"I don't understand." Caeden felt like he had been saying some variation on that statement ever since he met this dragon. "I thought you said dragons cherish their eggs above all else."

"They do. Can you not hear her anguish?" The dragon replied.

"I think I need a bit of background here," Caeden asked.

The dragon nodded. "This is our nest. The Jungle Blood nest. Three hundred dragons live here together of twenty different races. There used to be ten times that number."

"Ok, so your population declined. I assume that has something to do with all the egg shards laying around, but that doesn't tell me why." Caeden tried to be as kind as possible. Seeing this many shattered eggs, understanding how many hatchlings had died right here. It was intense. Caeden could only assume it was even worse for the dragon.

"Yes, this field of the unborn is why dragonkind has shrunk year on year, decade on decade. But they are this result, not the cause. When the shrouded consigned dragons to live only on specific continents, we assumed they would box us in, confine us so that we may no longer threaten them. At the time, that was an acceptable price to pay for preventing every dragon from disappearing into the void of history. But we had not realized just how spiteful and petty, nor how depraved and vile the shrouded could be."

The dragon seemed to struggle to speak more, and Caeden was a moment from encouraging him to continue when he started once more.

"They changed the land, the continent itself. They made this place spawn monsters designed specifically to fight us, ones built to overcome our defenses and attack us in ways we could not prevent. They are immune to our breath and can penetrate our scales with ease. But worse…much worse than that…" He lapsed into silence.

"But, how could they change the monster spawns?" Caeden asked. "I've never heard of that being even remotely possible. If there was a shroud that could do that, they would change every continent to make all the monsters easy to fight and offer up the maximum resources."

"I know not why your forebears have chosen to hide this ability, but it exists. Records from the sentient wars tell of several shrouded that emerged from among your people with powers above and beyond the others. They could do things that defied reason. Powers that affected the world itself on a fundamental level. One came here after the Treaty of Scales. She changed the continent, made the monsters completely different. Now, they mimic our form, appearing as dragons. But they have no mind, no will. They are monsters in truth."

Caeden processed everything. From the shattered eggs lying all around, to the monsters that looked like dragons, to the hatchling around his neck that was called a cursed child. A horrible answer formed in his mind. "You don't mean…"

"They attacked whenever the females were in heat. Dragons can only conceive once every five years. During that time, the female will emit pheromones to indicate to the males that she is ready to conceive. Dragons do not have relationships, such as you shrouded do. The males' fight for the right to breed the females, and the female approves whosoever she chooses to mate with. Both parents share the responsibility of protecting and nurturing the eggs and hatchlings until they are strong enough to live on their own."

The dragon's neck drooped, his head facing the ground. "The monsters destroyed our people. We form groups around our parents and create nests of multiple families that interlock. But the monsters are designed to fight us. We cannot stop them when they come. Every time a female enters heat, they come in droves. Hoards of them, all at once. Dozens die in the defense, and we lose more often than we win. They reach her six times out of ten."

He inhales deeply before letting out a sigh. "The hatchlings are half-monsters. They lack the automatic recognition of their parents and family, so they attack everything around them as soon as they are born. Because of their parentage, they also have the monster's ability to bypass our natural defenses. Many parents died because they refused to believe their hatchlings will try to harm them. They cannot let go."

"So, that is what the shrouded have done to us." He turned to glare down at Caeden and Cat. "That is what your forefathers did. They curbed our population in the cruelest, most vindictive way possible. By literally violating our people and forcing us to kill our own children lest they kill us. This is the legacy they have left you."

"Why didn't you kill us?" Caeden asked. He couldn't imagine a reason not to. After everything that had been done to this dragon's people, his anger must be overwhelming. Seeing shrouded in front of him must be excruciating.

"Because what would that accomplish? We are not savages. I know you are young, barely adults by your standards. I can see it in your shroud. It is weak and feeble compared to the old ones that come by to meet with the elders. Killing you will not save my people an ounce of pain, and blaming you for things you did not know gains me nothing. It would be out of spite and nothing more. And I refuse to stoop to the same lows as the monsters who did this to us."

He growled. "Dragonkind may be barely alive, but we have our pride. Just don't make me regret leaving you alive. Your promise that you intend no harm is the only reason I didn't kill you anyway. Otherwise, you would have been a threat I could eliminate without a thought."

Before Caeden could even form a response to that, the dragon's head whipped up, and he took a deep breath. "One of the females has entered her heat. Maybe even two. Leave now. You will be caught up in the fighting, and the others will no doubt kill you. And I will do nothing to stop them. This is all I will offer to a shrouded child that swore honestly that he intended us no harm."

Caeden's thoughts shifted. In an instant, he went from conflicted and uncertain to resolved. He felt awful for what had happened to the dragons here and wanted to help if he could. But they had every reason to distrust anything he might offer, so his best option was to leave. But this changed everything.

"Cat, it's time to go to work." He rolled his shoulders, formshifting into golden body and drawing Forged Infinity.

Cat shrugged. "You got it." Specters started forming all around them.

"What are you doing, child?" The dragon snarled, recognizing that Caeden was gearing up for a fight.

"What was done to dragonkind is wrong in ways I can hardly comprehend or describe. In some ways, genocide would be less deplorable. You have every reason to mistrust and hate me, and I can understand that. But I'd like to help as much as I can. See, my girlfriend kinda bit my head off about me not caring enough about other people, so I've been trying to change my attitude." Caeden explained.

"How could you possibly help us?" The dragon scoffed.

Caeden laughed. "You probably don't know this, but across the Starry Sea, shrouded are monster hunters. We're actually originally on a little school trip to train up fighting real ones. Honestly, this just constitutes extra credit!"

{}

Lily regretted taking her infused gloves off. Admittedly, she'd had to for working with the giant squirrel meat, as she didn't want any of the dangerous Chillvein poison getting into their food, but now that they were under attack, it felt like an oversight. Worse, since Sauma was out, which meant Erik had none of his abilities. He was a normal man right now.

The dragons coming out of the woods more closely resembled wolves than dragons. They had scales but otherwise looked exactly like brown-furred wolves with diary brown scales and wolf-like snouts. They made no attempt to talk, just charging blindly toward the campfire where Lily was cooking.

Without conscious thought, Lily had formed an ice longsword and dagger while reinforcing her body with physical enhancement. She had trained for long hours to make this sequence a natural response to danger. A moment later, it became unnecessary as the charging dragons were coated in layers of webbing that stuck them to every available object, from the trees to the ground to each other. In an instant, they were rendered completely immobile.

"The monsters have been contained, master. They are not physically strong. Due to their rapid approach, I believe their speed is their greatest asset." Sauma said. She continued to bury the wolf-dragons in more webbing. "They should not be able to escape."

"Monsters?" Lily asked. "I thought those were dragons."

"Feel free to observe them yourself, Lily. They have the appearance of some dragon race, but they are fully monsters." Sauma gestured toward the writhing pile of white webs.

Taking her up on that offer, Lily used investigative sense to take a better look at the creatures that had attacked them. Immediately, she could tell that they weren't proper dragons. After all, her aura could inspect them, something a dragon's scales would immediately stop. They must be similar-shaped monsters, which wasn't an uncommon thing.

There were many kinds of monsters that mimicked the forms of natural creatures. Sometimes that included the sentient races like dragons or even humans. Sauma was a prime example of this. She was technically a monster, just one that was the Incarnation of Erik's shroud. She incorporated the same way monsters did. The only difference was that she was tied to Erik's soul, so her discorporated form went back there instead of scattering into nothingness.

But these monsters were odd for a different reason. Monsters were a naturally occurring phenomenon that had been studied extensively by shrouded. In preparation to buy her pets, Lily had looked into that research, as much of it was applied to how creature shrouds replicated monsters.

Monsters were not, strictly speaking, physical beings. They were amalgamations of energy that manifested a physical form to interact with the physical world. Under all that, they were an energy template that determined how the monster's rudimentary intelligence worked. It governed how they formed their bodies and the actions they took. The air over continents was filled with Ki, which naturally formed these patterns and created wild monsters. It was a function of how the metaphysical substance of their reality worked.

Creature shrouds were capable of using their own Ki, changed by their domain, to create these patterns independent of the natural world. In fact, that was what Lily would think she was looking at if she didn't know any better. Looking at the Ki patterns instead of the generated flesh, these wolf-dragons resembled artificial monsters more than the real deal.

Natural monsters were what Lily would describe as 'messy' in their design. They formed from the natural ebb and flow of ambient Ki, so they weren't exactly precision instruments. Their energy patterns had redundancies and malformed sections that could hinder them in different ways.

Shroud-created monsters had no such weaknesses. In fact, it was the mark of a good monster maker that their Ki patterns were free of such limitations. They created patterns as perfect as they could make them without the flaws that came from natural formation. These wolf-dragons were exactly the same. Their patterns were purpose-built and exactly formed without any flaws or unnecessary sections.

But Lily knew these were natural monsters. They weren't bound to any shrouded and didn't have any of the key signatures a shroud's domain would leave on the Ki that made up their patterns. They were somehow both naturally formed and artificially created at the same time.

Just to test her theory, Lily flung her longsword out, using her aura to propel the weapon into the neck of a struggling monster. It died immediately and discorporated, leaving nothing behind. So she did it again. And Again. The entire group of twenty-odd monsters didn't leave a single bit of magical material or ether behind. No one knew exactly why or how natural monsters left resources when the discorporated, but shroud-created monsters never did. Ever. After twenty monsters, Lily would have expected to see something.

"What is going on?"