With my hand palm up, the Dragonfly landed on it. Moving my hand up closer to my face, the exotic critter started to make loud clicking & whirring noises, irregular in their length, sometimes a constant stream then a pause of a second or two. Whilst I listened, I studied the strange insect closer. Close up you could clearly see that its “skin” was a finely crafted gold mesh. Body segments made up of overlapping scales of perfect precision. The four wings appeared to be made of the finest threads of metal. Its eyes looked like two glass orbs and yet seemed to be filled with a reddish and green smoke which curled and gently twisted within the orbs. Its mandibles constantly moving as it made these alien sounds. The dragonfly was telling me something, and the best bit? I understood it perfectly.
You see, I found this little creature long ago, imprisoned in a cage. I’d already killed its former master, a rival in our underground rock hunting expeditions. I set it free using the keys I found on her body. She’d cost us dearly over the years. Vengeance extracted, I gleefully opened the door to the cage. The Dragonfly flew straight out like an arrow and sank its metallic jaws into my hand. A moment of searing pain and I could feel a burning sensation up my arm. Before I could swot it, it had darted off. It had started clicking at me from the other side of the now trashed room that I stood in. To start, I couldn’t make head or tail of this weirdness and my whole arm hurt like hell. But then, only moments after the pain in my arm subsided I could understand every last buzz, click and whirr.
It thanked me for letting it out of the cage that Sari had kept it in. The little Dragonfly told me that it had been stolen away from a travelling merchant that Sari and her band had encountered way out east. It said that the merchant had gotten it in turn from its creator. A mastercraftsman and ritual master who was able to utilise chaos essence to bring the Dragonfly to life. It was a marvel and one of the strangest creatures I’d encountered. Part mechanical insect and altered essence. The reddish green smoke that was visible through its bulbous eyes somehow gave it its “soul” and a personality all of its own.
After thanking me for freeing it, the Dragonfly pointed out that it no longer had anyone to serve. I asked it what its purpose was and also if it had a name. Buzzing its wings and I swear, proudly puffing out its thorax, it clicked something that sounded like “zirtickkkclickmuckizfrzzik”.
Could I just call it…” Dragonfly instead?” I asked. Clicking a response that I took for a yes it did its party trick. “Dragonfly” vanished. Not instantaneously but a slow morphing into the surroundings. It was still on the other side of the room but now I could see the vague outline of its elongated body and a slight fuzziness that matched the colour of its surroundings. After about a minute, it reappeared.
“Woah. That’s a neat trick.” I exclaimed. We potentially had ourselves our very own insect spy. It reckoned it could blend with its surroundings for a few hours at a time before needing to feed and rest up. And what kind of food would a gold plated, metallic Dragonfly powered by altered chaos require to eat I enquired?
“What do I eat? Insects of course!” The Dragonfly whirred.
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