Tetsurou quickly followed, the scalesworn hot on his heels. He could feel the air buffeted by wings and hear the scrape of raptor talons over stone.

Ahead of him, Sano turned and fired. Tetsurou felt the bullet hum by his ear and felt the hot splash of draconic ichor on his cheek. The air grew thin, a sickly ripple running over Tetsurou’s scalp. A beam of lightning tore through the jagged horizon of the badlands in a violent flash, but the thunder that followed was from their artillery as the trench magazines erupted. Even so far from the wire, Tetsurou could feel the blast wave. He staggered, and a long-necked scalesworn sought to seize the moment to strike like a viper. Tetsurou raised his rifle just in time, barring the snaggle-toothed maw of razor-teeth with the long barrel of his rifle. He didn’t hesitate to headbutt the creature with the satisfying crunch of orbital bone.

Recoiling with a shriek, the scalesworn staggered back, giving Tetsurou enough space to lash out with his bayonet. Hauntinly human hands clutched at the gaping neck wound as the scalesworn writhed in the dirt and debris, trampled beneath its onrushing kindred. Making wide, scything sweeps with his bladed rifle barrel, Tetsurou bought himself a scant amount of space. Off to his left, Sano fired into the cluttered semicircle of scalesworn, tearing a fist-sized hole through one’s head. Even as it twitched and writhed, it was shoved aside by the next, only for Tetsurou to drive the length of his bayonet through its eye.

He realized his mistake too late. Overextended and surrounded, a prehensile tail coiled around Tetsurou’s rifle and wrenched it out of his hands, taking blisters, calluses, and a few of his nails with it. Sickle-talons sliced through Tetsurou’s chest as he staggered back, groping for his belt knife. He bared the steel of his tanto just as a squat, dog-like scalesworn clamped its jaws on Tetsurou’s left forearm. He cried out as he felt the bones in his arm break under the pressure. Baring his teeth through a hoarse animal cry, he drove his tanto up into the soft underside of the scalesworn’s jaw, twisting and wrenching the blade until the creature went slack.

“Tetsu! Clear!” Sano called, wrenching his own bayonet free from one of the creatures to level it at the oncoming pack. The hammer fell with a snap, but no flash or smoke. Foul powder. Sano and Tetsurou looked each other in the eyes, and they knew this was it. The end of the line.

Blue-white light bloomed behind Sano as another sweep of the dragon’s breath cut through the badlands. Once again, the world burned away to a field of white, melting into Tetsurou’s nerves and veins like molten metal. The entire left side of his body exploded with the worst pain he had ever felt until, blissfully, darkness took him.

Somewhere in that interminable void, he heard a voice, soft as silk,

“I am not sure if you are extremely fortunate or terribly cursed. I suppose only time will tell, won’t it, Storm-Bitten?”