The roar and scream in long light echoed and reverberated all across Town. It pierced down from the void. In the distance along the path that Ashley had just taken a little while ago from the fields the watch towers were rallying. The searing painful flashes of shortest light were already flickering through the gaps between buildings and silos. The batteries which were almost twice as tall as Town was wide hummed as some of the tithe beam was redirected and unleashed to try and lance at the source of the monstrous signal.

Ashley could feel her skin and the outer layers of her eye lenses prickling and blackening with the burns from shorter light leakage from the terrible weapons rallying all around her against the threat. Glory was shouting at her in a tight beam that burned so it could over power the deafening light of the dragons.

“Seek a shelter or rally to a militia barracks! Ashley! CLEAR and BRIGHT respond!”

She mustered as much of a voice as she could in her boggled state, burning far more of her breath from her symbiote then she probably should have for this but she needed to be heard”

“ALRIGHT I will seek a shelter! ”

This was nothing like the solar canopy she had prepared and trained for all her life and survived. This was something she had never seen, that she had never heard of Glory seeing and yet she seemed calm and in command and directing. Dragons were a story, a thing told to scare children so they did sneak too much glucose.

Ashley wanted to help... But the roars of the Dragon had rattled her so bad she would have stumbled into a heating element like a newborn. Whatever was needed to be done to deal with Dragons was well beyond her right now.

Everything in town was a slightly contained panic. It was like the crushing rush of a harvest a hundred times more. But there were those like Glory amongst the fear and panic. Directing and rallying their fellows to the deeply carved shelters or to the upper reaches where caches of weapons and city magic were prepared.

A buffeting light muffling cloud billowed from some of the flanks of buildings, trailing behind painfully bright lights as they hurled shining metal tubes out into the upper void above the canopies. The heaviness of the clouds clung to everything and blocked the shorter light, protecting skins and eyes from the flashes but also scattering the tight beams of speech. Swaddling the flows of people of all kinds as they moved to their chosen place.

More diffuse flashes screamed past into the distance from whence the roars had come. Again and again in great cascading pulses. The light of the sun and the Town was dimmed and then darkened to a creepy gloom. Like the near pure black shadows of the Solar fields. The only thing missing was the dangerous terrible reds of heating elements.

Ashley trembled and felt her draw on her symbiotes breath increase alarmingly. The particulates and billowing clouds were like the largest leak of sap she had ever seen. The expanding clouds were freezing cold. She could barely see anything but what was directly in front of her. She felt like she was being smothered in tiny biting shards of ice that also smothered all light and voice.

Her symbiote was not going to last in these conditions, not in the panic of her hearts and the shuddering convulsions she kept feeling in the cold.

This was not like the solar fields, where the cold was sharp and burning, here it was slow and yet utterly smothering.

She could feel ice starting for form on her skin and the harness, her arms felt brittle and poorly able to bend. She stopped moving.

Her symbiote was starving, it was burning with need to be replaced, but she was smothered and cold!

She needed air that it could not give her.

And then with a terrible jerk she felt it yanked away from her. Pulled free, she tried to panic and squirm but could not move. She was too starved, bits of her skin were torn off where it had frozen a seal with her struggling lungs.

She had no breath now!

She was an infant child, it was her first time being pulled from the nurturing breath of her mother again. She panicked and yet was unable to move!

Suddenly warmth, great close warm contact and then the connection of a fresh passage to her air and glucose intakes. But the air tastes wrong, and the glucose in the blood made her dizzy. That was not a symbiote!

But it was warm!

So warm!

And finally she could move, she could speak, she could turn her frosted over eye to look at what was wrapped all around her and carrying her in this smothering horrible fog of frozen crystals.

“Smith-ner? W-what- where were?”

“Ho Ashley! Don’t dawdle here friend! We must get to shelter where we can have you hooked up safe and breathing! Don’t fret I keep you warm and living friend! Stay awake, talk to me! I’ll weather this exhaust for both of us!”

The warm embrace was the rolls of nebulous flesh of her friend smithiner, blocking off the terrible heat sapping ice! Completely curled around her. The intakes were...

“Smithiner! What did you do! You are NOT a symbiote!”

It made her want to squirm and writhe away, it was indecent and horrifying in the extreme. But at the same time it was the blood in her veins and the breath in her mind! It made her feel dizzy and out of sorts as well. The balance was not right, but it was close to it. It was keeping her alive.

The big lump of her friend simply curled tighter as her nudged and tumbled them with little grabber sticks and tools with the rest of his limbs. Tossing them along in the confused crowd, calling out chirps of progress like a proper field worker and bundle. Only Ashley was the bundle now!

“Ho! All my stock of breathers is moved to the shelters ahead, didn't have any more to help you. Gave my spares to three others before. But could not leave my friend Ashley frozen in the way. Not my best customer and friend! I breathe and eat ten times what yon Ashley does! I can spare the blood and air! You’re barely a strain promise!”

Smithiner had taken several of his own feed lines and jammed her viscera into them. It was a tight and desperate fit, it was going to chaff and probably even burn and itch later. She was going to be all off balance and loopy on the balance of nutrients from his blood. And she could practically feel the over flush sense of how much air he kept pumping through her body as it cycled in and out of him.

But at the same time she was alive.

She looked out into the now eerily silent muffling of white. Occasionally cries, conversations or shadows of buildings from town would hove out of view or flash sem incoherent in the deeper shade.

It was still so cold that she could barely keep her hands from going numb and her arms felt creaky unless she wrapped them tightly into the folds of Smithiner. She felt like a grub or a mite latched to her friend. Shivering in the cold, living off his breath and blood instead of free with a symbiote.

It might have been the imbalance of the blood or glucose, or it might have been the rush of too much oxygen. But she did not properly realize they had stopped dangling from a grip on one side of a building for quite a while. The way the clouds of obscuring vapor kept shifting and moving all around had confused her sense of direction.

The lack of markers to coordinate and fix herself too also disoriented.

“Ho smithiner why have we stopped?”

She felt like her words were sloppy the way she had to try and shout them through his bulk.

He hushed her softly, quietly so dim that she must have been the only one to be able to feel his voice.

“Hush ho little Ashley! I ‘hear-feel-sense’ something in the vapor”

She was confused, how could he hear anyone? Barely any kind of light could pierce this smothering gloomy smog. Still she lowered the intensity of her long light whisper so that only he would be able to discern it.

“What? How?”

“The cloud pressure shakes... bits of it against me, I feel it in my skin. Waves of it, like light but different. I can hear in it. I can hear a lot”

Ashley was not going to complain about magical extra-sensory abilities never before explained by her friend with very shaky sounding groundings of practical use except in the explicit conditions they found themselves in.

But she was mostly not going to complain because she was high on his weird oxy mix and she suspected it would devolve into rambling about sap tap jokes.

And now she was itchy.