Freezing Wings

Chapter 24

After about a half an hour of tense silence, Jordan sat back, flexing her claws. A heavy sigh of relief rocked her frame and a small smile lit up her face as she picked up her now solid sculpture, putting it on an already prepared platform. 

It had three large snowflakes, seeming to drift down onto the base. The base was one that seemed to already be covered with snow, a small set of footprints marring the surface. 

I walked up next to her, taking a closer look at it. The sculpture was about four feet tall and five feet wide, a small one compared to some of mine, but one of the bigger ones I had seen Jordan finish. From any angle, without knowing beforehand, it would look like the  snowflakes were just floating in air, nothing keeping them up. However, if one looked closely, you could see the slight distortion in the ice, and trace out the column. Jordan had done a great job on it, and it looked amazing. 

I looked down to her, breaking the silence. "You did an awesome job, it looks great."

I could practically see her inflate with pride, a proud smile plastered all over her face. "Of course it looks amazing, I was the one who made it."

I chuckled at her boastful words but didn't refute them. She deserved to have a bit of pride for a while. Jordan grinned, her sparkling white fangs standing out next to her grey scales. She got her blue eyes from Sarah, but her grey scales were from Gabrielle.

Those two things, combined with the fact that she was less than a third of my size, she looked like a child, glowing after being told they were awesome, which she was.  i passed the bowl I had already prepared to her. "It's almost noon, you need to eat, otherwise, when we go out later, you'll be hungry."

Her eyes lit up and her smile widened even further, "We're going out later? Really?"

I smirked, crunching down on a bit of leftover sapphire, "Sure, but if you don't eat, we're not going anywhere."

I had never seen a bowl of food disappear that fast before, and haven't seen a speed like that since. In less than twenty seconds, fifteen pounds of slate and crystals went down, never to be seen again. 

I blinked, a stunned silence pervading as I looked at the now empty bowl. A belch erupted from the fledgling, accompanied by a small area of frost on the floor and a sheepish expression on Jordan's face. She glanced away from me before edging to the door, obviously looking to leave. I watched her for a moment before I shook my head and walked with her, opening the door and moving out into the hallway. 

She followed like a shadow, a huge smile on her face. I glanced back at her but didn't say anything, there wasn't anything that needed to be said. The walk to the doorway was only about two minutes long and after we got through the maze and past the boulders, we were outside. 

From what I could tell, it was somewhere between eleven and twelve, when the sun was the highest in the sky. After closing the boulder behind me I took off, Jordan right behind me. I went slow enough so she could keep up with me, but fast enough that we actually got somewhere. 

I got above the forest line and stalled, hovering in the air. I looked back at her, "Where do you want to go? Other than the beach of course."

She circled around me, thinking. After a silent moment she stalled as well, right above my left wing and gesturing at the eastern mountain[1]. "How about the other side of the eastern mountain, near the forest?"

[The sun rises in the east, and there is another mountain off to the side, and is thus dubbed the east mountain >.>]

I nodded and few up above the cloud cover but lower than the second peak, using the moderate winds up there to coast down. Jordan moved until she was under my wing, like a pilot fish, and kept in time as to not fall behind. 

As we passed over the Kymari city, I sped up, fast enough so that Jordan had to hold onto my hand and be drug around like a scaly purse so she wasn't left in the dust. Their city covered the entire meadow, so if I wanted to get around it I would have to go onto the side of mountain. 

Most of the time I just went over it like normal, flying at a reasonable speed and giving the Kymari an eyeful before going on my way. However, today was different. Usually, when I looked down, the streets had only a few Kymari, the crowd mostly centered on their market and in the park in front of the western mountain. Today, the streets were practically flooded with green humanoids. Well over a thousand Kymari were centered in a crowd around a skyscraper on the north side, seemingly waiting for something. 

Whether it was a cult leader or a government official, I couldn't tell. All I could say was that, when I started on the west side, like a flock of seagulls they all turned and stared, weird looks on their faces. It gave me a creepy feeling, like how I felt back in the lab when the scientists looked at me, and I sped up so I could get out from under their gazes.