In The Dark

Finish That Thought #26 (Judge's Comments) 
Prompt: [I] thought pegasi were tough to ride until the Army got their first shipment of wyverns.

Special Challenges: Make the protagonist non-human; include a form of the word resolution or resolve

The character(s) and plot included in this piece belong to my novel I am currently writing.  They are the property of my co-authors and myself.  

October 7, 1916

I thought pegasi were tough to ride until the Army got their first shipment of wyverns. They passed the box onto me, of course, and insisted I poke and prod until I uncover their secrets. Unlike the pegasi, the wyverns have shape and move. Their black coats ooze and wriggle inside their glass jars as if they are trying to climb out. With a pair of electrical probes, I was able to mount one for 3 seconds.


Ares paused mid-sentence, a slight smirk teasing the corner of his lips. ‘The Army will love decoding this entry,’ he thought to himself. The Army is what he called his employer, a spindly man of mediocre height with a dusting of silver atop his round head, and his demonic cult. Pegasi was a nickname for the first ethereal substance he had been given to study in his lab. Wyvern alluded to this new element the Army had sent his way to analyze. It was Ares’ way since his imprisonment to jot down discoveries in code based off of medieval alchemy phrases. Not that he was a prisoner of the Army, oh no. Ares had locked himself away within his alchemy lab, deep in the recesses of the old manor on 8th Street. It wasn’t wise to go out, especially after faking his death only a few months before.

The smirk finally eased itself onto his thin lips. Oh how everyone had wept at his funeral. Even the sky had shed tears and bellowed its grief. Little did they know he was alive and well, chasing his dream of immortality with his new-found freedom. His pen dropped to the lined paper again and Ares continued to write.


I suspect these wyvern are of similar build to the pegasi, but whether or not they hold the key to the fountain, I do not know. They suggest a deeper mystery and magic than their counterparts. Since it took me a fortnight to tap into the power of the pegasi, I gather it will take me thrice as long to master the wyvern. However, I am resolved to perfect my formula and succeed in extracting the necessary ingredients for the second phase of transformation.


Running his tongue along a sharply pointed fang, Ares contemplated what to write next. The potion he concocted from the pegasi had stripped him of his humanity. Ares glanced at his cracked reflection in the cobwebbed baroque mirror hanging on the wall across from his mahogany desk. He was a shadow of his former self, almost vampiric in appearance except for the elongated ears. A few more answers, nay, one more discovery, and he would unleash the power to be able to transform his ghostly body into human flesh like the Army could. But what price was he willing to pay for immortality? If the potion of the pegasi had sold his body, would a wyvern potion sell his soul?