Heart of the Rainforest

Chapter 10 - Plan

Mamba returned with Banggai shortly before nightfall, her pouch heavy with supplies given to her by the healers. She flopped down on the floor near Adder and Lionfish, and fell asleep quickly. Tiki worked quietly at her desk for a while before she retired to her bed next to Equo, who had been sleeping since midday.

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Tiki woke up at dawn, when most of the village was still dormant. She took Akila outside to let her fly around the rainforest, and Mamba appeared next to her a half an hour later.

"Good morning," The SandWing yawned.

"Good morning." Tiki greeted her, watching the distant silhouette of her bird flying over the trees.

"Should I be wearing a blindfold?" She glanced at the treehouses in the village, and the few RainWings that were awake and walking along the bridges and platforms.

"I think you're safe." She glanced back at the sky, then raised her arm and whistled loudly. The small shape of Akila wheeled around in the air and started flying back to her. "Tell me about the village you lived in."

"Um- okay." Mamba's wings drooped a little, just for a moment, before she pulled them back up. "It was a really small village around an oasis in the desert. It was kind of hidden, like a mini Scorpion Den, but with a lot less criminals. There was like, fifty dragons that lived there. Most of them came there to hide from the war."

"How'd you become a soldier?" She tipped her head at Mamba. There was something more under her regular expression, almost completely masked. She wondered if Equo would be able to figure out what she was feeling - she was usually good at reading dragons, much better than Tiki was.

"We ran out of soldiers." She traced her claw along a bright green vine woven into the platform below her. "So Swelter raided every settlement she could find. The oasis village was supposed to be a kind of secret. We suppose she found it by accident."

"You just call it the oasis village?" Akila came soaring down and landed on Tiki's shoulder, muttering quietly to herself. "It doesn't have a name?"

"Pretty much." Mamba laughed a little. "Most of us don't really go anywhere else, since it's so far from everything. So we just call it the oasis village and we all know what we're talking about."

Akila made a very loud, very high-pitched noise that made Mamba jump. Tiki launched the macaw off her talon again and she flew back into the rainforest.

Equo materialized next to her, brushing Tiki's wing with her own. She had to take a moment to focus entirely on keeping her scales from turning vibrantly pink as Equo smiled brightly at her.

"Where do you think we should go next?" Equo asked, stretching and flashing all her luminescent scales one by one.

"What do you mean?" 

"Well, we can't stay in the rainforest forever." She bumped Tiki's shoulder playfully. "So where are we going next?"

"We could go to my village," Mamba suggested. "It's probably one of the safest places for us to go. Plus, there's some dragons there that I- I would like to see again. And Solstice will probably want to come with us."

"Great!" Equo chirped. "That's where we'll go, then. Cool."

"You and Lionfish probably won't like it there," Mamba said apologetically. "There's not much water in the desert."

"Oh, I didn't know that." Equo wrinkled her snout at Mamba. "I thought the desert was full of water."

Mamba swatted at Equo with her wing, but she ducked and the SandWing ended up thwapping Tiki in the face. The dark blue hybrid laughed so much she nearly fell off the platform they were standing on. 

Tiki leaped to catch Equo as her talon slipped off of the woven vine platform, and pulled her back up. Equo collapsed into Tiki's side and nearly knocked her over, giggling.

Suddenly, Equo flashed her scales dimly in a sequence Tiki didn't understand and her face fell. her forehead creased with concern, and her strange eyes flicked to one of Tiki's wings for a moment.

"What?" Anxiety clawed at the edges of her mind. "What's wrong?"

Equo shook her head. "Nothing. Just... I don't know. A weird feeling."

"That doesn't sound good." Mamba said.

"No, I get these weird feelings sometimes." Equo shrugged. "It's pretty random."

Mamba frowned at her.

"Um," She glanced at the sky. "Just... does anyone else smell smoke?"