Brass dragons are the least hostile of any dragon once they reach sentience. They are the most social of dragons and are completely in love with their own voice. There is nothing they would rather do than talk to someone for hours on end. Which is what they normally do to both invited and uninvited guests. So long as one can at least hold a conversation they eventually will let you go. Unsurprisingly, they tend to use lots of wind magic to allow them to further their favorite hobby though they are also able to use more than enough fire to hold their own should one insist on trading blows rather than words, even as they use wind to make their words into true weapons.

Adrian

My friends healed and no longer in danger of dying, I rush over to Frank. I already know he is dead and I know he was trying to kill my friends and me but I can stop from shedding a few tears as I check to see if he is alive.

There’s no life force in him, no heartbeat as I look over the somehow exsanguinated corpse that crumbles into dust as I touch it. Why did this happen? Why would my little brother try to kill or kidnap me? He said a job, how does a twelve-year-old have a job?

A tear falls on Frank collapsing more of his body into little more than wet dust. Confusion, anger and sadness swirl in my mind as I sit trying to both figure out what happened and what to do. I can hear talking but I don’t give it any attention.

Kythia

My mate sits next to the corpse of his wrong smelling brother,the physically weak warriors of Terra have stopped fighting both us and amongst themselves. This doesn’t make sense to me, kin should not have caused something like this. The scent of wrongness is also gone from the body and I do not understand why.

I walk over to my mate and see him suffering the pain of betrayal. The elven sisters rush over to comfort our mate as I spend a moment to try to find the scent of wrongness that covered his kin before but I can’t find anything. My mate begins to move the remains of his brother into a small box as I join the others in being there for our mate. The fox, Bryan and his mate are gathering the few possessions of our pack that were not destroyed by the explosion.

Soon the no longer tainted remains of my mate’s kin have been gathered into a small box though much of the dust he collapsed into was lost to the scattered rubble from the building. I do not mourn that the wrong smelling kin of my mate is dead but that his death and betrayal has hurt my mate.

“I want to be alone for a bit” my mate says before standing up and jumping out of the hole in the side of the building. After a few seconds, the dark scales of his draconic body pass through my vision as he flies off into the early night.

I’ll need to go find my mate in a little while, but for now I have to clean up this mess. The formerly hostile soldiers have been restrained and taken away and a man with several pointless extra bits of metal on his clothes has walked up to our group as the rest of my pack returns having picked up all of their not destroyed stuff.

The man who I assume is a leader of this Terra military speaks, “I am going to have to have you all detained while we figure out what happened. Where is Adrian?”

I frown as do a few of the others. I may not know much of this Terra government but I won’t let my pack be imprisoned.

“You’re not imprisoning any of us. We were the victims of an attack by your people” I say interrupting Abagail before she can respond to the question. She might give into their demands and I can't let that happen.

“This is for the safety of the public and yourselves. You will either be detained willingly or permanently.”

“No, I am one of the diarchic rulers of what the dwarves acknowledge as an allied nation. You will not touch my pack unless you want to deal with something worse than the threat we just killed for your Secretary Jasmine.”

The man looks at me stunned for a bit while Bryan and Abagail have a look of disbelief on their faces. They don’t think we could win a fight against these soldiers without my mate and I would agree, there are too many of them. I don’t plan on fighting straight up though, this is one of the few times a pack should run.

“Seize them” he commands but I interrupt him loud enough to keep the soldiers from clearly hearing him, “Fox illusion.”

A few seconds later her spell washes over us and the appearance of my pack changes to match the soldiers while some of them take on our image. All I was expecting was an invisibility but this works too. Might even be better than what I was hoping for.

I start to knock out the soldiers who have taken on our appearance and gladly let them take the fakes away. My elven pack sisters aid me in this while the fox maintains the spells.

I mirror the postures of the real soldiers as their leader unknowingly drags away some of his own soldiers. Once they are out of sight Talia asks, “how long do we have?”

The fox answers the question, “a tenth of a day.”

I smile and turn around to the others, “lets get going then before we are found out.”

They nod and I sniff the air. I can follow my mate's scent. We should go to him and make plans on leaving this city. Our welcome has run its course.

We get a few odd looks as we exit the building even though no one stops us, we do not walk as the soldiers do. Our body language does not match but the illusion holds and we begin to walk in silence down the street before I end up losing the scent of my mate.

He must have flown too high, I frown at how I am supposed to find him now. I glance at the moon and frown at how it is near the new moon, sister won’t be able to help.

“Why did you stop?” Bryan asks.

“I lost Adrian’s scent.”

“You can track him by scent?” Abagail asks in disbelief rather than a true desire for an answer.

“We need to find refuge somewhere then unless anyone else can track him” Talia speaks up. I smile at how she hasn’t lost what leadership she had before we all started following our mate.

There is a brief silence as we all think about the two options she brought up. It is the fox who speaks up first, and even though her illusionary magic has been proven I still frown from my dislike of her.

“My magic might be able to find him” she says.

So she also knows some divination, I nod as this would be preferable should she manage it. The elven sisters also nod, Lysan quicker than Talia but it doesn’t surprise me. The other two nod, though Bryan has some doubt.

It doesn’t make sense for him not to want to go after my mate, he must doubt the fox's ability to deliver what she said.

Unfortunately, once she started chanting whatever magic she was attempting, her illusion over us was broken. Across the street there are a few soldiers following a woman I recognize as Jasmine. She is pointing at us and telling the three men something.

A tiny fox made of her green fox fire forms in her cupped hands only to jump down and start prancing around like a pup starved for attention.

“This little kit will lead us to Adrian, or at least get us close to him” the fox says as she takes a step towards the tiny animate fox fire who immediately runs off before acting as it was earlier just a little ways away from her. I can’t help but wonder how such magic works, divination has never made any sense to me.

“Stop” I hear Jasmine shout and I turn to her as she and her three guards walk towards us. I wave the others to continue following the fox and her spell's directions. I can easily track them down, there are few elf and no fox scents in the city save those in my pack.

Once slightly closer Jasmine begins to ask a question, not that I let her finish the question as she lost all respect I had for her long ago. I interrupt her, “are you involved in the attack that just happened.”

The confusion on her face, what little there was, was all the answer I needed. She is not behind this at least not planning it. She does however use the pause I gave while reading her face to ask the question she started to before.

“What have you done to . . .”

She wants to know about the females? She was behind them then and not just an acquaintance of theirs then.

“Nothing I wouldn’t do to you for how you and your kind have been treating my mate. You call him a member of your society and yet you treat him like a threat to it. You make deals and promises only to break them as you try to control him.

I know what you have been up to, stop those actions.”

The three guards draw firearms and I immediately land a strike on the nearest of the nearest of the guards. There is hate in the eyes of Jasmine as I release another test of my mate’s involuntary blood magic.

The man screams as he bursts into flames, screams of other nearby people begining to panic. The two soldiers hesitate for a moment and I draw my longsword and impale the second soldier. Their attire being little more than clothes does nothing to protect them from the dwarven blade.

Red mist rises from disembowelment of the man as the blood dripping from my blade does the same. The mist forming dozens of tiny bolts of energy to strike the other soldier. None of the three are dead, yet but will be in minutes if they are not treated.

Jasmine herself is releasing a scent of fear as she begins to draw a pistol. I get within her reach and with my superior strength she can’t get out of my hold as the edge of my sword touches her neck.

“Don’t worry I’m not going to kill you. You need to uphold your end of the bargain you made after all” I whisper into her ear before pushing her to the ground and casting Invisibility as quickly as I can.

My spell does not last long with my poor skill in illusion and that I never learned the actual spell. Not even a minute my spell broke, colapsed due to my own errors but I had already turned the corner.

It did not take me long to catch back up to the rest of the pack and while we were momentarily stopped by a large number of guards at the gate the fox's tricks got them to ignore our presence.

Her tracking spell runs to around the corner of a wall and I see my mate sitting under a tree, tears falling to the overgrown grass around him.

“We’ll set up camp in the building over there” Bryan says as he points across the road to a house.

Abagail looks at my mate for a moment before she nods and follows Bryan to ready a place for everyone to rest. It is probably going to be a long night and I suspect that the Terrans will try to find us.

Lysan is the first to walk over to our mate and start rubbing his back, she does not say anything nor does Talia and me when we join her in being there for our mate. He has protected and comforted us, we will do the same for him.

I bare my teeth towards the fox when she takes a step towards us, a warning she notices before joining Bryan and Abagail in setting up a camp. She may run in the pack but she is not worthy of my mate. I will not let a weakling or a coward breed in my pack let alone with my mate.