A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Jailbreak

I creep beneath the silver moonlight, trying to remain quiet. The pens loom before me, colossal to my small mouse eyes. I look around one more time, then shift into a small snake to slither beneath the door.

    Shifting back into human form, I look around the large building that houses the animals Sionic created. My eyes automatically adjust to the sparse light, making the darkness fade away into color. A boy with dark skin and dark hair and dark eyes, whose name is Vision, can see in the dark with his zaffre and admiral blue pupils.

    The animals all startle at the sight of me. In one corner of the large building crawls lizards. Though these aren’t ordinary lizards. They have one bat wing and one bird wing on their backs, and are all the colors of the rainbow. The lizards crawl away from me when I walk over to them, their airy hisses filling the air.

    In another corner sits a huge beast, the size of an elephant. Chains wrap around its long weasel body, cutting through the shifting shades and tints of gray fur to its white skin. Its bright orange bird legs, all six of them, are laden with ropes and cords, restricting any movement from them. The creature’s silver eyes look at me out of a silver-gray squirrel face. A long monkey tail the same gray as an early morning sky flicks behind the creature, not tied down.

    I pull Alexis’s silver ring from my pocket, remembering when the dark-haired woman gave it to me.

    It was after lunch. She came over to Ally and I, sitting under our tree, talking. She held out the blade, hilt towards me, and had said,”For your nightly journey, great hunter.” I took the knife, and just stared at the silver dragon pommel, with the silver-white orb clutched in its mouth. Alexis told me to touch the stone, and imagine it as a ring. I did so, and the knife magically shrunk down and contorted into a silver dragon ring, with the stone settled between its folded wings. Alexis smiled and said,”For an easier carry,” then left, leaving me with her ring and a startled Ally.

    Now, I touch the orb, imagining it as a knife. The ring grew, unwinding into a silver dragon head with a body, legs, wings, and tail morphing into a sharp moonlight-colored blade with white markings along the edges.

    I walk towards the huge creature, remembering what Pux had said about a cair friend she had lost to Sionic when she and Sam landed in Alaska after fleeing their island. The cair looks at me with wise eyes, and bows her head what little ways she can to me as I pat her side.

    “Don’t move, Shara, and I’ll have these ropes off before the end of the hour,” I say, and Shara murmurs her thanks in Earth Tongue, the language of all creatures that walk across soil. I raise the knife, and saw through the ropes holding the giant creature’s legs.

    It takes less time than I thought to saw through the thick ropes and to unravel the huge chains from Shara’s body. Once I was done, though, Shara stood to her full height, stretching her legs and body like a cat.

    I walk towards another corner of the pens, and try to see through the chain link fence bordering off this section. Luminous eyes stare back at me, as small as squirrels’. One wilane creeps forward, with her clear gray eyes the color of an early morning sea, and studies me. Her blue-green scales shimmer faintly, as if light shines from within her skin. Her owl face, with its light brown feathers veined in violet, makes her human-like eyes all the more interesting.

    Kneeling, I reach my hand towards the wilane, as if it’s a dog. The wilane sniffs my hand, eyes never leaving my face. “Mikac, you must come. Sam is worried about you,” I say, and the squirrel-sized creature rears back in shock. It then turns towards the rest of the cage, towards the rest of the wilanes, and barks. I can barely follow along with Mikac’s words, as they’re a mixture of Earth Tongue and Feather Speak, the language of all those that can feel the winds in their purest form.