Diamonds and Deviants
This picture my own - others from Google Free to use images
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Celtica didn’t want to go to Daniel Savage too often to ask for favours. She wasn’t entirely certain of the relationship between her father and the chief werewolf and she didn’t want to push her luck - or her father’s store of goodwill - with the werewolf clan.
If she could do a task on her own, then she should, it didn’t pay to cut corners or rely on others, especially when you didn’t know what standards they kept - or what morals.
Dragons had always had a good relationship with wizards and warlocks, shamen and other magi. If she wracked her brains enough, she was sure to come up with someone that she could ask.
The problem was that dragons had made a pact millennia ago to hide their presence from the world so these days, a dragon was as much a part of mythology to werewolves, vampires, faeries, dwarves and giants etc as they were to the humans.
None of the preterdeviants believed in dragons anymore, they were thought of as tales from a bygone age, things that never were, fantasy creatures. Whichever magi had done the deal with the dragons had made such a good job of it, he had, in all essence, glamoured the entire population of the world.
Now, if Celtica could find that Magi, it would help her enormously. But how do you find someone so powerful, especially if he didn’t want to be found?
Celtica had an idea. She remembered when she first travelled to the world of man, away from her family and the security of being a member of a large clan. Her mother had given her a gift.
It was a shard from the Dragon Stone - well actually, it was a splinter from a shard of the Dragon Stone and it was meant to give her wisdom when she needed it. Celtica wasn’t quite sure that she actually needed such great wisdom at the moment but as she’d thought about the shard, she figured that notion had entered her head for a reason and so she should at least follow her intuition.
She went down to the bay again. The alarms had all been shut off and reset as far as she could see and the security firms had gone back to what they usually did of an evening.
Celtica didn’t like the cold. It didn’t harm her but she was a warmblooded dragon and she much preferred swimming in lava than in the comparatively icy waters of the bay.
‘Ah well, in for a penny, in for a pound’ she thought as she removed her boots, jeans and blouse. Underwear wasn’t so very different from swimwear so it made no never mind to her. She gritted her teeth and dived into the water.
She would have been a lot more comfortable in dragon form as she swam through to the underwater entrance to the secret cave but it was risky, especially after the Syren song had been called. She didn’t know what kind of creatures would get curious and brave enough to come take a look.
Her vision was perfect underwater, she could see everything around her, the litter and debris, she could even see traces of pollution as she swam and she shook her head in dismay. Humans, bloody parasites crawling the planet’s surface, destroying everything as they went and all in the name of ‘progress’.
The entrance to the cave - her cave - was just ahead. It was brilliantly disguised, she had been fortunate enough to find it when she first moved there and the town was a little fishing port with nothing of much worth in monetary terms, but a wealth of riches in terms of community and goodwill.
She had watched it all move forward through the decades and centuries to where they were now, at the pinnacle of human greed and avarice.
As she made her way upwards, towards the dark surface of the pool in the cave, she began to think towards the Dragon Stone. Within seconds, it responded to her mind and it led her to its hiding place. If she hadn’t have needed the help of the Dragon Stone, it wouldn’t have shown itself to her, but if she hadn’t have needed it, it wouldn’t have placed the notion in her mind in the first instance.
To be able to communicate with the Dragon Stone properly, she would have to be in her dragon form but each time she used her dragon form, it aged her human form until at last she would have the appearance of a wizened old crone who could not possibly be still living.