Before he was truly awake, Ellis saw a hand reaching out for him. Everything was so hard to see; his eyes were blurred with tears and dust, ears ringing. What was it all for? He clumsily grasped for the hand, quickly being grabbed and jerked up off the ground. Where was he, who grabbed him, who was he? Thousands of questions pounded at his head while he was strapped to something.
With a jolt, they were flung into the air, Ellis being ill-prepared for the suddenness of it. His head spun more, his gut threatening to spill out his mouth. He bit back the lump that was his tongue, trying his best to steady himself. After a moment or two his vision cleared and the ringing subsided. He had been laid on his stomach, his cheek pressed against what he was strapped to. His viewing angle let him see below and, more than how high up he apparently was, he shook to the sight of waves of dark ray-like creatures gliding across a massive desert below. His eyes were drawn to what he had been strapped to, to what held him aloft in so high in the sky. Below the leather of a saddle was a mass of sepia scales with orange leathery hide lining them. It was living.
He tried to struggle free, frightened of the giant creature he was ensnared to, the thought of what was far below, gone from his mind in that moment. A stern feminine voice barked at him, his panic muffling whatever was said. He was tied down to the beast-like game incapable of lifting his head.
“Calm down, I said calm down!” The voice finally became clear. The stranger pushed Ellis down with one hand. “Shia-away, do you not recognize when someone’s saving your life?”
Ellis turned his head so his jaw pushed against leather, trying to get a better view of who was speaking... and what he was on. Another voice spoke, this one was expansive and had a long wheeziness to it, “... whole, it has me worried-” Concern wormed into his mind, and drew his eyes past the figure in front of him. Ellis’s eyes met with the amber eyes of who had spoken, what he was riding on: a dragon.
Ellis fought against his restraints with no success. He was trapped to this monster, to this creature that shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t, right? He… he couldn’t remember. What even was a dragon. He knew that a dragon was a dragon, but he had no memories of what a dragon was. His mind fell away from him in disbelief. He couldn’t remember anything.
“I said, what’s your name,” agitation rode the woman's words, “I won’t ask again, what’s your name?”
“Ellis,” he responded. He apparently knew things, he knew his name, he knew how to speak, he knew that what was happening to him right now was an impossibility. He tried to remember something, anything, but nothing came to him.
The woman removed what clothes Ellis was apparently wearing from his back. “Not a scratch,” she stated with awe. Ellis turned his head to rest on his other cheek, straining his eyes to see what the woman was doing to him. She had her hand enveloped in a globule of, what looked to be, water. But water didn’t act in that way, how was it suspended like that, and that glow it had. She put that hand to his forehead. It was calm and, somehow, calmed him greatly. She brushed the liquid over him, asking “Who is your family?”
His family? He had no idea; he couldn’t remember anything before this weird woman had picked him up. He stretched his mind as far as he could to remember something from before, anything. He wormed in his restraints, why couldn’t he remember. He knew things only, but he couldn’t envision anything in his head, he couldn’t say why he knew these things. Anything he tried to remember, as it must be there somewhere, flitted just out of his reach.
The woman, irritability lacing her words, spoke over Ellis’s thoughts, “what were you doing in that tide?
“I don’t know,” Ellis shouted back, “I don’t remember anything. I don’t know who you are, where I am, or who I am!” His eyes were fogged with liquid fear that escaped from his eyes and down his face.
The woman removed the liquid from his head, letting it fall from her hand and be carried off with the wind. “No, I suppose you don’t know.”
Ellis lifted his chin just barely, trying to see who he was talking to. The bright light of the day put her whole form into shadow. “No I don’t, I-I,” the ball in his throat choked out any further words and he closed his eyes tight, gritting his teeth.
He felt the woman shift on the saddle, reminding him what they were on. She didn’t ask anything further for an uncomfortably long period of time. His ears were buffeted with wind as they soared through the sky. Why was this happening to him? He felt his jaw ache as he tried to bite back the way his thoughts jumped around. From explanations to thoughts of escape and the futility of it. He clenched his eyes shut, trying to hold on to those few memories he did have, the memories that were only a few minutes old.
“My name is Tia, my family is Aro,” the woman’s voice was calm with regained composure. He felt her move over him again, feeling the restraints that bound him loosen. She unfastened the straps, him lurching from the released pressure, nearly tumbling over the dragon’s side. With one arm she held him back, effortlessly pulling him over to the square of the dragon’s back, between its great wings. “Don’t struggle, I don’t want you falling to your death. And not after you survived that tide.” She propped him up to a sitting position, then tightened the restraints again around his waist and legs. “It’s nothing short of divine intervention.”
Ellis wiped the tears from his eyes. His eyes slowly adjusted to the light, allowing him to see her finally. Ellis’s eyes grew wide. She seemed like a hole in the world. Her skin was white and grey, without a sign of any hue, and her hair was a black that didn’t seem to reflect any light. That is, that was reflected normally. It still had a sheen to it, but it was black on black, with the two blacks somehow different.
His arms now freed, he looked to his own skin. It was the same. A white and marble-like with grey veins. He grabbed his hair, it being long enough to pull in front of his eyes. It too was the same as hers, though it was filthy and filled with sand. He scratched at his arm, hoping for it to turn red. It didn’t turn red, only a darker grey. He felt his chin, a beard that he knew wasn’t there before itched.
The woman, Tia, grabbed his arm, “Are you alright?”
Ellis looked to her, to see what else about her wasn’t normal. She wasn’t strapped in, yet she wasn’t thrown off to the wind, only slightly moving. Her ebony hair was tied in a graceful yet efficient braid of various violet rings down her back, the bottom and mid rings cutting into her outfit, a skin tight blue jumpsuit, keeping the braids steadfast to her back. Her skin seemed to glow with how white it was, her darker features as her hair, lips, and pitch eyes heavily pronounced. “You seem to be fine, a bit too open…” her face of worry turned to a grimace, “far too open…” She was obviously taller than him, with a slim figure and pointed ears with four red bulbs lining them each. Her features were lean and angular, her cheeks flat yet not hollow. She was obviously much older than him, but not elderly. And behind her, she had a tail wrapped in the same tight cloth. Ellis reached behind him, sighing to the relief of not finding a tail.
“Did you hit your head?” She reached her hand to his head again, water appearing from nowhere and enveloping it. Ellis tried to keep himself as far as possible, but the restraints held him in place. “Let me ask you a question,” she paused, “does the word Vanguard mean anything to you?”
Ellis was calmed by the water again, but not as much as before. He looked into her pitch eyes for only a second before looking away, “no, s-sorry, I don’t.”
She backed away from him, situating herself in a seat on the dragon's neck. The saddle was large enough to comfortably fit at least two more people. She went silent again, allowing Ellis to take in more of his surroundings. Something he was inclined to do, to take his mind away from his fear. A futile effort as everything he observed filled him with awe and reminded him of his predicament. But it was a nice enough distraction nonetheless.
He looked to the sky, only to be greeted by a brilliant band that provided the world with light, not a disk. The band stretched from horizon to horizon, being the brightest overhead and dim on either end. And the clouds the sky itself, it was titian in hue as though it were evening or morning, but the band of light was high over head. And the clouds, they had a slight tint of teal to them, the darker, rain laden ones, even more so. He reached his hand out to touch one of those teal puffballs.
He saw his hand stream through the cloud they passed next to, leaving a stripe behind them. He then looked below them, down to the land below. It looked like a small playset, the pieces ill-fitting with one another. The land was sporadically patched with golden trees and tilled farmland. The desert where he had been seemed a distant memory, something impossible from where he was currently. The land was smooth too, fields and forest rolling on forever ahead.
He looked behind them, to see the black mass of creatures shifting over a desert. They seemed as an angry sea, waves crashing and mulching the land. Far off, he saw one of those creatures, more intense than anything he’d seen in his life. Despite their distance, it was large enough that he could still make features out on it. It was not a ray-like creature as the rest of them were, but a coral serpent with eyes that glinted in the distance, like it was looking directly at him. He averted his eyes, knowing that there was no way it saw him in particular.
A desert and a forest, so close together, it begged for him to ask why. He held his tongue though, not wanting to converse with this person, and definitely not the dragon again. The thought was so ludicrous, it had him cough a laugh through his frown.
“Do you know where we are?” Tia asked, having Ellis jump in his seat.
“No, I don’t,” He responded.
She kept quiet yet for a time again before speaking. “Is there anything you remember?” Her voice was so soft; he shouldn’t have been able to hear her with the wind rushing over his ears.
Ellis shouted at her, “No! I don’t remember anything. I don’t know where I am, what those things down there are, or even who I am, I don’t… I don’t…” Why did she have to bring the topic back to his memories? Couldn’t she see that he couldn’t remember anything? He recoiled into himself, closing his eyes once again. He clenched his fists to his face, trying to keep what semblance of composure he had left. “Maybe it would have been better if you had just left me,” Ellis remarked under his breath.
Teal clouds rolled underneath them, obscuring Ellis’s view of the world. He hadn’t realized how warm he had become, he was sweating. And the clothes he wore, they were like sandpaper rubbing against his skin.
He then looked to study his absurd means of transport. Its muscles rippled beneath the saddle with each wingbeat. Its wings were leathery, the same hot orange as the lining of its scales. But that leather was orbicular-shaped flaps, like hundreds leaf-shaped flesh feathers layered on top of one another. Among the many smaller leaves, there were four large leaves with, what he could only assume were, its fingers running through, shifting at each subtle change in the wind. It had antlers with the consistency and general shape of a ram’s horns. The more he looked at it the stranger it became, deviating from what he knew a dragon should be.
There it was again, him knowing yet unable to recall. It was so frustrating, so confusing, so… distant. He tried again and again to remember something, anything. Each time he thought he’d closed in on a memory it would weave away from him, dancing off into the unknown.
He attempted ro remember recent times, what had just happened. He could, indeed, remember Tia’s hand in the hazy sandstorm. This finally gave him the slightest bit of comfort. Even though he could not go back too far, he was still capable of at least creating memories; able to have some semblance of the past. Maybe he could remember what happened before Tia had pulled him. Hope glinted within him, prompting him to finally call something to his mind.
It wasn’t much, mostly faint feelings. He was staggering around, senseless, unable to see, feel, or tell which way was up or down. He slowly regained sensation, first a sense of existence, feeling as though there were things around him, unable to properly describe them. He could then smell, pungent odors of bile and dirt stung his nostrils. Then was sound, a deafening rumble from above, of things he could not place. Taste, a tangy grit that had him retch. Touch, he could feel his body being covered in hot sand. Then he saw Tia’s hand. But all that was as far back as he could remember.
After gaining complacency at his accomplishment, Ellis went back to observing the land below him. Tia did not talk to him again for a long while. That thought quickly vanished from his mind as he became more and more transfixed at the intricacies of the land, and of the chasms that ran through it. The dragon bounded through the sky, each wing beat lulling him with their soothing rhythm. He fidgeted in his seat as well, uncomfortable for sitting down for so long; despite him still putting in a lot of effort just to sit up right. He wanted to go down there, to see what was beneath those trees and in those crevices. He thought he saw buildings in the chasms, but they were so high up it was a hard to tell if his eyes weren’t just playing tricks on him.
“What were those creatures,” Ellis wondered under his breath.
“Which ones do you mean?” Tia asked.
Ellis bit his tongue. How did she hear him, he could hardly hear himself over the cascading, surprisingly warm, wind. Ellis looked about him, trying to take in more of the weird sights.
“Did you mean the sohpes?”
Ellis fixated on the dragon’s scales, seeing how shiny they were.
“Listen,” she sighed, “I want to help you. That you’re alive, that means Shia herself must have saved you. And,” she swallowed, “it means there must be purpose for you somewhere.” Ellis hazard a glance at her, seeing her looking forward, stiff-backed and muscular.
Tia didn’t start any further conversations, letting Ellis observe the land as much as he pleased. He let his eyes settle, letting them close without pushing them. When they opened again it was dark. He was still bounding through the heated sky. Below had become an amalgam of shadowy masses, him unable to discern their true forms of the individual trees for a time.
Ellis looked to the horizon, a band with a soft yellow glow rose up from the trees. This band was slimmer, more subdued than the day’s version. So dim in fact that its edges where well defined; jagged, as though broken. The stars, no that word wasn’t right, the lights in the sky glimmered all around. Most were but pins impossibly far above, yet some of them where larger, shaped as shattered porcelain pieces. Dispersed nebulas of scarlet painted the sky high up, dulled by the overwhelming presence of the night’s darkness. Most of the gaseous masses were red, anyways, some being more yellow or more orange. The clouds did not glow, but played with the light of the sky lights, making the sky lights seem all too close.
“When did the night get so colorful?” Ellis pondered.
“What do you mean when?” Again, Tia responded to something that should have been impossible for her to hear. Before he could respond she brought herself around to meet Ellis’ eyes. Her sudden encroachment had him instinctively retract, the binds that kept him stung as they dug into his body. He hadn’t noticed before, but the straps that kept him had been too tight. He had neither noticed nor payed attention, the pain had been dulled from constant exposure, not to mention the other things his mind payed more attention to.
Ellis stuttered, “I-I didn’t say anything.” The more he payed attention to his body, the more he felt the various things making him ache and uncomfortable. The ropes digging into his flesh were bad enough, but under them, all over and inside his ragged clothes, was sand. Any two parts of his body that met chafed, the rest rubbed raw by the wind sanding his clothes over his skin. His clothes, of what little he had, were simple; just a brown robe, something he’d never worn before.
That he’d never worn before, as if that mattered. There were so many things he knew was wrong with the world, what he was wearing was the least of his worries. He slumped over in his seat, covering his face with his arms. He couldn’t remember why everything was wrong, but he knew they were, he just knew.
“You said I’m lucky to be alive,” he projected his voice over the wind, “why?”
“Didn’t I say? No one's ever been recovered from a tide.” Though obviously concerned with Ellis’s ineptitude, her voice carried with a matter of fact demeanor. She was in the same pose as she had been, her muscles having memorized it from years of practice. She sat stalwart, shifting with each change in the wind that the dragon adjusted for.
“Then why am I here,” Ellis responded, “and why were you there if it was so dangerous? Why come down and rescue me?”
Tia shifted in her seat, turning ever so slightly towards Ellis, “Your first query, I cannot say. As to why I was there and came down to pull you out, it’s my job.”
Ellis sat attentive while she explained herself. While Tia’s main role is the protect her Kophari, a leader from the way she talked about them, she is often tasked with duties she claims were unbefitting of her skill. One of these chores was to occasionally check in on the country's sohpes tide. It had become erratic as of late, deviating from their long held migratory path. Many villages, towns, and farms have been lost to their ravages, places once thought protected now have questionable safety.
Ellis wanted to ask why she was explaining this for him, as it seemed like information that he should have already known. But he didn’t, did he?
During their flight over the expanse of the sohpes tide, she had noticed a faint aura. She had expected it to be some abnormal feeling of the sohpes, but, upon further inspection, she was assured this was different. They came over Ellis, over a town once called Treun. The tide had not yet turned all to desert, broken arms of structures still reached for the sky. The dragon saw him, diving without warning. Lucky he did, as she’s is unsure how much longer Ellis would have lived otherwise.
“Any further questions,” Tia asked.
Ellis shook his head, his mind tugging to go back to his distressing thoughts. Ellis hesitantly peeked over the side, curious of where they currently were. The landscape had changed drastically. Farmland became towns in the chasms, lush forests lining the cliff sides. Rivers and towns ran through the open veins, colorful lights twinkling definitions into the rifts.
They weren’t as high up as before, the air now made Ellis shiver. The shadows and contrastingly bright lights did not alleviate the difficulty of seeing. In fact, he might have seen less being closer to the ground in the dark than he did while it was bright out when they were higher up.
Ellis’s eye caught movement. Above the rifts and over the tree-line, there were large flying creatures silently cutting through the air. At first he assumed them to be dragons. No, they were something else entirely. They were enormous birds, not as large as the dragon he was on but larger than any he’d ever witnessed. Their backs carried soft blue glows, only illuminating and not blinding the viewer. On their back, too, were humanoid figures. They were still hard to see, due to the height difference.
Tia drew Ellis’s attention. “You will,” she said, mulling the idea through her head as she spoke, “You will attend Prohweda. It is by no means a permanent solution, but it will keep you safe, in one place, and fill that empty head of yours.” She smiled.
