Iblis stared out at its domain and knew exactly what it was going to do as a piece of dried egg gunk flaked off its snout.
"Yuck!" It growled and ran out of the door into the plaza surrounded by ruined buildings beyond. The city outside the lair's door was very vertically designed with balconies and stairways going up and down everywhere. Many side streets and alleys were stairs of some variety, wide and long, tall and deep and many forms in between. With a running leap the Red Dragon leapt off the nearest of the balconies across the plaza, looking out over the city below and spread its mighty, if yet tiny wings.
It plummeted and then with a quick correction flapped frantically into the sky and glided through the air gracefully. In its element now.
It caught thermals on instinct and its wings flapped as needed, which was rarely even with its prodigious weight due to its body knowing what best to do. Even so it was a tiny hatchling and could not fly forever like its ancestors could if they pleased. It was an indomitable titan beast, but it was still young!
And so after several hours flying towards the lake it reached its shores and then less than gracefully fell out of the sky and landed with a
plop!
In the dust, which just compounded to its cleanliness issues and poked the fastidious parts of its brain into a tired fury. But that fury was stymied by the beautiful sight before it.
Spread out before Iblis was a steeply slopping dip in the earth and in that dip were deep aquamarine waves gently lapping back and forth at the banks. They glinted unnaturally in the sun, many things hidden beneath the waves that it could not see causing a shine to rise from below. It smelt metal in large quantities.
Rising up around the lake were buildings, empty and with rotted facades climbing with ivy and with trees sprouting from their windows and courtyards in a rioting forest. They sat tilted like drunks around a puddle and rubble was present here and there from the decay.
Unbothered by all of this Iblis rose and waddled its way to the lake's edge. There it marveled at its appearance.
Under the greenish gunk its scales were a eye-biting red, standing out and decreeing to the world "look at me!" with a beautiful overlapping pattern like mail. On Iblis proud out-thrust chest were bands of hard scales like a snake's belly, tinted with red and its firey blood. Its tail was long and whip like, the spade at the end formed for cutting and bludgeoning. Its wings were finely jointed and its muscles robust and mighty things.
Moving to its long and sinuous neck it supported a triangular saurian head full of sharp dagger teeth that curved menacingly out from under its lips. Its ear holes were protected by long ribbed fans of thin scale and flesh which shaped sound and provided Iblis with exceptionally keen hearing. Its forked tongue tasted the air and was as red as fresh meat as it wiggled. Its eyes though were the most terrifying, a piercing and luminous golden hue like molten gold in the white of the eye with a deep abyssal pit in the center that was always slit angrily.
Because of its firey blood and Draconic nature even standing at the edge of the lake was beginning to cause it to ripple from the small campfire heat of Iblis, the nature of its fire leaking out into the world in an aura. A quality shared by all Dragons which defended them from birth.
It dove and happily frolicked about on the bed kicking up sand as it rubbed off the gunk, unworried about breathing as its fire sustained it and the water boiled around it gently. It was dim below the waves, the sun reaching very weakly into the dark waters.
In it Iblis saw a strange thing, collections of decaying corpses in ruined steel armor coating the lake bed deeper in and glinting faintly in the weak sun. An army had died here and then sunk into the lake. Or perhaps they died and then the lake came. It was not sure and the armor was in despairingly poor condition.
It swam deeper into the inky blackness towards the bottom.
The corpses became more numerous as it swam in reptilian undulations, wings held close to its body. Two, three, even four or more deeper they lied there in the deep unburied. The water felt strange now, charged with something. But Iblis did not fear the macabre sight around it, merely curious as it occasionally poked at the piles of the dead.
Nothing of much interest to the hatchling fell out of the piles as it prodded at them so it continued on. Deeper and deeper and deeper to the very bottom of the lake and the center.
There it found a plinth or perhaps an obelisk, tilted over to lay on the lake bed, wrapped in chains. Bound to it by those chains is a strange corpse. It had the general shape of a man clothed in a frilly and lacy gentleman's suit but its exposed flesh was sunken and almost mummified, its fingers too long and its nails poking morbidly from its fingers and its face bore three eye sockets and a beak. One eye was bandaged and unseen, one was a dark hole, and one was yellowed and rotten. Its beak was black and chipped around the edges, waiting.
"Hmm." Iblis hummed in thought as it stared at the thing. Such a strange corpse might be an Interesting Thing to keep in its Hoard. It was a quick work of a moment to start melting through its chains.
"Oh? What's this?" A waterlogged murmur slid into Iblis's ears as it released the thing's legs. They kicked and wiggled weakly as the Dragon stared at the not so dead corpse that was now reaching for it.
Clang. Things were moving around behind Iblis, corpses twitching and the armor dimly sparkling.
[]
Write in: Well, you found a thing. Its also guarded by the Dead! Have fun!
Thanks to
@Argidoll for the idea for the Crow Man. Fire will definitely work down here so don't worry about not being able to use that.
