Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) - Gary Stringer (read e book TXT) 📗

we can relate,” Sara sighed with a wistful smile. “My sister and I come here often, just to be close to our world. A world we can never see again.”

“Why not?” Mandalee asked. “If you don’t mind me asking. Feel free to tell me to mind my own business.”

“Aww, rubbish!” Jessica chimedn in dismissively. “There’s no harm in telling ’em, is there, sis?”

Sara agreed. “It’s not like we get to be ourselves around many people. ‘Hi, I’m really a purple Chetsuan girl from another world that I can never go back to’ isn’t the best chat-up line.”

“Who needs chat-up lines? Some of us just find the nearest cute elf boy and stick our tongue down his throat,” Jessica teased.

“But seriously,” Sara continued, refusing to rise to it. “If you want our story, we’re perfectly happy to share. There’s no point in making it a secret.”

“As my sister says,” Jessica explained, “we’re Chetsuan girls. That’s our name for our species: Chetsuan. Our world, Phitonia, is that one there,” she pointed to the second portal from the right. “Unfortunately, we shared our world with these flying lizards called dragons. They had a different name for us: dinner.”

“In the old days,” Sara took up the story, “our people found ways to defend themselves and build a civilisation, despite not being top of the food chain. Then, a few decades ago, the red dragon Mallax rose to power. We don’t really know the details.”

“Yeah,” Jessica agreed. “Dragon politics wasn’t big on the school syllabus, was it, love? Back when there was a school. But as far as we understand it, even other dragons were scared of him and sort of fell into line or else. Now, by all accounts, Mallax had what I guess you might call a food allergy.”

“Specifically, to Chetsuans,” Sara put in.

“Yeah, even proximity to us brings him out in hives something rotten, poor dear. So, he decided, if we were no good to him, we were no good for any dragon, and suddenly we’re off the menu. Which might seem like a good thing, except…”

“…Except that meant we got downgraded from dinner to vermin,” Sara explained. “Their determination to exterminate us destroyed everything our people had built. Civilisation gone, our people were forced underground to live with the rats.”

“All vermin together. Vermin United!” Jessica declared, punching the air, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“We spent our early teens moving from one hole in the ground to another. We grew up fast, until one day, when it was our turn to gather food. Always a risk, but obviously a necessary one.”

“That’s when we got snatched,” Jessica revealed, “and taken to the black dragon, Zacar. I guess you’d call him a scientist. Working alone as he did, even Mallax didn’t know half of what he got up to. Zacar was looking for a final solution to their infestation problem, and under his orders, there were dragons constantly on the lookout for stray Chetsuans to become his laboratory rats.”

“Longest year of our lives,” Sara lamented. “Which was a hell of an achievement because not many lived that long.”

Mandalee exchanged a glance with Cat. She was beginning to wish she’d never asked.

“What…erm…” the druidess began tentatively, “…what did he do to you?”

The way the two sisters looked at each other at that moment, the shared suffering in their eyes spoke volumes without them ever speaking a word.

In the end, Jessica shook her head emphatically. “No. Don’t want to talk about that. Sorry, love.”

Sara reached out and held her sister close. “You wouldn’t thank us if we did,” she whispered, a haunted look in her eyes.

Mandalee spoke up to say, “I am so sorry for making you relive this,” she apologised, reaching out to them both. “I never imagined…”

“Nothing to be sorry for, dearie,” Jessica assured her. “You haven’t made us do anything, and as for reliving it, it’s not like we’re ever going to forget. We’ve just learned to get on with our lives.”

“But you can’t get on with your lives with your people?” Cat wondered.

“No, never,” Sara shook her head, emphatically. “You see, the reason we survived was that we were Zacar’s successful test rats.”

“Oh, yeah, a real eureka moment for him, it was!” Jessica remarked. “We’re carriers.”

“Carriers?” Mandalee frowned, not understanding.

Catriona did. “Plague carriers,” she clarified, tears in her eyes at the horror of the idea.

“Don’t worry, you’re perfectly safe.” Sara assured them. “It can’t jump species. Zacar made sure of that. He snared more of our people from across our world for lab trials. Other than caging them up, he didn’t do a thing to them. He didn’t need to: we did.”

“Yep, we killed them all, we did. Every single one. We couldn’t do anything except sit in our cages and watch them die slowly. Zacar was understandably delighted with us.”

“True to the scientific method,” Sara took up the story, “having successfully proved the formula under laboratory conditions, we would have been released back into the wild as field tests. Then, once our people started dying all around us, he would move on to mass production and create more of us carriers all over our world.”

“Eventually, the carriers would be the last of our species, and if all the carriers were sterilised before they were released…”

“You couldn’t reproduce,” Mandalee realised, “so there would be no need to hunt down the carriers in the end. Give it time and extinction would happen naturally.”

“Thank the stars it never got that far,” Jessica put in.

“What happened?” Mandalee wanted to know.

“Daelen StormTiger happened,” Jessica beamed.

“We’d all heard of him of course,” Sara told them with a smile, “but to be honest, I thought it was just a myth. A story people told to give them hope. That one day, without warning, this superhero would drop out of the sky and save us. He’d done it before, hundreds of years ago, or so the story went. Beaten back the dragons, given our people a chance.” She shrugged. “It obviously didn’t last, so as I said, I never