[DoA Inktober 2023] Written submissions: [DoA Inktober 2023] Infested

“Horizon, wake up! I just found a fresh whale fall!” Deep Six barged into Event Horizon’s nest, his red eyes flashing in the dim light of what glowing plants still lived here at the bottom of the ocean. After a few weeks of adjusting to the deep sea’s pressure and darkness, Event Horizon can (mostly) confidently say that they were quite enjoying the solitude down here. But of course, Deep Six was helping too, as despite the two dragons’ initial meeting being a bit strange, they had gradually warmed up to their fellow reject of society.

Said reject of society was currently trying to tunnel into the mud and plants that lined the bottom of their den, in order to lead them to said whale fall. Event Horizon flashed black and white gradients of annoyance, but squeezed through the entrance of the den that connected them to the waters beyond. A while later, as the two dragons approached the site of the whale fall, they found a mass of deep-sea fish, crabs, other crustaceans and starfish absolutely feasting on the dead whale. Still, there was a lot of the whale left, and neither dragon would voluntarily turn down a meal such as this.

It turned out that Horizon and Deep had different ideas of what constituted a good meal though, as once they checked around to make sure all was safe (only small sharks, eels, a few octopi here and there, and the long body of a lone Abyssal also scavenging from this carcass) Event Horizon went straight for the whale, while Deep Six was… Grabbing mouthfuls of eels and crabs?

“Deep, why are you even trying to get eels when there’s all this whale?” Event Horizon dropped their large chunk of whale meat on a nearby rock to speak to Deep Six.

Deep Six shook his head and make a somewhat uncomfortable gesture. “I don’t know,” he said, “for some reason I don’t feel like the meat is… Safe? And I also felt like being near the whale was a bit suspicious too. Haven’t you wondered why a whale fall could last so long and get all the way down here without being shredded to bits by the dragons above?” And didn’t that just suddenly startle Event Horizon. They knew that Deep Six had been contaminated with both vampirism and feral, and even though he could keep it under control most of the time, it also made him capable of innately recognising a fellow contaminated creature. Which meant that either this whale was sketchy, or there was something in the pile of scavengers that was sketchy. Or… Both.

Just as Event Horizon was piecing this together, a disturbance seemed to happen near the back end of the whale, where the Abyssal that was previously scavenging there had started biting aimlessly at the eels nearby.

By the dim white-blue light of that Abyssal’s glowing nodes, Deep Six spotted the dragon’s eyes, or more accurately, what had previously been eyes that was now glowing coral. That was definitely an infested dragon, and none of them wanted anything to do with it. As it turned to chase down some more eels, exposing the rest of its body, he was shocked to see that the blue patches on its otherwise black-and-white body had been taken over by blue glowing coral, too.

He didn’t want to test out whether he could be infected by a third type of contamination after his vampirism and feral contamination, and clearly Event Horizon didn’t want to test that theory either.

They high-tailed it out of the muddy plains that the other creatures were still feasting in.