Fed up with tracking the devilish twisting and turning pipes, Richie imagined that once things were over, and should she survive, her dreams would only ever consist of pipes. Pipes, pipes and more pipes! That's all she'd seen for over two hours now. Brown ones, yellow ones, white, red, green, and her personal favourite... ORANGE! It was all mind-numbingly boring. Her focus had started to waver on numerous occasions and she'd found it hard to bring it back, despite all her dragon training. The tiniest part inside her screamed out that she'd made a mistake, that she should have stayed and led the group, the one she'd left Tank in charge of. Normally so self assured, that massive hit of confidence had deserted her now and was nowhere to be seen. Even pushing her doubts aside had proved difficult and taken everything she had mentally, something else oddly new to her.
Dropping to her knees, she crawled commando style for about twenty metres before getting to her feet and vaulting a criss-crossing line of different coloured pipes that cut across her path at waist height, once again changing sides of the walls they ran along.
Momentarily she thought about stopping to catch her breath for ten minutes, but she was only too aware of just what might be playing out elsewhere in the domain. Her friends... not only Tank, Peter, Flash and Gee Tee, but the humans as well, they were in danger... mostly placed there by her, with the exception of Peter and Tim.
'DAMN!' she thought. 'How on earth do I keep forgetting about TIM?'
She should have been only too aware of him, in the same way that Janice was focused on the love of her life... PETER! But her lover and now supposedly 'Saviour of the Dragon Domain'... the White Dragon kept slipping in and out of her consciousness. One minute there, the focal point of her thoughts. The next... GONE! No recollection at all. Was it some side effect of having her memories stored in the ring? Would it cure itself over time? Or would it only get worse? These questions and more plagued her thoughts, if nothing else, distracting her from her all too ready dislike of pipes.
Abruptly turning a sharp, left handed corner, she stopped, dropping to one knee, all thoughts of lovers and pipes long since forgotten. There, not thirty metres away, was what she'd been told to look for. A grille, two metres square, slivers of sharp, bright, white light highlighting the dust, cutting through its horizontal slits.
Drawing the dagger from behind her back, heart beating faster, concealed in the cloak, carefully she edged forward, frightened and excited in equal measure at exactly what she might find. Reaching the grille, carefully she pried two of the metal slits apart with the tip of the dagger, creating a gap through which she could see. Relief washed over her, well... in part anyway. One thing was for sure, she was most certainly in the right place at the right time.
Earth's surface. London, England.
It started out as a day like any other in the bustling metropolis that was London. Commuters commuted, children and their busy parents hustled their way through the school run, traffic ebbed and flowed, mainly at the pace of a tortoise, whilst the trains and tubes transported everyone from the suburbs and the home counties to their offices and places of employment in the city. It was madness, turmoil, an unruly mess, but it kind of worked and made sense in a nonsensical kind of way.
So everything was going... not quite swimmingly, but you know... just about okay, that is until a random tube train, full to the brim with passengers, had the unfortunate luck to be travelling from Waterloo to Bank station on the Waterloo and City line. With the tube hugging the rails at almost its top speed, the driver, a veteran of this particular route, looked out wistfully through the dirt smeared glass, pleased with himself for being on time, virtually to the second. This, as it turned out, would be the very last thought he'd ever have.
With no warning whatsoever, the tube reached the melted part of the tracks the two nagas in disguise had used their magic on only minutes earlier. With nothing there to guide and support the wheels of the carriages, and buffeted by the speed, things started to go awry straight away. During the first one thousandth of a second, the driver felt the front of the transport veer to the left ever so slightly.
'That should be impossible,' was the thought that he didn't quite have time to rattle off, before the right side of the tube somewhere just behind him collided at speed with the wall of the tunnel, instantly throwing him head first through the glass he'd been gazing so longingly through only moments before.
Super hot sparks ricocheted off all the edges of the carriages making contact with the tunnel wall, lighting up individual sections, hurling bricks in every direction, and generating the most horrendous scraping noise (think a teacher scratching her nails down a chalk board times a thousand). Inside the body of the train, screaming passengers were flung into seats, doors and of course each other. The result was a constantly transforming, constantly moving bloodbath.
With momentum changing and the lead carriage off its axis like a wriggling caterpillar, the whole train turned over onto its side, smashing windows and doors, ripping up what remained of the rails, still moving dreadfully fast in the direction it had originally been travelling in.
As the first carriage crumpled up somewhat, the second buckled in on itself, tearing seats from their housings, throwing passengers into twisted, broken metal, shaking away the very structural integrity that held the thing together. Blood ran thick amongst all the terrible injuries, shattered bones, morbid cadavers and scattered remains. It was a hellish sight, straight out of most people's worst nightmares.
Emergency lights barely flickered through the thick, choking dust. Screams from those still alive were muted at best, mumbled and incoherent at worst. Those that could move had nowhere to go because they were all trapped inside a metal skeleton cage, unable to get out because the wreckage was so badly damaged. Survivors turned to their phones for illumination, and a chance to get help, and despite the damage they sat amongst, thankfully there was still Wi-Fi, which some used to get a message out. With the emergency services on their way, all they could do was close their eyes in an effort to try and forget the misery and death that they sat amidst.
Being so far from both stations, exactly as planned, the police, fire brigade and paramedics had THE most difficult time in getting to the derailed tube train, wasting valuable resources through no fault of their own, allowing injuries to get worse, more people to go into shock, and with some of those that could have been saved, instead dying through lack of quick, coordinated emergency response.
As it turned out, it would be one of the most deadly train crashes in the whole of the United Kingdom, with answers for what had happened few and far between. Most importantly though, it started to spread fear and panic throughout the general population, something that from the very off, it had been designed to do, so in that sense, it became regarded as something of a success.
29
A Bridge Too Far
Tougher than tough, a warrior with few equals on the battlefield, all of this counted for nothing as her fighting spirit crumbled into despair, as the magical shield that had surrounded them hissed into oblivion. Amelia Battlehard watched stoically as the king surrendered, taking in what she knew to be her last moments on this planet. She had no problem laying her life down for her monarch, because that was indeed part of her job. But like this... it seemed madness. Fighting, clawing, scratching the eyes out of her enemy until she bled out and her last breath left the dying husk of her body, that was how she'd thought it would end. But to concede to these savages was nothing short of insanity. Looking on, she hoped that the king had a plan, ninety-nine point nine, nine percent sure that he didn't. Deep within, she prayed for the dragons under her command. They didn't deserve this. They deserved to die with dignity and at least have the opportunity to take a few of their enemies with them.