I was there, surrounded on all sides by nothing but cold. That’s what it was; cold. Nothing moved, I couldn’t open my eyes or feel any of my limbs. My mind was rushing with every thought I could ever remember. I wasn’t sure how I got myself into this mess, but I knew that I had to get out, whatever it took. A mild sting erupted in the back of my mind, like someone plucking a hair from my scalp: my aura sight. It was a strange thing to be able to see things in different colors without even opening my eyes.

The cold around me, it was ice, it came in as blue. There were heat signatures all over the ground outside of my contraption, but I wasn’t sure what they were. My keen sense of smell would’ve been able to pick it up, but ice prevents all sorts of senses. Although, now that I thought about it, the heat signatures on the ground were warm in the centers and cooling towards the edges. They were like little pools of liquid, but what could they’ve been? Lava cooling? No, lava colors would be white, right? This was just a simple red leaking to orange and then green and even blue.

How about hot water cooling? Maybe. But even that seemed fishy. Why would anyone pour little pools of hot water all around outside of my encasement and just let them be without any reason? Or was there a reason? All of this thinking was starting to make my head hurt, not that it didn’t hurt before.

I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Aria and I am the heir to the throne of the Dragons. A princess by all accounts, but I hate that word. I just considered myself another dragon changeling and was never above my people but one with them. I had the gift of aura sight and mild heat vision. My skills with a sword were mediocre at best, but I was still learning. The Dragon Knights had taken me to their quarters on several occasions and tried to teach me. It was nice to say that they were making progress, but there were some days where I just couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to their teachings.

Which suddenly reminded me to cast my aura sight a little further. What I discovered was hideous. Heat signatures long since faded from existence, shapes crumpled on the ground and against the wall. There were even two shapes hanging from the ceiling. My mind raced in fear and anxiety, my thoughts officially incoherent and blurred. Who were these shapes? They had to have been bodies, right? They were hanging limply from the ceiling, their life forces completely absent from their motionless forms. I had to do something, figure out what had happened in this room of death!

What little breath I could gather from the air hole around me I sucked in and expanded my chest cavity and flexed every muscle in my body that I could still feel. It wasn’t much, but I had to use what I could. My forearms and legs became heated with what looked like purple flames. Though the flames licked at my flesh, there was no harm dealt to me. The ice around me, however, began to melt at a quickening pace. At last, when it dropped me to the ground and left me shivering was I finally free from my prison. Or so I thought.

I slowly and weakly raised my head to see what I had felt before. An overwhelming sadness gripped my heart with a claw colder than the ice that had held me before. Bodies. There were bodies everywhere. The red of their original garments were stained with even more red than before due to all of their blood. Their necks had been torn open, one’s head had been completely removed from its shoulders. My stomach turned and twisted as I realized that they were all the Dragon Knights. Rehar, Shane, Karod, Bain, Deilan, and even the new guy that had just been sworn in was there, covered in their own blood, in each other’s blood, in blood that belonged to none of them and all of them at once. My body told me to pass out, my mind and heart decided not to.

I crawled over to Deilan, his brown scruffy beard and hair tainted with blood. I gently laid him straight and placed his hands over his chest, saying a prayer that his passage into the next world was painless and completely worth it. I had to do that with Rehar, Shane, and Karod as well. But Bain and the new guy were hanging from the ceiling to this room of disaster. What was I to do about them? I couldn’t use my wings, for two reasons: they weren’t strong enough to fly me up there and they were too numb to feel anyway. But I had a better idea.

I extracted my three-inch claws on my hands and morphed my feet into the those of the dragon-kind, with talons like an over-sized eagle. I dug my claws into the stone wall of the room and began to ascend, it was just like climbing a mountain…a very vertical mountain. When I made it to the ceiling and hung upside down, the task became legitimately harder. I had to make sure to go much slower and ensure that my claws were deep enough in the stone that they wouldn’t lose their hold. And yet another problem presented itself to me; I was absolutely terrified of heights.

So after about four minutes of coaxing myself into becoming completely upside down on this ceiling, convincing myself that it was just another wall facing another direction, I managed to make my way over to Bain. His life was gone and I knew it before I placed my hand upon the cold cheek of his pale face. I sliced the rope from the ceiling and held onto it with my other hand, standing upside down on this ceiling, my eyes determinedly focused upon the grip I had in the stone with my feet and the hold I had of the rope. I lowered his dead body to the ground gently and then dropped the rope. Now all I had to do was swing myself back up to the ceiling and grab on with my hands again. Only then would I be able to breathe right.

I managed my way over to the new guy on the squad and stopped suddenly, a noise issuing from his direction. It scared me so much that I almost lost my grip on the ceiling and fell. I cocked my eyebrow and looked him over to see if I was just imagining things or not. His body was very lightly turning this way and that, finally turning to face me in the end. When it did, I had to keep myself from screaming.

His eyeballs were brutally removed from their sockets, his lips sewn shut with a crude wire and various cuts and bruises all around his neck and all over his cheeks and arms. The sight of his mangled body was enough to make one sick, and I almost vomited. I crawled an inch or two closer to him and reached out my hand to touch his forehead, caked with blood that I knew very well belonged to him. He groaned and began breathing through his nose much more noticeably.

“Oh my!” I said aloud, no longer able to keep myself quiet. I crawled ever closer to him and saw the reason why he was not dead because he had been hanged. The rope had caught on his neck armor and left enough room for him to breathe, albeit rather sparse. I slit his rope and lowered him to the ground, just as I had done for Bain. I then wasted no time in climbing over to the wall and releasing my hold to fall 14 feet to the ground.

I crawled over to the newest of our kind and knelt beside him, releasing the rope from around his neck and armor, supporting his head on my knees. Very carefully, and as slowly as I could go without not going at all, I used my claws to cut the wire that kept his lips from moving. When the bonds were sliced, I removed them from the rough holes in his upper and lower jaws, allowing them to bleed only slightly before stopping the flow with some cloth from my sleeve.

Several hours went by, and though I had looked around the room many times, I could not find any other way out other than the barred door that stood out the south end of the room. I covered him in the cape from Bain to keep him warm and curled around his head so that he would have some elevation instead of being flat on the ground. My mind told me to stay awake, but my body insisted that I get some rest, if I could manage it.

At some point, I’m not even sure when, I had fallen into sleep’s clutches. Though the events of today, all that I had been conscious for, were saddening, I had found some hope in the new guy that kept me from losing my mind or committing suicide. I wished only that he would wake up soon before it was too late…

Chapter One