Chapter 5: Laylith
“Noooo!” Laylith screamed.
The askaldenfirst’s body crashed down. And the head continued to hang in the air, blood dripping from it.
“Did you think I wouldn’t know you’d escaped?” Ansell was coming down the steps, and he was smiling evilly. He threw Singyama’s head right at the girls.
Laylith breathed angrily and threw a spear at Ansell, he dodged.
“Kiyal Farus Fiyas Dracal!” Ellia uttered, and a fireball flew at Ansell, he dodged again.
Laylith launched a fireball at him as well.
“Kas Isil Patur Frahal!” Nella cast a spell summoning a huge ice elemental. He stood in front of the girls.
Ansell muttered something and the ice elemental shattered into pieces.
“Kiyal Farus Fiyas Dracal!” Laylith repeated furiously, releasing fireballs, but the First was already hidden under the dome
Ellanella was at the edge of the ruined stairs, and she turned to the girls.
“Bye,” she said and jumped.
“No!” Ansell shouted and ran to the edge. The girls, too, rushed to the edge. Ansell jumped with the protective dome, landing softly.
Nella was lying next to the lighting magic arrow, which was still glowing despite the fact that the askaldenfirst was dead.
“My girl! Silly, silly girl!” Ansell took her in his arms, and tears flowed from his eyes.
Laylith breathed heavily and watched the First for a few more seconds, and then she cast a high jump spell, and she jumped over the collapsed part of the stairs, looked up, and then decided to squeeze to the outside of the tower, toward the clouds. She couldn’t see what was down there, but she felt a strong wind. She concentrated and cast a soft fall spell, then jumped from the tower. She was falling for quite a long time, and finally she landed on a stone-gray-reddish road; it was quite warm. A gigantic, seemingly endless tower stretched into the sky. Laylith jumped up and examined herself, it seemed that she was unharmed. And then she rushed along the road... But then suddenly Ansell appeared in front of her.
“I’ll take you right here and now,” and he murmured a magical metal shackles spell, and before Laylith could react, her hands and feet were chained together again. Her body was magically chained to the road, spreading her legs and pressing her back against the gray-reddish stones. She twisted, trying to resist, but to no avail.
“You bastard scum!” she shouted at him as he tore her pants off; she spat in his face. The First ran his hand over his face and then inserted his fingers into her crotch. “I’ll tear off your filthy, stinking hands, do you hear me?!” she screamed. And then Ansell got excited and entered. Laylith shrieked. “You beast!” and suddenly all her strength left her, she sobbed. She felt that she could not resist, and it killed all the fury and courage in her. And her tears flowed with such force that she thought she could cry out an entire Arikayrnira river, on which stands the glorious capital of Eileenelia.
After a while, maybe an eternity, maybe a few minutes, Laylith tried to force herself back into rage and courage, tried to imagine ripping the bastard’s belly open with her father, laughing and twisting his guts around his head... But she couldn’t, and with each push she became weaker and weaker and only roared more and more…
She felt him cum and she wanted to die, now she wished she had jumped with Nella into that abyss, or she could have jumped from the tower, she just didn’t need to cast a soft fall spell and it would have been over. Her father abandoned her, Lisandra was dead, another askaldenfirst was killed. She remembered how skeshdak, losharat Ansell seemed to snap his fingers, and now the head of one of the most powerful creatures on the planet, the head of the mother of dragons, was already hanging in the air...
Suddenly she felt herself rising in the air with her head upside down. And she flew. That bastard has already cast the spell of the portal to the tower.
“Hang it so that my seed stays in you longer,” Ansell said, and then, as he magically chained her next to the other prisoners, he disappeared. The collapse of the stairwell did not affect this floor, but there was chaos in this room, or maybe it was because Laylith was looking upside down?
“It’s your fault!” Kansifa said suddenly. Laylith looked at her from her upside-down angle in bewilderment and surprise. The tears must have gotten so smeared along with the sand on her face that Kansifa turned away. Or maybe Kansifa didn’t like the look on Laylith’s face?
“Kansifa, Sharadumain take you, look at her!” Neika screamed. “Look at her!” the azdairik young woman raised her voice. Kansifa obeyed, turned and met Laylith’s empty eyes.
Kansifa turned away, tears welling up in her eyes.
“This is not the end,” Rshana said, and her tears flowed as well. “It’s not over, we’ll have another chance, I believe it and you must believe it! You must, otherwise you can’t! If we give up, if we stop fighting even within ourselves, he will win!”
“I–” and Laylith shut up, it was hard for her to think and speak, especially when she was hung upside down from the wall. She felt very sick, and suddenly she felt herself change, she began to transform. Her head rested on the floor, her arms began to turn into wings.
She broke the magical shackles and continued to grow, so much so that she broke through the ceiling. The girls screamed. One stone fell and crushed Rshana’s head. Laylith couldn’t control the process, but when she saw it, she moved toward the captives and covered them with her already feathered breast, and it continued to increase.
Laylith, covering the rest of the girls and breaking through a couple of floors of the tower, realized that she seemed to have stopped enlarging. So she decided to turn in the other direction, carefully, without touching the girls, and hit the wall with her beak. Stones rained down on the broken bed, which was crushed by her huge clawed bird’s paw.
Soon she had destroyed more than half of the wall, and she began to fear that the tower was about to collapse. As gently as possible, she turned toward the girls and poked the area of the magic shackles with her giant beak. Because of this, she accidentally almost chopped off Neika’s arms with her beak, but Neika managed to move her hand and her hand wasn’t injured.
After a while, the prisoners were free. Laylith screeched to them and, sticking her head and part of her body into the hole she had made on the opposite side, waited. The girls figured it out and began to climb on Laylith. It was a problem, the furry plumage enveloping them as if they were floundering in a sea of fluff, hard to cling to... But after a while Tannah, Neika, Kansifa, and Ellia climbed onto Laylith.
Laylith jerked forward with force, and they get out of the tower. It was warm and comfortable, the fresh air filling her lungs. And she instantly took off and screeched. At that moment the tower began to fall. Its height was enormous, the tower rested against the clouds, and now, as it fell, Laylith simply watched the trajectory of the fall, flying high, and realized that she and the girls had nothing to fear. Laylith flapped her wings, frozen in the air, and watched as the tower collapsed with a crash, blocking part of the reddish-gray paved road, crushing dozens of trees, and further forming an entire bridge over a small lake, and even beyond that this giant cylindrical structure went like a huge pipe somewhere into the forest.
Laylith decided that she had to fly. She looked around and saw the light, and thought it looked like Silenta, and then she shifted her argiphone gaze and saw a city in the distance, jutting into the cliff. There were sand-colored buildings with round domes and rectangular towers. In the distance, where the cliffs ended, water could be seen.
Laylith headed toward the city. When she flew closer to the city, suddenly several dragons soared into the sky from different directions, almost all of them were black with different stripes, a couple more were gray-brown. There were six dragons in total. Laylith landed on a maroon paved road, with sand on one side and sandy-maroon soil on the other. And suddenly she began to transform, the girls jumped off her or rolled down her feathers. The dragons landed and took the form of the tukhtaashes. All six approached the girls, who had already assumed fighting poses. Naked Laylith put her arms out in front of her and half-bent at the knees, not caring about her naked appearance.
“Whose slaves are you?” asked an old tukhtaash with a lozenge-shaped face, light brown eyes, and gray hair.
Laylith looked carefully at the tukhtaash who approached; besides the old man there were three young men and two young women, one was a half-arqilunian half-tukhtaash with a triangular pleasant face, straight dark hair and brown eyes, her ears were slightly longer than the tukhtaash ears, longer than Laylith’s. Another woman was smiling at Laylith, she had curly hair almost to her shoulders and brown eyes.
“Shikhart tyggash asharkh shkrvtah tyrrykash,” said a young tukhtaash with a red-chocolate face, looking at Laylith, he had curly short hair, serious sideburns, a beard, and he had small pupils against the large whites of his eyes.
His neighbor laughed. This one was a short-cropped tukhtaash with an almost smoothly shaved face; he had a faintly visible mustache and beard. The last one was a chubby tukhtaash, a plump brunette with a beard and a round-rectangular face and brown eyes.
“Whose are you?” Laylith suddenly asked.
“Ha ha, how funny!” the old man said without a smile. But the young tukhtaashes, except for the two girls and the well-fed one, laughed. “You know the law, slaves–”
“Kiyal Farus Fiyas Dracal!” Ellia suddenly cast a spell and a fireball flew toward the old man, he quickly jumped back.
“I’ll fuck you tonight,” said the young tukhtaash with a barely visible mustache, he looked at Ellia with a mixture of lust and irritation.
“You’ll only fuck your dead head tonight,” Laylith shouted at him. “And each of you will die! And you,” she turned to the half-elf, “why did you join these bastards?”
“Ha! They’re not from around here,” the fat man said.
“Hmm, if that’s so,” the old man said, “then, first, tell me, where are you from? And secondly, I’ll explain to you some basics of our racial culture and laws. We, the tukhtaashes, are the titular nation. And she,” he pointed at the half-blood tukhtaash girl, “is the daughter of a slave–”
“Why are you with them?“Laylith asked the half-blood again, ignoring the old man’s chatter.
“Don’t you want to listen to me, slave?” the old man asked. “I’m magnanimous today, I’ll repeat. She is the daughter of a slave. We tukhtaashes men have the right to copulate with our slave women as many times as we like. Once upon a time, a free tukhtaash man fucked an arqilunian slave woman and she became pregnant and gave birth to this beautiful creature,” he pointed to the half-blood with his hands. “Since she received her father’s ability to turn into a dragon, she had the right to serve as a guardian, protector of the kingdom, in the capital or the provinces, in any city, and in return she and her mother received the status of untouchables. And now no one has the right to take Shattiel Aishka and her mother by force. She was even given her father’s last name. But as soon as she betrays the kingdom, betrays our customs, then she will immediately face a fate worse than slavery,” he smiled. “Welcome to Taashtar!”
“We are in Taashtar!” Laylith’s eyes flashed with hatred.
“I can’t look at her without lust. Shattiel, cast a clothing spell,” said the tukhtaash with the faintly visible mustache; he had a cheekbone-powered lower face.
And Shattiel cast the spell of a set of clothes and threw it to Laylith.
Laylith had been trying internally to set herself up to turn into a bird all this time, but she couldn’t figure out how to do it. And now, suddenly, she decided that she needed to be attacked and hit, maybe even wounded. So she rushed toward the old man.
“Kshat Tah Vak Psafar,” the old man shouted, and made a quick punch into the air, and a translucent giant fist flew out of his hand, hitting Laylith so hard that she flew aside and fell naked on her stomach, with her leg half-bent, and she was not thinking clearly, she felt sick from the blow.
“I can’t stand it,” she heard from one of the young tukhtaashes, but she didn’t understand who it was.
She realized she couldn’t move, and then someone came up and piled on top of her, and she felt pain. The same pain she had felt recently. Pushes and pushes and pushes. Then she heard the sound of a fireball and it flew past, but her rapist jumped back.
“What are you doing?” A rapist voice shouted. “I told you I’m going to fuck you tonight. But first I’ll fuck her–”
Laylith heard the screams of the girls, but she couldn’t move. She didn’t understand, was it her physical problems or the magic? Was she scared or was it the spell? Suddenly she felt like she was being raped again.
After an eternity, the tukhtaash poured his seed into Laylith. “If I think about what happened now, I’ll go crazy. Come on, Laylith, think of something else! Why did they, after having been in dragon bodies, keep their clothes when they reincarnated as tukhtaashes?.. The one that had me was the one with the karkhash face! Forgive me Chathi, but I can’t be fair. I’ll kill them all!”
The sudden anger not only made her move, but she felt the transformation again. The tukhtaashes saw this and began to transform into dragons themselves.
A huge snowy argiphone with white and yellow plumage soared into the sky, and the dragons followed the bird.
Laylith turned sharply, dived down, and then quickly gained altitude. The dragons that had been chasing her didn’t have time to regroup quickly, and one of them, a black with red stripes, was right below her in another dive. Laylith dug her claws into his back with all her strength and pecked at his muzzle with all her might, hitting him in the eye and ripping the eye socket open, breaking through the skull. The dragon began to fall instantly, Laylith barely able to unleash her claws. The dragon fell dead, lifting a column of sand into the air.
The gray-brown dragon quickly flew over to the girls, who had already been locked in a magical cage.
And the woman’s voice rumbled, “If you don’t stop, I’ll kill them all!”
Laylith wanted to answer her, but she screeched instead. She was full of hate and rage. She wanted to shout, “If I stop, they will be raped! May we all die! But I’ll kill every scaly Taashtar nasty thing!”
And Laylith, making a loop in the air, was able to almost repeat her trick. She clawed at the back of another dragon as hard as the previous one, but this time the dragon turned around with her, wishing not to repeat the fate of the other. It was a black dragon with green stripes. But Laylith not only held on, she managed to get her beak into its muzzle, biting part of its nostril and the dragon’s mouth, and then she began to squeeze until she bit its muzzle in half. Blood and fire gushed out of the terrifying mess on his muzzle and the dragon began to fall, and Laylith pecked it in the neck a couple of times and, pushing away from it, began to gain altitude again.
She heard someone spewing fire below. And she saw that there were three girls left in the cage, and one charred corpse had fallen to the sandy-red soil. Next to the cage was a dragon, and she recognized the dragon as a smiling tukhtaash woman with curly hair. Suddenly she saw another dragon, a grayish-brown with yellow borders on its scales, swoop down on the female dragon, and spew a stream of fire directly at her.
Laylith realized that she was being chased by two dragons. The one closest to her was spewing out streams of fire, but it kept missing. Laylith thought that trick wouldn’t work anymore. So she turned and flew sharply in its direction, it opened its jaws, and... Laylith ducked under the stream of fire, and under the dragon, and then, taking three huge swings while it tried to turn its body, pecked it sharply in the stomach, piercing its scales and ripping it open with her beak. The dragon made a terrifying sound. And Laylith ducked out from under its falling carcass and began shaking her head, trying to get rid of the unpleasant smell and taste of the dragon’s entrails. It was a dragon with brown stripes, and it collapsed in a small clearing, breaking the trees.
“Yaza, follow me,” the last male dragon shouted, he was a black dragon with small blue borders around his scales. And the gray-brown female dragon, partially wounded by another female dragon, flew from the battlefield.
Laylith landed beside the girls, the magical cage disappeared. Neika was hugging the corpse of...Tannah.
Laylith screamed. Shattiel turned into her half-elf form already in clothes.
“Can’t you talk when you’re a bird?” Shattiel wondered.
“And she can’t turn at will,” Kansifa added.
“It’s your fault!” Neika shouted to Laylith. “Cursed be the day you were born!”
“Neika, stop it!” Ellia yelled at her.
“Why?! When the dragon threatened to kill us, the feathered bitch didn’t land, but killed another dragon on purpose to provoke them–”
“We can’t stay here,” Shattiel interrupted her. “Soon reinforcements will arrive and they’ll kill us all. If you want to live, come with me.” She took dragon form again, and soared off toward Silenta, which had already begun to descend towards the horizon.
Laylith screeched and set her wing up. Kansifa climbed up, and Ellia saw that Neika didn’t want to go. Neika wouldn’t let go of Tannah’s charred corpse.
“Neika, if you stay, you won’t get your revenge. And you’ll be raped again and again! Who knows how many more days or weeks or years! If you want to stay, stay, but then you’ll end up worse than Tannah. At least she fought to the end, and she had no choice to live or die. And you have!” and Ellia held out her hand.
Neika tearfully kissed Tannah’s charred forehead goodbye, and took Ellia’s hand. She stood up, and they climbed onto Laylith. Laylith took off.
By that time, Shattiel had already almost turned into a dot, and Laylith flapped her wings with all her might to catch up with her.