We were reliant on them. The Cirrus Town folk. As much as the remnants of the Navy said we didn’t need them, we knew that we wouldn’t last a week without them. We looked up to the skies as a hope, a safe haven, where those wonderful souls above airdropped what little they could afford to supply our efforts in Silverhold.
Of course, there were the rare time a few Sirens stole a skyship and tried to lure us in, but we fought them off. Sometimes they’d be so bold to just attack us head on, coming from the darkened clouds leaving us mere moments to prepare a defense. But generally, the skies offered us an essential lifeline that we could not live without.
Silverhold lost a man every now and then, a tragedy and a soldier we could not replace without great effort, but we never lost many.
Not until that day.
I remember it vividly, it was supposed to be a supply day, the Cirrus folk would tie a bunch of supplies to a parachute and drop them, simple. We had done that what felt hundreds at times at that point. Yet something was wrong, at first we thought we were seeing things, that the skyship was simply obscured in the clouds in such a way it created a larger shadow, or just us going mad and thinking it was closer than it was.
The next thing I know, I see the wreck of a skyship falling from the skies, as if it was some sort of meteor about to pulverize Silverhold. By some stroke of bad luck, it directly struck Commodore Kai’s office, our acting Commodore was killed instantly, along with several other high ranking members in our a chain of command.
It was chaos, marines desperately carrying out the wounded, screams of those crushed under the ship slowly dying from bloodloss or suffocation, the splinters scattered everywhere. I was busy carrying one of my lieutenants away from the crash scene when I heard a loud
BOOM
erupt from the crashsite.
The supplies meant to help us survive this damned invasion had become our doom. The Atlantean’s seemed to hear it, seemed to use it as a signal to feast upon us. At least, that’s what I intially thought they heard.
Outside I could hear men screaming that there was some “beast” flying in the sky with a deafening roar. As if it was signalling for the Atlanteans to come and feast upon our sorry souls.
I will forever regret going outside and looking up.
Some monster, some beast that could not even possibly have come from a human flew high above us. I heard tales of dragons, a powerful and noble species that had supposedly gone extinct.
“Could that truly, be a dragon?” Is what I thought to myself. But as I did, it swooped low and began to rain hellfire upon Silverhold. The screams of the men who were suddenly consumed by a raging inferno I have seen no equal to haunts me to this day. I saw men get reduced to ash, devoured limb by limb by the dragon, crushed or torn apart by its mighty claws.
The Atlanteans followed in short order, the majority of the men left were infected or devoured. The only officers left was me, my lieutenant and two captains that had fallen back to regroup there men. We lead a combined 25 men all together less than a hundreth of Silverhold’s pre invasion forces.
With what we had left, we made a desperate push to one of the brigs that had managed to survive the Atlantean feast, joined by various pockets of survivors who were also fighting their way through Silverhold. By the time we made it there, we had about 45 in total.
Unsure of our fates, set lose the sails of the brig, and sailed into the darkened sea. Eventually we came across a sailboat crewed by 5 marines, who had also escaped earlier that day, sailing to the Whispering Caverns based off some rumors of some survivors living there. With the sailboat taking the lead, we sailed off, praying that we would find fellow survivors.
Silverhold before this was down to 500 men.
Only 50 were still alive by the time it was abandoned.
