https://www.deviantart.com/catofwinter/art/A-fitting-end-cm-823365399
https://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?https://toyhou.se/5194469.commander-sassafras
Sassafras couldn’t believe she’d done the one thing her generals trained her to never do: surrendered. She should have known it would be a foolish mistake for her and the other ninety-nine LeafWing soldiers to go and face the HiveWings. They hadn’t stood a chance and fifty-five of them were dead, including all of her superiors. Sassafras had appointed herself leader of the group, and as their leader, she’d then ordered Pinyang to get everyone else to The Poison Jungle.
Before she could truly retreat and hide away from the HiveWings like a pussy, there was one thing she needed to do: rescue her two eggs. Blackthorn, her husband, had insisted on coming with her, but she’d told him to stay back and assist Pinyang with keeping the other soldiers in line.
I may have gone against my word and surrendered, but damn it, I won’t leave my eggs behind! she thought, banking to the left to fly to the forest so she could reach her house faster. It was just up the hill, she reminded herself. What the hell?
It started with a plume of smoke in the distance and quickly became a rush of horror through Sassafras’ veins.
Sassafras threw all caution to the wind and flapped her wings like never before. She rocketed up the hill and her house came into view, which was when her heart sank into the ground and her eyes filled up with tears. Five white-eyed HiveWings with torches were standing around what used to be her house, watching the pile of ash smoldering.
She shrieked her rage and grief up at the sky. When the five HiveWings all spun around to look at her, Sassafras heard the intense whispers of all the plants around her in her mind clear as day again.
Let us have the dragons of the hive.
Sassafras’ brain clicked. She would let the plants have them.
Plants. Grow rapidly. Attack swiftly and brutally. Kill the dragons of the hive. Any and all of them who get in your way. TEAR THEM TO FUCKING PIECES.
She heard the angry shrieks of the plants in her mind as the ground beneath her seemed to shake. Sassafras buried her face in her talons and sobbed for her eggs, not looking up even when she heard the screams of the HiveWings who burned down her house — and with it, killed her unhatched dragonets.
When she finally chose to look up, everything was calm again, save for the bloody mess all over the hill. Severed arms, legs, heads, and ripped-in-half bodies were everywhere. Each of the five heads were overgrown with vines sticking out of their eye sockets and mouths, which were stuck in agonizing screams. Flies had already been attracted to the massacre that Sassafras deep-down wished she had witnessed.
“You b-bastards,” she wailed. Sassafras walked passed the bloody scene to all that remained of her house — and her two eggs that would now never hatch.
The shells lay shattered along the ground, splinters spanning the soot like broken glass. Sassafras had to take a moment, but then she saw the bodies. A sob raked through her, tearing past her throat into the choking air.
One dragonet's tiny form had been crushed into itself, and its wings were pitiful, skeletal black sticks between crumbled, dripping black membranes full of holes. Its jaw was hanging off to one side, dark and bent in on itself.
The other corpse was burned to the point that Sassafras could barely see it. She picked up the smoldering form gently, ignoring the remaining heat left in the flesh. The dragonet had been burned alive in its egg; the flames had melted the shell against the molten scales of the tiny LeafWing inside. Its body bled slowly from small trickles from its blank, white eyes that reminded Sassafras of the HiveWings, except that there was red blotches within the eyes from the pieces of egg melted into the sockets.
She dug her talons into the smoldering ash and endured the searing pain. “No… why? My eggs…” She couldn’t stop her tears from flowing down her cheeks and hitting the ash.
This is what I deserve for being so horrible to all the… the gays and lesbians on this fucking continent, Sassafras thought, for once full of regret. Mine and Queen Monarch’s sisters and their wives, that blind HiveWing and her girlfriend… I didn’t treat any of them right. This is my karma for being so cruel to them, losing the thing I cared about the most. My eggs…
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