Wings of Fire: Normal Days

Chapter 11: Sore and Soar

A jolt (literally, not figuratively) ran through Peak and he woke up with a start. He looked around and realized he was in a forest.

WHY IN THE MOONS WAS HE IN A FOREST?!?

And then the events of the day came rushing back to him, and he looked at the plant near him. Burly was gone. Baltic was gone too. He wondered if Paradise was still in the forest looking for the ingredient or not...

And then a blur. Peak looked up to see some shapes walking away from where Baltic had once been, and a blue blur was flying into the forest behind him.

And there was that plant next to him...what was it?

What plant made someone sleepy and...

Of course. How could he have been so stupid? The plant sitting next to him was a piece of somnum obliviscatur, the exact plant that, according to Kinkajou, was an ingredient to the tranquilizer dart, and what Paradise was looking for at the moment.

Peak turned his attention to the shapes in the forest, who were still walking out of the forest; he could only make out that one shape was pure black, with some silver...

But Burly had been touched with Somnum Obliviscatur, just like Peak had been, so he couldn't possibly be up and flying.

He turned his attention back to the denser part of the forest, where the blue shape had flown off into, and it was probably looking for Paradise. Wait...a blue shape? Now he knew exactly who it was. Tsunami was flying into the forest and if Peak followed her, he would be yelled at. Then he would be yelled at again, louder. Then he would be yelled at for the third time, even more than the previous two times combined.

He noticed the direction Tsunami was heading in, and it wasn't northwest, where Ditto was supposed to be. They wouldn't find Paradise, because they had no idea where she went. So that meant that he had to find her. Of course he could just tell Tsunami, but she was flying too fast, and now even Peak's extra SkyWing speed couldn't catch up.

Peak stood up and immediately regretted it. He was bruised all over his body, and he only now realized that he must have tried to fly instinctively before falling asleep and must have fell down. It wasn't like he could do anything about it, so after a long time (which was actually only three minutes), he spread out his wings and took into the air in the direction of Ditto.

He looked down at his neck and realized that Burly must still have his pouch, and everything in it. Which means he can show it to the dragonets of destiny and I'll definitely get in trouble. But now wasn't the time to worry. Wait...didn't he see something else on his neck? He looked down again, but there was nothing.

Peak flew for several wingbeats and looked down again. This time, since his chest was more visible, he saw something that almost made him fall out of the sky. His chest was light orange, as always, but one scale...one scale was a light neon green. First, he assumed it was just something that got stuck to his scales when he was lying on the forest floor. He tried to wipe it off, but the only thing that came off was a few specks of dirt, that all scattered into the wind. It was smooth, having the same texture of his other, regular scales, and he realized it wouldn't come off, so that meant it really was a scale.

Peak stared at the scale for a few seconds then shook himself off and kept flying even faster. He tried to stop himself from looking down at the green scale. Maybe it was a hallucination or a side effect of the drowsiness the somnum obliviscatur had caused. He left it at that and immediately he flew straight into a big nut tree because he wasn't paying attention. He looked up and saw that the entire place was covered with nut trees, and many paths leading to different locations, and Paradise could have gone past any of them.

The paths all looked pretty much exactly the same and he looked through all of them and he couldn't find any clues. At one point, he did see a purple scale, but it was in the middle of the trees before it split into its many paths, so it wasn't very helpful.