Halfblood

Chapter 4

I fell through the ground, landing unharmed but scared on the floor of a cave. Spectrum was nowhere in sight. Neither above me, nor below me, nor anywhere else I looked. "I've lost h-" I started talking only to be cut off by a voice in my mind.

'It was the only way I could save both of us. She would have destroyed us otherwise.'

"We are now stuck in a cave, who knows how far below the earth's surface, possibly without a way out!"

'At least we're alive.'

"We won't be soon... No food, no water... Possibly no way out..."

'There is a way out. All you need to do is write a gate.'

"Write a gate? What do you mean?"

'I saw your writings in your memories. They found a way into my world and changed it. You just need to write us back into my world. Easy enough?'

"Easy? Definitely not! I don't even have my notes, my laptop. I could land us somewhere else, or I could put us there and completely break your world, or most likely of all, I spend hours writing, assuming I can even find what I need to write... and then nothing happens!"

Picking up a loose stone, I hurl it as hard as possible into the darkness in the distance. After a long time, I hear a very faint clink!  

"That way is a cliff."

'I could have told you that.'

"What? How?" So apparently this dragon has some tricks I don't even know about. And I wrote him.

'You do remember that you gave my entire species night vision, do you not?'

"That was in a rough draft! It didn't even make the book." This means my job just got a whole lot harder. If the night vision actually happened, that means that every single villain I wrote into all my concepts is running around in the land, just waiting for us to show up.

'I may have forgotten to mention that small detail.' Spectrum's mental voice sounds happy, almost smug even.

"WHAT? WHY? HOW DID YOU THINK NOT TELLING ME WOULD DO ANY GOOD!"

'I KNEW YOU WOULDN'T AGREE TO COME IF I DID TELL YOU!' The dragon sighs. 'AND I NEED YOUR HELP TO FIX MY WORLD!'

"WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I CAN FIX IT?"

'WELL, YOU DID BREAK IT.'

I sigh. Spectrum does make an excellent point. "Case in point. But you should know that some things are much easier to break than fix."

'That's why from now on I'll do the breaking, and you'll do the fixing.'

"So the mighty creature thinks he can leave all the hard work to me? I care to disagree"

'Care all you like, but you should know that I can overpower you at any time.'

"It just so happens that I knocked you unconscious less that 48 hours ago."

I feel pain shoot through my skull. 'Technically, you simply facilitated me knocking myself unconscious. And,' a ghostly talon appears in front of my face and taps my forehead. 'Even that wasn't completely your doing. You used a mirror.'

"But I was intelligent enough to think of using the mirror."

'True, but now you no longer have a mirror.'

"There are rocks. I could throw them at you."

'Two problems with that.
A: How are you supposed to throw stuff at a target you can't see?
B: The rocks would just go through me.
And C: I could just laser the rocks out of the air.'

"You said two problems, but then you gave me 3 points." I shrug. "You need to learn to count."

'I can count. One, two, fifteen, two thousand, three hundred and seventy six minus fifty....'

The dragon's 'unusual knowledge' of numbers makes me break out laughing. "I" ha ha ha "think" ha ha ha "that you have been sleeping through math class your whole life."

'Define math class.'

"Are you being serious? The third to sixteenth chapters of my fifth rough draft included something known as dragon school."

'Oh yeah. That. I didn't like it.'

"Of course you didn't!" a chuckle rings through the cave. "You've always been a rebellious little monster."

'Hey!' Pain rends my skull, and a few seconds later, the ghostly dragon is standing beside me. "Only I'm allowed to call myself a monster!"  

"Who gave you permission to make the rules?"

"Well, nobody, but...."

"Let me lay down a ground rule here. I wrote you into existence... thus I am in charge here. Got it?"

"The only thing I don't get is how writing me into existence gives you the right to be in charge of me."

"Did I really just realize that I accidentally made my main protagonist a complete idiot?" Ignoring Spectrum's attempt at a withering glare, I continue. "The reason it gives me the right to be in charge is that I could easily just make you do what I want you to by writing, or even write you completely out of existence."

The dragon sighs. "Touché. However, I could easily stop you from writing if it ever came to that."

"Speaking of writing, if you find me some paper and a pen, I'll get started on that gate."

"Really?" At my nod, Spectrum hurries off.

"I'll be back soon."

I sure hope so.. But with her running around, I can't be sure he will.