Wings of Evolution (WoF AU)

Chapter 1

Echo of the strata

Beneath the winding strata, Uhar watched the procession unfold. Riots. They'd been unheard of through most of the known history of Lenas, but even with such a long time consumed in order and peace, they should have expected that it wasn't to last. In fact, Uhar was probably the only dragon who had seen this coming.

He looked away from the signs and closed his ears to the shouts. Uhar ignored the echoes that bounced across the cavern walls and the graffiti slathered across the homes. He escaped from the crowded streets of Lenas, walking into the more sedate and orderly caverns of the outside caves.

It was sad to see his home falling into such disarray. Even if he'd only had five years of life to see it.

Uhar flew across a particularly large cavity, stumbling as he caught himself on the other side. He needed to do something about this. The riots had sparked pretty much overnight. Uhar blamed Losei completely. Only she could summon such uproar among the common folk. She and all the other glowwyrms in the protected caves below.

Uhar cursed under his breath as he stumbled on a patch of loose gravel and skidded forward several tail lengths. He tried very hard to keep a level mind, but sparks. He just wanted to leave. Go off into some strange land and be away from these meaningless squabbles between the regular folk and Losei's dragons.

He looked upward.

Perhaps it didn't matter anymore if the world forgot the Kiaen. They'd tried as hard as they dared to be forgotten, forgetting much themselves, but the surface couldn't be nearly as hateful as the caverns had become.

Uhar swallowed that thought and hurried onward.

---

He bent over the books again, staring at the lines and lines of ancient text. They'd cracked the cipher several years ago, before he'd cared enough about what his mother had been doing, she'd gathered as much of the words of the ancients as she could, but before long the libraries had been closed off. After her passing, it fell to uhar to translate the piles.

Most of it was in the ancient tongue, but they hadn't technically forgotten that in the first place, just... misplaced it. After years of interrogating every dragon over a hundred years of age, they'd found Esin, a scholar in her day who'd inherited the knowledge from a line of ancestors. They'd kept it as clean as possible from the tongue of the caves, but it was still a very confusing language with so many words lost to time.

Uhar slumped against the desk as he once more found nothing by the end of the scroll. There were no hidden meanings in the text, no easy ways out, and absolutely no secrets to the ancient powers. No way to save his dragons from a leader determined to forget everything that the Kiaen had struggled for.

Uhar had enough at that point. He didn't even have access to the rest of the library of the past. All the works his mother had salvaged were already translated and de-ciphered, and none of them would tell him why his ancestors had left the surface.

Was it a famine? Plague? Wars and death? Was it a hatred of their leaders? Had they split off from the lost ones because of disagreement?

Uhar let out a long breath and shoved everything off his desk in a measured moment of anger. Alright then. He would have to find out for himself. Uhar reached through the stacks of books, landing upon one near the middle filled with maps, including one that showed a path through the caves.

He took the book, a bag filled with all he dared take and left Lenas behind him in a moment of fear. This was not the orderly escape he'd expected, but he would take what he could get.