Book of The Seraph: Ascended

The first thing Josiah noticed at the rousing of his consciousness was the splitting headache that had overcome his mind. The second was the intense heat emanating from underneath his back. His eyes shot open, and both pains intensified immensely. This resulted in the strange mixture of reflexively jumping off of the floor and falling back to clutch his head in pain. This ended with Josiah going right back to where he started, only now he was on his stomach. This only lasted a second however, as once again an almost burning heat graced his skin, this time however, he managed to stay on his feet long enough to scurry away from it. As he slowly opened his eyes, each millimetre inviting another pulse of head pain, he gradually became aware of the situation around him: he was in the centre of a smouldering crater. He was frozen in a mix of shock and confusion, all his mind could muster was '...Well then'.

His body went into autopilot as his mind shut down, trying to logically process everything he had just experienced before it would relinquish control to it's fleshy avatar once more. He slowly managed to climb out of the fairly large crater with relative ease, the sides were steep enough to slip on, but not enough to inhibit climbing all together. When he finally got to the top of the crater and looked down at the carnage he had brought against the land, he snapped out of autopilot and regained his perspective. His eyes went from cloudy and vacant to sharp and focused in a few seconds. "What on earth have I gotten myself into this time..."

In that moment, the average night time ambience hushed to a choked silence. Josiah realised this, and felt something was off. His eyes darted from one shadow to the next, trying to figure out if something else was there with him, to no avail; the light from the smouldering ground had completely reset his natural night vision. Suddenly, he felt as if he was pulled in a direction, right as something whizzed through where his neck would have been just a second ago. He only just had time to look in the direction the noise came from, but still he saw nothing.

Due to him looking in the direction of the first noise, he was completely oblivious to the others directly behind him. He felt three jolts of pain in the back of his neck. He looked away from the dark bush he was staring at and plucked one of the sources of the pain from his flesh; a dart of some kind. Mind still in shock, he looked forward again slowly, only to be met by two huge, almost glowing, sapphire blue eyes. These were all he could register before he tumbled to his knees and fell into the dirt. For the third time tonight.

"This is Sergeant Silver Spire, I have captured the creature, and will now proceed to bring it back. Over." An armour clad Royal Guard looked over the downed creature, not sure if the order to bring it back even if it was awake was the correct course of action. It looked so weak, so defenceless. Its spindly limbs were perhaps three quarters the width of his, and not to mention at least twice as long; it couldn't hurt them if it tried.

The trip back to the guard barracks, aside from a single accidnetal trip, was wholely uneventful. The ponies were never out and about this late, so they got no strange looks. The creature had been encased in a opaique magical container, usually meant for things like manticores and baby hydras; things with teeth and claws. Interestingly, however, the creature currently being subjected to the magical prison had no such appendages meant for attack, or at least none they could see. An order was an order, however, and their orders were to make sure the animal was safely brought into captivity. It could be incredibly dangerous for all they knew.

Knowing that this was the exact procedure that he had seen take place tens of times on other larger animals, Sky Step decided to break off his reconnaissance after the creature had been sedated and captured. He was tired and he had all the time to eye up their fallen sky thing tomorrow, anyway. This little fact didn't stop him from wondering about the creature all the way back to his home in town, and even after he got into bed.

The platoon of local guard ponies returned from their mission with ease, slipping through the garage like door specifically built for this purpose. One of the guards in the hallway looked at the magic continer and whistled a single exhale. "That looks rather small for a beastie box." He was refering to the ball of magic that held the creature.

"Aye, well this is definitely no beastie by the look of it." Silver Spire retorted, as he magicked the ball into a steel cage built directly into the wall. He then released his magic, letting all the guards who were around the containment area see their new guest.

"Well he's certainly a looker." One guard commented.

"Rather pitiful, if you ask me." Another said.

Captain Tsunami rounded the corner and made his way into the containment area. All of the guards stood to attention the second he had entered the room, but were quickly dismissed right after. "Well it won't be here for long. Only until we can get somepony to catagorize it, it seems to be a new kind of creature in these parts of the world." There were some surprised inhales at this realisation, but nothing more.

The now armour clad pony walked up to inspect the sedated creature, oogling at its extremities and foreign biology. Silver Spire trotted up to him and asked: "What will happen after that, Captain? I don't know much about things that fall from the sky, but it surely we should make sure it isn't hurt too bad before we just release it back into the wild..."

"Well you do have a point" He mused, looking over the boy's back at where there would have been charred skin and bones if it were a normal creature. "It looks fine on the outisde, but there may be injuries on the inside... The hospitals have magic that can detect that kind of thing, not to mention all the blunt force trauma that comes with falling out of the sky. I'll see about getting it looked over at the Cross Infirmary, not that they will know what to look for, exactly. " With that he stood up straight and walked out of the room, on his way to write the Sun Princess a scathing report about how a relatively big object slipped her right by and plowed into one of her towns.