ORIGIN

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It was awhile before he could try again.

He spent time under the water, jaws open, pain filling him despite the cold lapping over his tongue and down his throat. When he finally emerged, willing to brave the flesh-melting agony to try again, the bats had shifted position along with their intended prey.

Now they were some thirty yards closer to shore--which meant farther from him.

Dragon submerged again, and this time as he powered his way forward with swishing tail, legs tucked against him, he kept his jaws wide open. It dragged him down, a little, and swimming forward and staying upright took a lot more effort, but the reward of cold, fresh water constantly flowing through his maw was well worth it.

By the time his snout slowly emerged beneath the bats, he'd almost forgotten about the pain.

Almost.

Again.

He exhaled softly through his nose, again gathering his still-uneasy, churning bile, and focusing that inner fire deeply around it. He could feel it simmering and bubbling, and he began to watch the bats, focusing closely on their flight patterns.

They seemed relatively random, he eventually realized; sometimes one swept down and then none would appear for a full minute. Other times it was three, four bats in quick succession--sometimes they even nearly collided! The direction, too, was random; all he could predict was "up."

...I can do "up!"

Dragon drifted, like a particularly toothy log, until he was positioned just below the swarms of flies. Then he waited, watching closely for a bat.

The instant he saw movement he belched and then spit, the blast of bile soaring up in a splash of steaming goo and striking one, albeit rather lopsidedly. It only hit the thing's wing--but still, the bat squeaked loudly, and the dual smells of vomit and burning flesh filled Dragon's nostrils, screaming of success.

As he watched, the bat turned, trying to fly off--but its flight grew erratic after only one or two beats of its wings, and it then plummeted into the water, thrashing.

Dragon submerged, and arrowed toward it with swift, powerful strokes of his tail, jaws opening as he reached it--and then snapping shut the instant he felt movement against his mouth.

The kill was quick, as always--a crunch and a brisk shake of his head. But he didn't swallow it down. Instead he carried it all the way back to the pile, where he spread it out--both as an offering to Aquarian, and to have a better look.

Its like its wing just... melted.

His thought was awed, his eyes wide, and this was immediately--as he turned and charged right back into the marsh--followed by another.

I've gotta try that again!

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He'd decided to practice his aim, first.

A smaller gob of bile wouldn't melt through a bat's wings, maybe, but it'd let him get the hang of aiming the stuff at a flying, diving, chaotically-moving creature, at the very least.

He slipped out in silence, only his eyes and nostrils above the water's surface, arrowing toward the clouds of insects and the bats. They'd moved quite a distance further up the shore, and closer to it, and it took him some time to locate them.

By the time he did, his bile was already churning in his throat; as he slipped quietly beneath the water, positioning himself beneath the insect swarm and slowly raising up beneath them, he could already feel the heat in his gut intensifying.

He waited, prepared--and as the first bat swept down, he struck.

The superheated spitball struck the bat dead-on, and the creature shrieked, flapped its way upwards, and then simply dropped.

Dead.

Dragon blinked.

Oops.

This thought despite the fact that this was exactly what he'd meant to do. It had been so sudden and precise that it had almost seemed, well, accidental.

He swam to retrieve the bat, this time ripping a chunk off in a violent tear to eat.

It tasted okay. Like rat, if he had to compare it to something. He'd carry it back to the pile, and add it on. Another offering for Aquarian.

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He'd rested overnight, and slipped back out into the water some time before what the lights would indicate was midday--if one could even tell in the dim darkness of Cetus.

Soon he was lurking again, waiting below the surface, eyes on the cloud of bugs above. It had taken him some time to find them, but now that he had, he was watching them very closely, moving with them as they drifted along the water.

The bats were coming far less frequent now, and any attempt to hit one would take a great deal of accuracy. Add to that the fact that he had to keep the boiling bile ready in his gut, which was somewhat painful even before ejecting it up his throat, and Dragon was left rather uncomfortable.

Finally a series of strikes by the winged rats prompted him to action. He lifted his head from the water, feeling the bile surge up and forth, and he projected it out into the air above.

It caught one by its side, spinning it so that it splashed down in the marsh some distance away. Dragon felt mixed--half-triumphant at his strike, and half-annoyed that it hadn't been better. Oh, and it was excruciatingly painful--there was that, too. Again he swam with open jaws, letting the cool marsh water clear out the remaining bile and soothe his burns; and then he clamped teeth around the dead bat, lifting it and swimming back to the pile to add it on.

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The alligator crept along the ridge of the Crags.

They were both harder to climb, now that he was somewhat larger, and easier; harder because he was heavier and not so agile, and more prone to sliding away if he slipped. Easier because he could now more easily reach ledges that he couldn't before; he could step over stones that he'd had to struggle to haul his hindquarters up, before.

Dragon eventually reached his favorite basking spot. He planned to rest here, awhile, warming himself under the very low-hanging light orb, regaining his energy. Once there he found that he could nearly touch the thing with his snout, now. He regarded it with as close as he could come to affection, then lowered his jaw to the stone to rest.

Not warm enough.

The smile curving his face fit his emotion--he remembered how he'd used charring heat in his feet and tail to warm the stone further before. Maybe it was his affinity with fire that made him crave a higher heat; maybe it was the tolerance he was building for being burnt.

Either way he focused, eyes slipping nearly closed in contentment, feeling the heat building in him.

He was careful not to burn the stone to ash, or anything quite so silly; instead he simply warmed it, barely any heat at all, feeling his power quickly slip away again as he closed his eyes to rest.

Ahh, nice, hot rocks. Every lizard's dream.

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Dragon was woken from his basking some hours later by a sound below, toward the swamp. At first he merely cracked his eyes open, motionless, wondering what it was he had heard.

A moment later it came again--a shrill squeal, followed by a thrashing in the underbrush. He quickly turned, predatory instinct stirring him to action, and scrambled down the stone shelf slopes. He was going relatively fast, his mind set on the prey-sound rather than his footing.

Luckily, however, the cliffs were familiar to him, and the shale ledges--despite flaking away here and there, and despite sharper points that dug into webbed feet--didn't send him careening to his death. He slowed as he reached the bottom, high-walking to avoid too much hiss-dragging from scales-on-stone, then paused to listen.

Silence. It was eerily quiet here, the grass not rustling, the chittering of insects stilled by whatever the commotion had been. There was--

Suddenly there came a thrashing. It was startlingly close, and to Dragon's further surprise, it wasn't down in the marsh at all, but rather to his right, somewhere inside the cliff wall.

Confused, the alligator slowly slid down into the marsh, creeping along the edges of the Crags to peer inside.

What the...?

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The Crags of Cetus weren't a united front. Instead they were a series of massive, sharp and jumbled stones, and beneath them, at their base, there were many dark channels and gaps that lay between them. Dragon had known cave rats and many cave bats to make their home in these spaces, but it had always been surprisingly quiet and peaceful--until now.

What he saw startled him more badly than anything had thus far in his young life--and that was saying something, considering he'd been born directly into the attack of the one-hundred-meter-long Guardian of Cetus, a fish-dragon named Aquarian. This, though... This was horror.

A thick white... something, like air gone solid, filled the narrow gap before him. It was bound and wriggling like cotton, and he could smell--strongly--the acrid scents of urine and adrenaline. Dragon had never seen spiderweb before, but if he had, he would have realized how much danger he was in even at this distance: the webbing spanned a good three meters of gap, thick enough to entrap even a 'gator such as him, and something several feet across was already bound within. It was panting, laying tense and tiring, and from the hooves he could see protruding from the bottom--and the faint bioluminescent glow flashing a warning from within--he thought it to be a cave deer.

A long-legged black shape, hairy and glistening with ichor, was perched over it. Those legs slowly worked, spinning the deer up even tighter in its grasp, and Dragon recoiled in disgust.

"What are YOU?" he hissed.

The deer panicked at the sound, again thrashing and squealing; the spider jerked up to stare at him, and he could see many glinting eyes regarding him coldly.

Oh no, what did I do, it's staring at me, I--

It was probably frightened of him, and it would have probably scurried off--maybe--if he'd approached. Or maybe it would have descended and tried to bite him or wrap him up. Either way he'd never know: as if he were about to throw up from fear, he could feel the fire surging and flaring and bubbling up within him to escape in a monumental blast from his jaws.

Except he didn't remember to open his mouth, and it guttered right back down again, smoke coiling from his nostrils, staring blankly.

Suddenly he realized that the spider was crawling down its web, toward the ground... and it was still staring at him.

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Dragon widened his eyes, taking several quick, scurrying steps back. The horror scene kept playing out before him: the bound deer squealing and thrashing now and again (between periods of panting and hanging helpless in the web), the massive spider slowly descending from the rock, and--was that venom, dripping from its hooked, sharp fangs?

Uh-oh.

A normal spider might have been happy with one prey item, but cave spiders were aggressive and this was no exception. Suddenly it bolted straight at him, two legs lifting into the air, a swatch of sticky web flinging his way and obstructing his vision.

This time the blast of flame worked, and for a moment Dragon was triumphant through his fear--except then the flaming spiderweb had landed over him, engulfing his body, and he was on fire.

He hissed and twisted, the sticky threads seeming to cut right into his armored flesh, burning lines of it searing scars in a pattern of webbing over his back and sides.

Then the spider had leapt on him, and it was trying to bite him, and Dragon rolled frantically to try and keep away. The pain was blinding, the fear perhaps moreso. He rolled in the swamp, flattening reeds as he went, and at least the water put out his fire--but the spider was still chasing him. He snapped to try and keep it away, but then it was jumping at him once more.

At least this bit of webbing had burned and melted away, but Dragon was now on the defensive, backing up quickly with the spider advancing on him. It spit another blast of web at him, and he didn't set this one on fire, at least, but now he was entangled. His body thumped to the ground, legs twisted up against his sides as the web tightened, and watched the spider running at his face.

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The spider was on him with a blink, and he opened his maw--sparking embers of glowing orange blooming within--to burn it at last.

But then his jaw was slapped shut, and he felt as well as saw the spiky black hairy thing perched on his snout, binding his mouth neatly closed.

Crap.

He tried to open his powerful jaws and felt it surprisingly difficult; the muscles he used to open his mouth, he realized, were nowhere near as strong as those used to snap it shut. The spider had him properly bound.

It began to drag him--it was impossibly strong for its size--and he rolled, thrashing exactly as the deer had done--

I AM NOT PREY! BUT I AM NOT PREY!

--his mind rebelling in fear. Suddenly the spider seemed to tire of his fighting, and it leapt on him again. This time he felt the stabbing agony of two huge fangs puncturing his armor. They could barely get through, and he could tell from the way the thick, dark green-yellow fluid welled up and dripped away along his snout that the spider hadn't been able to inject all that much.

It was enough, though. He felt his consciousness slipping away, and the last thing he saw before everything went dark was the grass starting to part around him--not even feeling as his body was dragged toward the cave.

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He wasn't sure how long he slept.

All that he knew was that when he woke, the deer was dead. Its struggles had ceased, and with groggy gaze and even groggier mind, he could see the large spider perched over it, fangs deeply embedded in its cocoon.

It was feeding.

This woke the alligator just a little bit more. He struggled briefly, which caused the spider to twitch and turn his way, watching him with those glittering eyes--but he couldn't get free, and he quickly went limp again.

He eyed the spider. Surely if he'd not been a magical creature, he would have perished here; and maybe, if he put up too much of a fuss, it might envenomate him again (and this might have far more dire effects than before). But he was magical, and he was pretty sure that even in his mouth-dried, mind-fogged, body-weakened state, he could call on enough of his power to at least get rid of the web.

The problem was that, bound as he was, he was liable to burn himself, too.

But he wasn't about to just lay here to be food for some insect (he didn't know spiders were not insects). The alligator went still, dark golden-green eyes locked on the spider, and focused on calling his burning power through his blood, rather than out of his bound maw.

He had to be very careful--careful not to burn himself, careful not to set the webbing on fire. He heated it slowly, at first, focusing it on the webbing at his snout, for the most part. If he could free his jaws, his chances would be far, far higher.

Dragon eventually managed that much, at least; the strings binding his maw melted and burned, searing his skin but falling away. His feet were next, but as he was working on this the spider finally seemed to take more notice of him, turning to face him completely and lifting two long front legs toward him in warning.

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Dragon thought quickly. What was it that he'd done, in the past, to keep his enemies at bay? What was it he'd done when he was in danger? The pit! The rats!

As the spider leapt, he focused on his hide, his flesh, his skin. Rancid smoke began twisting up in thin tendrils, the stink of burning flesh filling the air. It forced the spider back; it scurried onto its deer, again, huddling with legs raised. Smoke seemed to particularly effect it, even though Dragon wasn't able to focus that much power into it while still trying to melt his binds.

Eventually he went limp, for a bit, gasping as he rested and tried to regain his strength.

The spider was now no longer attacking, and his jaws were free--but, though he was still free to try and escape, he still had to manage it.

What could he do? He turned and tried to bite at the webbing keeping him suspended in the air, but after his jaws snapped shut on nothing a few times (and he was sent rocking wildly back and forth) he realized he simply couldn't reach. His next thought was to set himself on fire, again--but if he failed, the spider would come after him.

No. Best to kill the spider first, then if I wear myself out with magic, I have as much time as I need to escape.

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