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It was another fine day of morally ambiguous plundering on the Sea of a Thousand Currents, and Stormflash was bored out of her mind. She stood at the ship’s helm, idly spinning the wheel a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right, watching with slight amusement as the landlubber exaltees sprinted to the sides of the ship and emptied their stomachs.
“Captain, what’s our heading? We can’t drift about all day!”
Quicksilver, the Ridgeback that was generally accepted as Stormflash’s father, poked his nose around the corner of his ship.
“M’child –”
“Daughter today,” Stormflash clarified.
“M’daughter,” Quicksilver corrected. “It was recently a year from the day yeh hatched from yer egg, was it not?”
“It was,” Stormflash said cautiously. Birthdays were a tender subject after the surprise exploding soylent cake from Spitfire and Phantom that was not appreciated by the Swamp Witch.
“We’ll go on an adventure just for you, then. A fellar in The Rusty Tidelord told me of a cove filled with bounty and treasure as far as the eye can see. A rich pirate used ta dock there, ‘parently.”
Stormflash grinned. She liked the Sea, but it would be nice to plunder a beach again. “Just give me the coordinates, Captain.”
“Uh, Captain? Looks like we’re not the first ones here.”
The cove was absolutely packed like sardines with boats of all shapes and sizes. White sails, black sails, rainbow sails; figureheads of maren and centaurs and unspeakable eldritch sea horrors; air ships and water ships and ships that seemed to stay afloat by sheer stubbornness alone. Beside them, a tiny fae on a water lily navigated through the seaborne gridlock.
On the shore, Stormflash could just hear the roars of battle as sailors cut their way through the local wildlife. There was absolutely no way they would make it to land before the Riot of Rot.
Quicksilver grinned. “The treasure’s not in the ground, lads. It’s on the other boats.”
The plan was quickly drawn up. Ocean was far too large to go unnoticed, and Rydian’s guide seal was strangely nervous. In the end, they decided that Stormflash, being of the Water flight and only a tiny bit disgusted by having wet scales, was the best dragon for the job. This was mostly decided by Quicksilver pushing her in.
So she swam like a shark, Thresher at her side, only the flat top of her head and spikes rising above the surface. The water was surprisingly deep, enough that she had to pump her webbed digits to stay afloat. Luckily it was deep enough for Thresher, though, who –
“Thresher?” she hissed. She was close enough to a merchant vessel being loaded with caged Maren to hear the booming laughs of the Wildclaws above, and the hissing wheezes of their Mirror lackeys. But even sticking her face underwater, she couldn’t see her familiar. She did see, however, an enormous shadow.
“Uh oh,” she had time for, before the boat beside her erupted into a spray of wood, waves, and teeth. The thing that popped up beside her was serpentine, absolutely enormous - larger than her, maybe as large as Ocean - covered in flaring spines, and swallowing entire dragons in a maw full of meter-long needle teeth. One eye swiveled in its socket and locked onto her, and then the serpentine body crashed back into the sea.
So that’s where Thresher had disappeared.
Stormflash gritted her teeth. She had the pent up energy of countless days spent just taxiing exaltees. They hadn’t had a good fight since they faced the Spirit monster, and it was time to change that.
“Hyaaah!” she screamed as the Sea Serpent made another appearance. She launched herself into the air, narrowly missing the mouth snapping closed behind her tail. She grabbed onto the mast of a nearby ship, water cascading off her scales, and flung herself away as the ship tipped onto its side in the sea. That didn’t deter the Sea Serpent, which slithered right over the ruined vessel. Stormflash punched it as it went past.
It stopped mid-slither, turned its head, and flared its neck frills, hissing with pure hatred. Stormflash screamed back.
It launched itself at her. She launched herself at it.
She landed on its back, sliding down the rubbery skin before grabbing onto a fin. She held her breath as the water rushed up to meet her, and they went underneath together. She held on tight, grabbing spine after spine as she climbed towards its head. She was going to die here. If she lived through this, she was going to ask for a sword.
Her hand slid up under the ridge of its frills and it stopped suddenly, writhing. She grinned and moved her hand around, and the writhing commenced. It turned its head and stared at her with that eye as big as her head. She wrapped her legs around it and held on for dear life as it charged for the surface.
The Rogues would never forget what they saw next. Quicksilver was desperately scanning the wreckage into which his daughter and the sea monster had disappeared when he spotted them. His daughter, soaking to the bone, gripping the monster’s back. And the monster was… purring? It was making a low-pitched squeal of content, one eye closed leisurely, and its frills were raised to let Stormflash freely scratch it behind the gills.
She waved to them with her free hand and Quicksilver brought the crew to life with a roar. They navigated to the duo in the water, unsure of what to do next.
“It ate Thresher,” Stormflash piped up in the silence. “I’m calling it Highfin. Oh, and I’m going to need a sword.”