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I needed to pick myself up. Human form it was. That I could manage. The hole in my mind fucking terrified me. It sat back with my memories, except it wasn’t a memory. It wasn’tanything.
And human (or dragon) brains couldn’t store null values.
“Are you three okay?” I asked, shivering in the cold.
Akoni’s scales made a sad metallic sound as they shuddered. He nuzzled my side instead, trilling worriedly. Keon trilled too.
“We all felt it.” Auryn’s beautiful face was gaunt with worry. “We all felt it try to take you.”
“I could barely see you,” I whispered.
“Shh.” Keon caressed my spine.
Auryn turned his attention to the corpse. I made myself stand up, hugging myself to try to stay warm, which was pointless. Homeworld’s clay felt like beach sand under my bare feet. Akoni shielded me from the wind with a wing, a soft warmth emanating from the membrane.
“Quickly,” Keon advised Auryn. “We don’t have time for an autopsy.”
The thing was the size of a comically large dragon. Or whatappearedto be a dragon, or wanted us to think it was a dragon. Mismatched bones stretched, poked under a hide devoid of nearly all scales. The hide was overall a dingy shade of brown, marled with shades of dark gray and green. No finlets or frills to speak of, naked pointy tail. A few sad sapphire-blue scales had clung in patches on the shoulders and haunches, but now lay on the ground, the color bleeding from them into the same sort of plastic I’d seen back on the ship.
“Is it me, or does its skin not look like it matches the frame?” I asked no one in particular.
“It doesn’t.” Akoni pondered the corpse. “It didn’t fly properly and did not move as I would expect. And yet, it looks like a dragon.”
“Itisa dragon.” Auryn pulled back the lips to look at the fangs. “But there are multiple rows of teeth. No horns. And usually when a dragon dies, there’s residual magic that lingers around the corpse. There’s no magic, and instead there’s a—”
“Null?” My brain had no other word in any language (or even a pictograph I couldn’t pronounce) to explain what I’d perceived. Or not perceived, as it were.
Akoni tucked me against his side with his wing. “We should leave.”
“I need to study this,” Auryn said.
“Helena and Keon aredone, drake-of-light. It’s time to go.”
“We can take another ten minutes. The corpse might not be here when we get back.” I wasn’t about to quit now and go back to Lemuria with stories of a zombie null dragon that attacked us and wouldn’t die. That’d send the Wyrms right over the edge.
The smell once Auryn cut it open was beyond foul. And I’d chosen sewers as my profession.
Auryn rumaged through the creature with a combination of surgeon’s tools light filaments, and the casual brutality reserved for an over-full junk drawer.
“Hurry up, Auryn,” Keon demanded. “We donothave time for this, and if the Gate closes, we’ll be stuck here for a while.”
We had agreed to not bring any tech to Homeworld, so Auryn’s notes were written on a legal pad smuggled from topside (since paper was precious in Lemuria) and the technological marvel known as a pencil. The notes were smudged with various stains of biological origin and his hands were filthy. Forget soap, he was going to need to dip those in bleach.
Auryn shoved his notes into the satchel. “One more thing. Move back.”
“Oh?” Keon inquired.
“I’m going to nuke it from orbit,” Auryn said, deadpan.
“Um, haven’t you seen that video of the humans who thought blowing up a whale carcass would go well?” I asked. Because there was going to be Nope Monster gibletseverywhereif Auryn did that. In fact, Iknewhe’d seen it, because it was a Lemurian anti-human meme and was in Hekon’s training for topside drakes on how human ingenuity could go hilariously wrong and be spectacularly misguided.
Auryn’s scales ignited so bright it was hard to look at him, and churning sparkles appeared deep at the root of the scales, incandescent hot and making a fiery noise I heard in my brainstem.
Nine spears of light smashed down through the clouds, through the body, and into the clay. Cracks appeared in the ground and light rose up through them in vapor. The body glowed from within, burning brighter and brighter.
Auryn snapped his wings forward, the lattice blinding,hewas blinding, and I heard him utter a single word in old, old draconic:No.
The corpse exploded in billions of shining particles. The shockwave raced over the landscape, the stones, the Gate, us, the clouds rang like thunderous bells.
