Hope Lost: The Dragon King

Hope Lost - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

It had been at least a few hours since Hope inadvertently confirmed she was the intended savior. She spent those hours trying to think of everything but that fate thrust upon her. She rummaged through her purse, occasionally checking to see if her phone had magically come to life again. She applied more sunscreen and fussed with her odd-fitting clothes. She was proud of relieving herself without much trouble during the times they made brief stops, and slowly ate her way through her bag of nuts and dried fruits. 

To her right there was still the very tall tan grass that obscured her view of the landscape. At one point she watched, with alarm, a glistening green beetle about the size and girth of a party balloon lazily fly out of the grass and into her path. It buzzed its way back into the grass, and then out again beside her, flying next to her for several feet before slowly flying back into the grass. 

Another time she heard the calls of a flock of large birds soaring high above, their long iridescent white tails flowing gracefully behind them as they passed. She wondered what they were, but wasn’t curious enough to ask anyone.

To her left a forest had risen commensurate with their steady progression along the trail. Their path led them towards it and then skirted its edge at a distance of about fifty yards. The trees at the very edge looked relatively normal, but just within the boundaries of the forest the trees were unnaturally large. They were taller and larger than anything she’d ever seen in the California Redwood and Sequoia forests, and the woods looked as if it could easily conceal a host of giants. The canopy was so thick that the ground level was dark and difficult to see beyond the edges. She could hear animals calling each other from within but only birds entered or left the forest canopy. More than once she thought she saw something moving through the trees in pace with them, but she could never get a good look at it or it seemed like nothing at all. Her horses remained calm, regardless, and she assumed horses were good at detecting threats.

The horses, too, were a curious thought exercise for her. Years ago she had babysat for a little boy who was obsessed with nature shows. She liked them, too, and they watched hours of them together. One thing that stuck with her was that animals developed features for a reason, usually for defense or for attracting a mate.

What exactly she was riding she didn’t know, but it wasn’t a normal horse. It had antlers, about the length of her hand, but flat and sharp, like knives. Its front hooves each featured a long, curved and very sharp claw. She tried not to think too hard about why horses needed claws.

The shadows below them had grown longer, but were still not as long as she would have expected by now. She didn’t have a watch, and usually relied on her cell phone for the time, but she knew what several hours felt like and they’d been riding, with rest stops, for at least that long. The sun was still fairly high when she would have expected it to be setting soon.

An unsettling thought occurred to her as a trickle of memory came to her from one of her conversations with Tessa. It was time to break her silence.

“Ahem--” she cleared her throat, and Tarik glanced over at her. “Tarik?”

“Yes?”

“How long is a day here compared to where I come from?”

Tarik frowned and shrugged. “I don’t know where you’re from, so I can’t answer that. Our days are...normal? We count the increments, if that’s what you mean. There are twenty daylight units and fifteen nighttime units this time of year.”

She pressed her lips together and scratched the back of her head. She should have known that.

“So there are some caves up ahead that we’re going to stop and camp in for the night. It’s a safe place and has some nearby water.” He glanced up at the sky. “We have a few hours of daylight left. We’ll get to the caves with plenty of time to set up camp, though.”