Warriors of the Dragon

Over the Kazakh Steppe

Sephira reached out to Caius before she let sleep take her. She could feel him laying amongst many other warm bodies on the cold, hard stone floor.

She woke early in the morning as the orange rays of the dawn sun stretched between the white mountains. She didn't open her own eyes, but found herself looking through Caius' eyes as he peered out of the large entrance to the dark stone cavern. He felt his rider with him and Sephira could feel a pull to join him. She wondered if it was her own feelings that drew her towards her dragon or if her dragon was the one who wanted her with him. Her eyes opened to the dark room and she took a deep breath reaching out her arm to feel Craven's body beside her. He grunted when she accidentally hit him with her flailing arm as she sat up.

"Sorry," she murmured, running her hand lightly over his back where she had whacked him. Her voice seemed swallowed up by the room and she saw that the heavy curtains had been drawn over the windows and blocked out all the morning light. They had kept the room very warm overnight, maybe even too warm. Sephira had slept in her thick black tunic and her pants and boots. Even after she let her connection to her dragon's mind fade, she still felt a strong urge to get down to him. She didn't feel like she had the patience to wait for the others to wake up, even Craven.

"I have to go to Caius." Sephira murmured to her half-asleep lover. She didn't mean to make him wake.

"What happened? Are they okay?" He asked, his amber eyes wide awake in seconds as he pushed himself up off the bed.

"They're fine." She told him gently, putting her hands on his shoulders as if she was going to push him back into bed. "I'm sorry...I didn't mean it like that." She laughed with sympathy in her blue eyes. He took a deep breath, rubbing his hand down his face before pulling her into a hug as if to say 'it's fine, go'. When he let her go, she rushed to get on her armor, sword harness, and finally her mask before she slipped out of the room and found her way to the spiral staircase that led down to the cavern.

*

Craven was feeling Sephira's impatience when the others took longer to rise than he would've liked. All the doors were locked until Rauka and Leuthil opened theirs and joined him in the hallway.

"How was your night?" Rauka asked him politely.

"Fine. How was yours?" Craven asked cursorily.

"I slept well. Markus, Dawn, and Isolde seemed to have a good time and stayed up later..." She chuckled, staring at the line of locked wooden doors in anticipation.

The door at the end opened slowly and the three of them looked on in confusion when a shirtless human man came out with a guilty expression on his beardless face. His blue eyes made contact with theirs as he awkwardly rushed down the hall clutching his shirt and vest with his leather pants undone. The three of them looked at each other with the same bewildered expressions, but none of them ventured to comment. Demitro was the next to emerge from the same room and they weren't that surprised to see that he was also shirtless. He had a long shapely torso, but it had very little muscle definition, not even as much as slender Leuthil. Though he could not be considered a glutton by any means, his body did reflect his love of libations and habit of carousing with the other naiads rather than training or fighting like some of the others in the group.

He peered over at them with disdain as he made his way to the washroom and Rauka noticed his strange short hair-cut as he disappeared. His dark brown hair was about two inches long on the top of his head, shorter on the sides, and he had a long skinny braid behind his left ear that rested on his shoulder.