Freezing Wings

Chapter 9

I was half-asleep, dozing before my daily stint of watching my food get cold. I was jolted awake by a sudden shake and crash, the sound of human screams ripping through the air.

Dust rained from the ceiling as I sat up. I could barely lift my body, but I shook off a bit of the haze that had clouded my mind and looked around. Lucas also woke, his previously calm face scrunching up into a worried expression as he saw my haggard figure, swaying in my cage. He opened his mouth, probably to ask how I was doing, when he was cut off by a loud rumble, accompanied by screams.

The sound of shifting scales and the murmur of dragons echoed from down the hall as others of our kind woke up.

There seemed to be an earthquake happening, and the facility we were in was underground, so there was a high chance of us being buried alive. The rest seemed to realize this as some began to break out, the sound of cracking glass ripping through the air.

I was moving purely for the fact that the instincts laden in my body demanded me to - to preserve my life in the face of apparent danger. My original plan was to just sit there and wait, but apparently, my body wanted to live, and that plan was thrown completely out the window. 

Another rumble shook the air, chunks of rock falling from the ceiling. One smashed into the top of the cage next to me, shattering the glass and cracking the bottom of the cage, shards embedding themselves in the wall closest to me. 

A shot of adrenaline surged into my veins and a thread of panic finally breached through the fog in my mind, kicking me into motion. I inhaled, gathering the little bit of moisture in my body and amassing it in the back of my throat.

A ball of liquid ice formed, a pitifully weak mist condensing. I coughed and released a bolt of blue ice in the middle of the glass, causing it to shatter and open up a big enough hole for me to slip through. If it was me three months prior, I would have never fit, however, I wasn't as big as I was then, and I jumped out with relative ease. I was wheezing like an asthmatic fish out of water, but I made it.

Lucas was already out and he looked me up and down, his face scrunching into an even more worried expression. Instead of asking me how I was doing or what was wrong, he just walked up next to me and walked with me.

As I walked with him, I finally realized just how small I had become. When I hatched, I was only a foot or so shorter than him, yet when we were walking together, he towered over my nine-foot frame at nearly 16 feet tall, dwarfing me. I was barely half his height and considering how light I had gotten from not eating, he could probably pick me up like a toy pet.

We apparently kept growing long after we hatched, and although Lucas was technically three years older than me as a dragon, when I hatched he was only twelve feet tall. I was huge compared to other hatchlings, being nine feet tall rather than the usual five feet. He had probably hit a growth spurt that caused him to grow like a hyperactive weed over the past three months and gain four feet.

[I know the growing cycle is a bit weird but then again we are dealing with dragons >.>]

I don't know why, but the fact that he didn't say anything made my mind lighten, even though it was only a bit. We walked down the hall, slowed down by my slow pace and regrouping with the rest of the dragons that had already gotten out.

I spotted Sarah in the far side of the crowd, along with a few others I knew, but I shrank back behind Lucas. The thought of them seeing me in this emaciated state made me scared, and I hid.

He glanced down at me for a second and touched the top of my head with this snout, but didn't say anything. The amount of gratitude I felt in that moment couldn't be described in words.

As a group, without having to say anything, we immediately began to move after everybody got out, following the same path that had been mapped out by various other attempts. As we trotted through the passageways dust rained from the ceiling, with the occasional chunk of concrete breaking up the silence.

The sound of claws tapping on the floor resounded out, overlapping so much that it sounded like river rapids. We all moved as a unit, following the preset path. For some reason, we didn't see any scientists.

Despite the silence being broken by human screams, we couldn't find a single soul. It was like they had just disappeared off the face of the facility, or had fled.

We kept moving, however, and after a long while came to a stop. I looked around, puffing from the slight jog and my muscles already beginning to burn. Judging from my slightly fuzzy memory, we were about halfway from the exit.

The person in the lead, a navy blue guy named Travis, turned back, his face full of apprehension, "This is as far as we've gotten, I don't know where to go after this.."

A murmur rippled through the crowd of 50 as we all looked at each other, wondering where to go next. If we just wandered through the halls we would end up getting lost and buried alive, but we couldn't go back since we would still be trapped and eventually buried under the stone. There weren't any humans around to guide us to the exit, and no maps for us to read.

I found my lips moving without my consent, as if working on their own, "I know where to go..."