Ivory stared at The Codex in her hospital bed. It was heavier than it looked, cold beneath her fingertips, its edges sharp enough to make her pause. She opened it slowly, almost reverently, and the metallic pages whispered under her touch, humming faintly, like a low vibration running through her bones. It was like it patiently waited for her curiosity to slip.
The first words struck her chest with weight: Croxastea (CROX-ah-stee-ah) endures. It always has. She swallowed. There was a finality in that sentence, a patience that stretched across centuries. Not mercy. Not grace. Endurance. It sounded like something Blue would say himself.
The text unfolded like a living map, describing a planet that had never fractured, never begged for aid, a place forged under pressure so immense that only creatures capable of unerring patience, intelligence, and self-control could survive. A place that was ancient and existed millions of years before humans, thousands before dinosaurs, and centuries before Earth had formed.
Ivory was mesmerized at how long the dragons had lived, at how long they endured life and evolved.
Croxastea's gravity pressed more heavily than Earth's, and the air shimmered with metallic dust that caught light and turned the sky a muted, polished blue. Ivory imagined standing beneath it, feeling her bones compressed, her lungs stretching to draw in the dense, polished air. A cold sun burned without warmth, air that was a deep blue. Mercy was absent. And yet life thrived. The dragons survived without everlasting emotion.
Ivory read on, her pulse quickening. She noted the pretty font, the brassy pages, the small words, and the pictures of the planet and the dragons, and how each evolved overtime. The planet was hues of blue with temples, flowing lakes and rivers, bright blue oceans, and beautifully sculpted caves. It seemed too pretty to be real.
"Why are you smiling?" Blue asked.
She looked up to him taking off his coat.
"Croxastea is beautiful; too pretty to be real."
"It is real; it looks a bit different from that photo," Blue motioned to the book.
"I want to finish reading," Ivory turned back to the book.
The Seraphyne — the original dragons — were not myths. They were apex organisms, apex minds. Their bodies were vast, twenty-four to thirty-two feet from snout to tail, wings folding inward like living armor, sixty feet of membrane stretched like sails when in flight. Their scales shimmered with metallic facets, each one a miniature prism of blue. Bone beneath was crystalline, capable of absorbing shock and redistributing it across the body.
Eyes and pupils were slit and reflective and any shade of blue, cold stone and perceptive. Dragons were strong physically, psychically, and rarely died of disease, skin thick and tough like the fire they had breathed. They lived eight hundred to twelve hundred years, aging not linearly, but like the slow drift of stone, barely noticeable until the end.
Ivory could feel the pattern in it, the cold perfection. They did not survive by violence or speed. They survived by waiting, calculating, and enduring. Her own chest tightened as she realized — she had seen this in Blue. That same stillness. That same inexorable patience, the blue eyes that were cold yet perceptive, cold yet soul seeing. It was odd.
Ivory kept on reading.
Life on Croxastea (CROX-ah-stee-ah) was not sprawling or indulgent. Cities were not cities in the human sense but labyrinths carved into living stone, grown from the rock, underground, permanent. Dragons did not bother the surface and kept to themselves for Millenia.
Art existed only to record lineage or victory; Technology was restrained yet impossibly advanced: crystalline matrices were encoded into them; their DNA. They even used their DNA as a form of communication through stone and magnetic currents, environmental systems maintaining pressures, temperatures, and stability for lives that spanned centuries. Hunger, chaos, and disorder were unknown.
And yet… there was no expansion. No need. No ambition beyond survival. Until the schism.
Some dragons observed Earth, curious and calculating. Humans were messy, emotional, irrational, yet astonishingly adaptable. Their numbers grew rapidly; their violence was normalized. Their chaos was opportunity.
The conservative dragons ignored Earth as they found it to be too loud and reckless, though the new age dragons, the dissenters, the Dragons from the Southern side of Croxastea, saw dominion. They saw not survival, but control. Apex species do not wait forever. They expand, they claim, they shape.
These dissenters left Croxastea with purpose. They were strategists, genetic architects, planners across centuries. They understood immediately that Earth could not be conquered by force. Humans were too impulsive and emotionally volatile to be equals; they knew that to keep the dragons alive and to expand their lineage, they needed certain humans that would meet a list of criterion through dominance, infiltration, beauty, strength, and bloodlines.
Human women offered gestational resilience; Offspring meant enhanced cognition, extended lifespans, and empathy as a tool rather than a weakness. The dragons could live among humans openly, blend in, observe, manipulate, endure, and conquer.
The dissenters called themselves The Seraphyne: blood and DNA of the dragons, physical body of a human. They colonized Hollow Earth (civilization below Earth's surface) and are as advanced as the main Dragons, just that they resemble humans and control the government, politicians, the justice system, other gangs, black markets, Area 51, and anyone that benefits them.
Their sole purpose is to breed with genetically selected humans that will continue on their Seraphyne lineage: calculated, intuitive, strong like a dragon yet empathic and a sense of purpose, like a human. From beneath the human world, they trained hybrids, mapped genetics, infiltrated governments, gangs and medical archives. Earth was never invaded, just cultivated.
Dragon babies only took 6 months to fully develop and then be born; though overtime due to breeding and evolutionary purposes, The Seraphyne were born anywhere from 3 to 4 months time, which is due to the numerological interpretations of each number.
The number 3 represents Key Meanings of Angel Number 3: Creativity & Self-Expression, .Spiritual Growth, Guidance & Support, Balance & Harmony (logical dragons with emotionally driven humans), and Manifestation, whereas the number 4 represents Foundation & Stability, Hard Work & Discipline, Support & Protection, Balance, and Spiritual Grounding: each trait is from the dragons or humans forged as one to create: THE SERAPHYNE.
Ivory's fingers traced the lines describing hybrid offspring, the progeny of Seraphyne and chosen human women. Now, this was her bloodline.
I was chosen. I was always chosen. She told herself.
The Codex was immediately gravitated to Ivory as if it already knew that Blue had chosen her.
She imagined Hollow Earth, vast and silent beneath human cities, dragons moving through crystalline halls, children of mixed blood learning, training, observing, the world above that carried the average human: ignorant, alive with chaos, unaware of the meticulous empire being built beneath their feet. Humans unchosen, original, not special enough for aliens.
And then she understood. Blue was a hybrid and a creation of this centuries-long design. Earth was a colony, Croxastea (CROX-ah-stee-ah) the throne, and she — Ivory — was neither victim nor pawn. She was a component, essential, deliberate, and important. And Blue chose her.
She still hated him; in fact, him being an alien makes her despise him more than she did before. Though, she knew it was his design and that he appeared human in the sense that he had logic, emotion, and charm, though did not think or believe that he was a human. He believed himself to be a superhuman. That's what Ivory called him: a superhuman.
Her hand shook, and she looked at Lyra sleeping in the bassinet. Already connected, already aware, her tiny face impossibly serious, luminous. Ivory brushed a fingertip along her daughter's cheek. "What have you done?" she whispered, voice trembling.
And in the shadows of the room, Blue's presence felt closer than ever. She knew, without looking, that he had already considered everything she had just read. Ivory knew that Blue had already planned her reaction, measured her comprehension, and mapped the future across her mind. The Seraphyne were patient. And so was he.
And this entire time, Ivory never knew him, underestimated his strength and his significance. The Blue Dragons was an ancient gang that existed for a very long time, and she was the newest member in a deeply ingrained secret society.