Starless Night - The Ballad of Cassidy Kidd

CHAPTER VII: ANY GOOD COWBOY KNOWS HOW TO RIDE

I WAS REALLY GETTING TIRED OF BEING SLAMMED INTO SHIT.
I was also getting tired of monitoring my language. Enough crap had happened in the last two days to officially disable my internal censor.

My body overflowed with that emotional Svaugr energy, spilling out and pouring down the sides of the tower- I tripped over myself, trying to stand, nearly dropping off the tower along with the emotion-thick fog.
Managing to keep my stance, I stared straight ahead through the cloudy, deathly fog that had swirled and thickened around the tower, trying to pierce through my skin and into me like a cruel swarm of mosquitoes. Through the fog, I could see lights- something massive, robotic, and serpentine, flowing through the air inexplicably like an eastern dragon. A brighter light pierced through the fog, lightning pouring out of a massive, blue dot that headed straight for my half-limp body.

The realization that it was the beast's maw came a little too late.
It galloped straight through the fog, its mouth agape and seemingly salivating despite being entirely robotic from head-to-toe. Thousands of shifting plates, moving and shimmering like scales, came together to form the guise of a leviathan-esque dragon that very clearly had it out for me. Its eyes and jaws burned with a power that I couldn't decipher- it felt similar to the emotional fog, but more condensed, and more angry. I couldn't make out any legs, but given its movements, it must have had them, I thought.
Moving gears and the flighty movements reminded me of the Svaugr as well as Icarus, as though it was formed by his hand out of their metal.

No, something resounded in my head. Like a second voice, other than my inner monologue. No, it repeated, over and over.
Not formed by the hand of any man. A beast shaped, then abandoned by the gods.
I guess we could relate in being abandoned, but it didn't seem keen to chat- only stopping its relentless charge to unleash a literally thunderous roar that coated the entirety of its jaws in blue lightning. Svaugr energy.

My right arm moved on its arm again, defying the exhausted state of the rest of my body- in fact, it seemed almost energized by the amount of power surrounding us. The fog continued to grow denser, and more of that lightning spewed from the beast charging towards me and zapped straight into the arm. I felt empowered as well, as though I had become in-tune with the energy from the arm, using it to fuel my own body. Electricity coursed through me, but more like adrenaline than blood- I could tell it wasn't supposed to be there. My body didn't want it there, despite the fact that it was seemingly beneficial. So, clearly I hadn't become entirely capable of processing the energy.
I still wasn't confident that all of that Thor lightning nonsense was gonna give me the power to kill an actual goddamned dragon. I thought about jumping out of its way, but my legs had locked up- not in fear, but out of a strange confidence. That second voice resounded in my head again.
Fight, it said. Release.

Then the beast slammed its entire weight into my torso, head-first, and even over the thunder I could hear my bones cracking. Every part of my body recoiled suddenly, but very little pain made its way into my system.

I gripped onto the beast with both my limbs, trying to ensure that its jaw wouldn't open again as we found ourselves very suddenly in the air above the eastern plains around Saint Petersburg. The rag I had strapped around my forehead in the bunker was keeping my mat of thick, red hair out of my face, thank god.

We already had to be at least a couple hundred meters from the tower, barreling through the air like a pair of confused, angry creatures forced into fighting by some prophecy. I felt not even a moment after we had left the air that the emotion the dragon was pulsating wasn't anger, it was confusion, and exhaustion. There was something deeper inside it that was filling its body with hate- regardless, it continued pressing its jaws down on me harder, but the strength of my arm and my insistence on doing squats every morning kept it off me.