Blight landed lightly, taloned feet barely a whisper over the rock.

Dread had told him where to come, and he'd not seen the other dragon in weeks; alone, Blight had quickly grown both worried, and bored. He'd toyed with the idea of seeing Emuh; Dread's explanation hadn't been clear. He was going to do something with his magic, and then he'd never returned.

"Hello?" he called, spines rising warily along his spine, tattered fins spreading. His ghostlight eyes darted here and there into the dark of the strange little cave mouth before him, and he hesitated there.

I think this is the right place, he thought to himself, and took two slow, cautious wing-walk steps inside.

(tagging for GM Navy to do a Transcendent thread!)

A voice croaked from above, "HELLO, HE ASKS."

Emuh descended on silent wings, black feathers still frosted at their tips. Toxic-green eyes burned through the relatively dark corridor. "WHO-WHO ASKS?" He tilted his head to and fro—another one of those scaly, winged beasts, hmm? The last had held great power. Perhaps this one might be an improvement; any amount of care and precision (a polite way of saying intellect) would pass for it. His aura shifted to a putrid-green film, nearly dripping off himself. A plague, virulent and lethal.

"YOU COME FOR A TEST? YOU SHALL RECEIVE ONE," the owl-beast crowed, and swept off.

In his wake was a dimming of the lights. Stone churned and shifted in the gymnasium-sized room beyond, stalactites and stalagmites yawning out the rock like teeth. They were clustered tighter in some spots and were sometimes arranged to form walls. Moisture accompanied by heady warmth clung to the air. A sour smell—like uncleanliness—drifted towards Blight, though it seemed to be coming from every part of the room.

Something heavy, smooth-scaled, and cool slithered across the dragon's toes. By the time he could look down at it, its tail-end was diving into the dimly-lit maze of rocky points. The ceiling groaned softly, just one time.

@Blight

The arrival of the owl had him blinking in surprise--and then it was gone."Oh, I was only going to ask-..." And it was gone- ...where Dad-Dad went, he finished, in his mind.

Well, maybe he could ask after this was done. Trial-? That's what Dread had come for, right? Or, rather, come back after doing?

He looked around, and jumped, flinching, at the slithering over one talon. Well, whatever that was hadn't seemed aggressive, at least, and he exhaled, looking around himself and focusing.

The room had... changed. It still was changing, in subtle ways, the rock finishing its reformations, groaning as it finalized its new shapes, its walls and chambers. The whole room resonated with his own sort of magic, but he didn't grasp quite what that meant. It seemed to be a sort of maze, ahead: gaps here and closed-tooth stone structures in other places, walls formed of rocky teeth.

"Am I meant to pass through there?" he called out, at last, uncertain. He wanted to reach out, to test the bacterial life ahead but that was something he'd never learned to do.

But-... maybe there was another way to navigate.

He focused for a moment, intending to form a parasite--something like he'd sent after Orthoclase-Alpha a long time before, something to follow and glow after the scale-tailed thing, something to show him the way. Instead, he accidentally swallowed it.

Almost immediately he felt sick--and worse than that, now he was glowing, not only from his eyes but a small ball that could be seen descending down his throat, illuminating the scales of throat and belly.

"Oh, shit," Blight half-whispered, craning his head to try and look down at himself--and then hiccupped, nausea rising in him.

The gentle ping! of a dripping stalactite was all that answered Blight's question.

As the dragon conjured up a parasite, only to swallow it, a faintly derisive, "hmmm?" echoed from above. What purpose could that serve, other than for aesthetics?

The cavern's ceiling groaned again, falling a few inches. Any of the stone "teeth" that'd been touching one another cracked beneath the pressure.

@Blight

Blight hesitated. He felt... sick, and now the fucking ceiling was collapsing? He wasn't sure what he was meant to do about that, with or without magic, but he definitely didn't feel like darting out beneath the crumbling rock was at all a good idea. He headed for the side of the room, staring half-upward warily, ghostlight eye cocked skyward. Well, ceiling-ward, anyway.

All the while he was wary of the strange and serpentine creature he'd seen and felt in the dark. Another lurching roil of nausea struck Blight, and the plague dragon tilted his head down with a grimace, trying to hack up the... the thing he'd made. Maybe, if he were lucky, it could still be of use to him.

Get--get out. Not me. Follow the--uh, that thing--it went that way... he thought at it, as if that would somehow help.

Out it came this time, at least, a small glowing gob of bug that quickly scrambled up, turned, and scurried off after the... thing. The other thing.

Blight took flight and gave an awkward, low-flying chase, eyes cutting warily to the ceiling every few seconds with concern.

The glowing parasite skittered out into the darkness, visible along the floor. Its tiny body's progression was slow, but it soon became clear that it was circling back around...

...indicating that the massive shape that had drawn close was stalking Blight from the shadows.

1/3

Ghostlight eyes tracked the parasite with rapidly-increasing concern. After a moment, as Blight realized what was happening, he launched into flight--tattered wings thumping at the air--to hover as high as he could to the low and jagged ceiling.

Wariness spiked into near-fear as he realized he was being hunted--or perhaps not, but was it a risk he was willing to take? It already touched me once without harming me, he reasoned, uncertainly, but then he saw the parasite circling around farther in the dark.

It wasn't, as it turned out, a chance he wanted to risk his life on. The dragon let out a high-pitched, shuddering shriek-like roar of warning, and called out to the thing. "STAY BACK, whatever you are!" But he could see his parasite drawing closer, and at last he called again upon his magic.

He struck out, but in the darkness he could not quite pinpoint the creature, and he wasn't sure he'd hit anything at all.

The magic missed, and an instant later Blight's assumptions proved correct.

A Lurker-like serpent, some foot and a half thick in its body and thirty or more feet long, launched at him from the darkness. A flash of fangs was all he would see, shining scale dulled by strange camouflage, muscles surging beneath them.

Should the bite land, the dragon might be dragged to the ground, but would certainly be poisoned: an agonizingly-painful acidic bite that would eat away gradually at his flesh.

The plague dragon flinched, magicka again flashing up in a flare to protect himself as he flinched from the lunging strike. Magic shimmered over his hide, wings beating frantically to keep him aloft as fangs tore over his skin.

He attempted to keep himself upright, to fly higher, feeling the distant ache of the venom begin its work--it was the barest of envenomations, his magic having saved him from the worst of it, and he flailed in preparation to gain distance between himself and the attacking Lurker-thing.

Another roar, briefer and shriller, of protest escaped him.

The Lurker fell back, briefly twisting its jaws as if to settle them back into place. Enormous, muscled body coiled back on itself, clearly preparing for another strike.

The light envenomation would eat away at the wound like an ulcer over days if not treated, but the dragon's magic had averted anything immediately deadly.