Alexstrasza * First Flight
HERE THERE BE DRAGONS
Every beat of the great red wings echoes like thunder as the ruby leviathan soars through the sky. The land below her is a bleak mountainscape, covered with ice and snow, dotted with the occasional trees and signs of life. Though the skies around her are frigid, howling with wind and whistling with snow and hail, Alexstrasza seems unaffected, uncannily sharp eyes scanning the ground.
There.
The howl of the wind becomes a screech as she swoops down towards the ground, towards a small band of mountain rhinoceroses. One lags behind. It is old, it is weak, it is slow, it is dying - and in its death, it will nourish life. In a heartbeat, the dragon's powerful jaws have seized the beast, and she alights into the sky once more. A quick snap of her jaws breaks the creature's neck instantly, ending its struggle and its suffering. She can feel its blood seep into her mouth, hot and rich and full of ebbing life, but this meal is not for her.
Miles and miles of land pass beneath her, and the mountains give way to other lands - a quiet ice-covered plain that tingles eerily with barely contained magic, with thousands of years of history and death. In the midst of the icy snowscape, though, there is a basin, sheltered from the arctic winds by a network of cliffs - in the center of which stands a great tree, its leaves red as if it were autumn, surrounded by thriving fields of green. There are others like her, there - other red dragons and drakes and wyrmkin, though none quite as large or as magnificent.
Alexstrasza lands, touching down surprisingly softly for such an enormous creature, and drops the still-warm carcass of her prey in front of a nook beneath the roots of the tree.
There are little squawks, and a a dozen tiny red whelps - her children - emerge from the egg clutch to feed.
*She sounds disoriented, somehow* A dream...?
Every beat of the great red wings echoes like thunder as the ruby leviathan soars through the sky. The land below her is a bleak mountainscape, covered with ice and snow, dotted with the occasional trees and signs of life. Though the skies around her are frigid, howling with wind and whistling with snow and hail, Alexstrasza seems unaffected, uncannily sharp eyes scanning the ground.
There.
The howl of the wind becomes a screech as she swoops down towards the ground, towards a small band of mountain rhinoceroses. One lags behind. It is old, it is weak, it is slow, it is dying - and in its death, it will nourish life. In a heartbeat, the dragon's powerful jaws have seized the beast, and she alights into the sky once more. A quick snap of her jaws breaks the creature's neck instantly, ending its struggle and its suffering. She can feel its blood seep into her mouth, hot and rich and full of ebbing life, but this meal is not for her.
Miles and miles of land pass beneath her, and the mountains give way to other lands - a quiet ice-covered plain that tingles eerily with barely contained magic, with thousands of years of history and death. In the midst of the icy snowscape, though, there is a basin, sheltered from the arctic winds by a network of cliffs - in the center of which stands a great tree, its leaves red as if it were autumn, surrounded by thriving fields of green. There are others like her, there - other red dragons and drakes and wyrmkin, though none quite as large or as magnificent.
Alexstrasza lands, touching down surprisingly softly for such an enormous creature, and drops the still-warm carcass of her prey in front of a nook beneath the roots of the tree.
There are little squawks, and a a dozen tiny red whelps - her children - emerge from the egg clutch to feed.
*She sounds disoriented, somehow* A dream...?