Where have the dragons gone, and why is the land dying?
Blue Shark sets out from her distant island home for the continent of Pyrrhia, brimming with excitement and determined to prove herself to her family.
But something is very wrong.
Dragons ar...
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The days dragged by longer and slower than a python with a full meal.
Blue hated lying there, listening to the cold wind screaming outside, prey to the loneliness that gripped her every day. She felt helpless. She trembled with restlessness, like the feeling one gets when they desperately want to stretch. She had to do something. Anything to escape the silence. Sosna was gone the majority of the time, but he did not ignore her wants. She was warm and well cared for. Her sides were already healing, and she could move her tail without stabbing pain. She could even roll over, if she was cautious.
How ridiculous it all is, she thought one night as she turned over carefully, holding her right foreleg tucked close. I'm waiting eagerly for a dragon I don't even know.
The sun was setting outside. The light in the great hall was fading, faint shadows stretching across the floor. Sosna always left her door open now, and she could see the fire crackling on the large hearth. It never went out before he returned, after the first day. She suspected he built it up more, so it would last longer and she wouldn't be left in the dark.
I know his name. That's all. Sosna.
She had been trying to figure him out in the past few days, like a puzzle to ease the boredom. But he was a complete mystery, and it frustrated her. Were all IceWings like this? Unreadable and enigmatic? Or was it his NightWing side? She remembered a NightWing who had visited Lamprey Cove once, a cold, proud black dragon with yellow eyes and a scar across his flank. His wings flared and a warning rumbled in his throat whenever something displeased him. Was Sosna like that?
No, he has no emotions. He's a block of wood somebody carved to look like a dragon.
But she remembered his eyes, and knew that the dark IceWing had feelings, and secrets of his own.
Why did he always have heaps of furs? What did he do all day? Why did he live in this fortress in the middle of nowhere? Why was his left foreleg bandaged? She knew it wasn't injured like hers, she had seen him use it just as well as his right. The bandages were tightly wrapped, and never bloodstained. He didn't walk with a limp. It was her current mystery, and so far had proved to be as hopeless as the rest of the hybrid.
Blue lay still, lost in her thoughts, pushing Sosna to the back of her mind. She focused on her own foreleg. Fractured, he had said.
But she had three others, and they were fine.
I wonder... can I stand yet? I'm just weak, there's no real problem with them. She stretched one wing outward, the tip brushing the low stone ceiling of the infirmary. There's no reason I shouldn't be ready to walk. I can't lay here pathetically for another minute. She folded her wings and cautiously pushed herself up with her right foreleg, settling into a half-reclining position.
