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“Well, don’t be jealous,” Ella told her. “You’ve got boots and a cloak of your own.”
The pilots started hollering again, and the ship engine restarted, sending the whole thing quaking.
Ella stumbled and fell the rest of the way down the ramp, mercifully catching herself on her palms before her face hit the hard frozen soil of her new home.
The ground was so cold that it felt like her palms were burning from the contact with it.
She stood quickly, gazing around in awe.
The land was fairly flat, and seemed to go on forever, with some sort of low ground cover giving it a pale green hue in spite of the frost on top.
But it was the massive islands floating through the air that made her feel like she was somewhere truly alien and terrifying. The rocky underbellies of the giants cast huge shadows over the ground beneath them.
Were they moving?
Ella squinted up, feeling tiny and exposed, like the only small, soft thing on a moon of hard surfaces and immeasurable mass.
2
JHON
Jhon stood very still at the bridge of the ship, looking across the tundra at a small figure wrapped in furs.
Something inside him tugged at the sight.
It was like a memory, but deeper. He had never mixed with Terrans, and had little knowledge of them other than what was in the intergalactic history books. So, he had no idea what had sparked the feeling that was somehow both new and intimately familiar.
He tried his best to place it, but a tiny hand reached up to tug at his beard, distracting him.
“Now what?” he asked the whelp irritably, though he knew it could not reply.
It made a squeaky sound and its eyes twinkled. Then it tugged on his beard again.
Something about its fearless impertinence in the presence of a dangerous dragon warrior gave Jhon the unwanted urge to smile, but that would only make the situation worse.
The little whelp wasn’t a pet, though it seemed to think it might be. There was no need for him to indulge in its delusion.
It was bad enough that the creature couldn’t speak a single word, or relieve itself without him cleaning it up. A dragonet of its age would be able to take care of its own feeding and eliminating, and would communicate well enough to be understood.
His mind went back almost half a cycle to the day his superior officers had called him in. Jhon was a great warrior, so he expected he was being advanced and given a post befitting his illustrious record in battle.
Instead, they had informed him that he was among the elite few of his brothers, chosen to watch over a single Imberian soul until it came of age.
Jhon knew the legacy. Generations ago, in a tragic military error, his Invicta ancestors had destroyed the entire population of the planet Imber. Though the planet itself, and its rich mineral veins remained intact, the gentle people of Imber were gone.
There was a rumor of an old woman who claimed to be the crown princess of Imber, rescued by soldiers and living on Omega 7-T, but most people doubted it was true. And Jhon certainly did not believe it.
The Intergalactic Council had recently granted the Invicta dragon warriors what they had begged for since the tragedy occurred - the right to bring back Imberians using DNA harvested from the planet.
Each Imberian baby would be grown in a gestation pod, adopted by a mother from a nurturing race, and returned to Imber to claim its birthright and share of the rich mineral deposits that belonged to its people.
And from the moment of its birth until it arrived on Imber, it would be watched over by an Invicta guard.
Because performing this duty was seen as righting a wrong, and a step toward redeeming the Invicta name, guarding an Imberian child was considered the very highest honor and privilege that could be bestowed upon a dragon warrior.
Never mind that it would take that brave soldier off the battlefield for twenty standard years, and land him on a boring moon in the middle of nowhere.
Of course, Jhon’s superiors had expected him to be elated when they shared the news.
