Chronicles of Carnezia (Book 2): Wilderness

Chapter 16: Angry Mob

Chapter 16: Angry Mob

            Frain climbed up to a safe and reasonable height and I was taking deep breaths, trying to mentally get rid of my induced headache. It wouldn’t be long now until we reached the town, lake or forest. I was expecting Frain to fly all the way to the forest but then that would leave me with the problem of getting to the town without walking for a few good miles. It took awhile but an obvious solution seeped into my mind; Frain could easily drop me off during the first night nearby and hopefully no one would be awake to see a dark purple dragon landing within the vicinity.

            Indeed it would be a better thing if Frain was a darker shade or a different colour altogether (like black or maroon) though I’m sure he blended in well with the twilight skies. I remembered back when Frain and I were flying during night time above Dracona; there were more dragons awake than I imagined would be at that particular time. There was something that had occurred to me so easily, even when I wasn’t really focusing; the lightest colour that I saw was a marble grey. The colours ranged through speckled scarlet to maroon, mauve to violet, midnight blues and greys to blacks; all were at the darker spectrum of the colour range that all the dragons covered.

            Frain was the second darkest dragon that I was rather familiar with. Hydra was an aqua blue and Storm was a very bright, pale grey with white speckles. Jeta, like Torrin, was the deepest colour that there was, jet black; Torrin was old, very old and so he had specks of grey amongst his scales whereas Jeta was only about four years old and he was completely black (apart from the spines, all dragons had pearlescent spines and horns). There was no way of knowing, or telling, which colour was the more common amongst dragons; firstly as there were that many and secondly as some were speckled or had the blemish of a secondary colour. Frain, in fact, wasn’t just one colour all over; his wings were a more bluish purple compared to the spectacular purple of his body.

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            We were now flying a portion of the Meskar River (the one that passed near to Baedon) although we were too far north to see the town I had started at. As I thought on it, Frain banked to the left and we began to follow the river downstream southwards. After a good ten minutes of high speed swooping, we started to descend a few hundred metres and Baedon came into view from behind a small floating, fluffy cloud.

            It wasn’t necessary but Frain gave an almighty roar that shook me down to the pit of my stomach and I had to cover my ears; the result of which was letting go of the leather straps and I was almost thrown sideways off his back. Thanks to good reflexes, I latched back onto the straps and clung on tight whilst Frain circled round above the town. He was looking for a place to land.

            Unlike the other small towns we had ever visited, here was completely safe to let the people know we were definitely coming in to say hello. Back when Frain was just a baby dragon (small enough to lounge across my shoulders), one day I let Frain openly walk around the streets with me and there was a moment that I was questioned by a small group of children. It was very similar to when we were last in Itra only they were very much less inclined of being scared of him.

            At that point, Frain pulled out of his rounded flying and glided down towards the ground. We landed very lightly, something uncommon in my experiences; I hopped down and took off all the baggage and the harness. As I shoved that into an emptier bag, Frain had lowered his head and was swinging his tail violently. There was a loud commotion going on in front of me but I had my head down as I was crouching. Looking up, I saw that a large group of people were making their way over and a few of them did not look at all happy.