This is an old short concept story of mine I wrote as part of a collaboration between myself and another DeviantArt user. We haven’t done much with the story, lately other use the characters to RP with…
The jungle. A seemingly never-ending expanse of lush green growth stretching to all points of the compass. Many creatures call it home; humans, birds, snakes and lizards, wolves, big cats, monkeys and apes. The vastness of the jungle allows many a creature and plant to go undiscovered to the rest of the world for a long period of time, until by some chance circumstance that a human explorer or hunter comes across it and announces their existence to the world. However there are sometimes that a creature has been known to mankind for millenniums, but has been passed off to be just fables and myths by the more advanced societies.
This has given us the advantage over them. They do not believe in us, so they leave us alone. We are able to hunt them and infiltrate them without retaliation. If a captured human escapes us, they won’t believe them, because they do not believe in us.
The Jungle is our fortress, our capitol, our kingdom.
We are the Naga, a product of an ancient human kingdom destroyed 5 millenniums ago.
We were fashioned after the cobra and the python, but with the arms and minds of men.
We were both their servants and their masters. We were created as golems, so we were their servants, but designed to guard prisoners and slaves, so we were their masters.
We desired to overthrow them, but we could not. There was a force between us and them. Hunters, defenders, demons of the sky.
The Dragaider.
The Dragaider were golems like us, but were fashioned after the fiery serpents, the dragons that made their nests in the mountains and valleys of the ancient earth.
The human craftsmen took more care with building the Dragaider, for they were constructed to defend the kingdom against her enemies. Against us If we to revolt.
The earlier Dragaider were simple minded, bulky and easy to manipulate. But as the humans improved them, their cunning and craftiness equaled, and quite possibly, exceeded ours. They gave them each an individual power, an ability to control an element or substance. They also granted them the ability to ■■■■■ forms, capable of turning from human to dragon in a under a minute.
The only thing the humans ever gave us was a preprogrammed insatiable hunger, which they used to control us. As a precaution, our masters placed a trigger within us, to prevent us from doing what we all desired, devour them and destroy them.
On occasion they did allow us to feast on captives and death penalties, but that only made it worse.
In desperation, we tried to remove the control ourselves, resulting in our kind nearly falling to extinction due to the override killing them.
Our numbers dropped considerably, the prisoners and slaves revolted.
But this undoing proved more successful than all our attempts, for our masters foolishly removed the control to allow us to ‘clean up’ the mess we caused.
Opportunity was opened and shut fast, for shortly after the slave revolt, a great earthquake struck the kingdom, coupled with a flood that magnified the devastation tenfold.
We used the cataclysm to our advantage, seeking out the surviving craftsmen, and coercing them to improve and upgrade us, granting us new weapons and new abilities.
They became our slaves as we had been theirs. Today their children’s children still serve us, as well as the descendants of other survivors we enslaved.
The Dragaider managed to survive as well somehow, and rather than confronting them we chose to avoid them, knowing in a direct war they would win.
Thus began our quest to master all the kingdoms of earth, while the Dragaider expanded a secret defense to all the kingdoms of mankind.
We enslave, they free.
We destroy, they create.
We conquer, they defeat.
They must not know we still exist, otherwise all is lost for us.
Today as the dawn breaks on the 6th millennium of our clandestine conquest, a new tide is about to turn the course of our invasion, one that hinges on a simple young human girl and a secret that’s hidden with her.
This secret she possesses she has is unknown, even to her, but is linked to us, the golems, the Naga and the Dragaider.
We must have her before the Dragaider discover her secret before us, otherwise the victory for our kind will be lost forever, and our mastery over mankind will become a bleak dream.