The Darkest Day

Chapter 1

Silt and her siblings were eating. It was lunch time. She was strangely quiet. Silt was thinking about what happened two days ago. According to Alder, she would have stepped on her tail in the middle of the night, which would have woken her up. Alder would have seen her walking away, then taking the Liana scroll, and writing a series of letters that formed no words while saying aloud the gibberish she wrote. Her! Writing? If only she knew how to.

And yet Alder had brandished the scroll to her (which she would have left on the floor before going back to sleep against the others). We could see a text, straight, in four paragraphs, illegible.

Even worse, if one could pronounce what she had written, it sounded like what the demon in her dream had said.

But on the other hand, the only witness to this event was Alder. She could have written all this just for fun. Silt didn't think her capable of that, of course. She knew she wouldn't lie to them. But you never know.

After the meal, they decided to go together to the nearest village. During the flight, Silt made sure her bag was still attached to her paw.

They came in sight of the village. They landed at the entrance, then went inside. As they entered, they were almost hit by dragonets that must have been less than two years old. Most of the dragons they encountered were awake. At the same time, the ones that were napping in the mud baths were hidden, so it was a bit normal. They continued down the main alley, but as they turned left, Pine hit another dragon.

"Ouch!" Pine moaned.

"Excuse me," the other dragon said.

"No, excuse me," he answered, embarassed.

« What the... »

At the glance of Pico, she realized that he had noticed too. The dragon that Pine had hit was not a Mudwing. After all, they could have expected it. As the war was over, all dragons from each tribe could go anywhere... except to the Sea Kingdom and the Ice Kingdom, for obvious reasons. Prisoners weren't allowed to roam anywhere, either.

It was all true, but the dragon standing in front of them was, to say the least... singular. His gray scales were decorated in some places with patterns that looked like cracks.

Stranger still, the upper part of its wings were covered with the same type of scales as the rest of its body. Silt was willing to bet that if he lay on the ground, he could be mistaken for...

"You look lost,"he interrupted. "May I help you?"

"Th..." said Pine.

"No thanks," Silt disrupted. "By the way, what's your name?"

« Why do I ask this? »

"I'm Massif," he answered, "and y..."

He was about to finish his sentence when his body began to become intermittently semi-transparent, before disappearing completely. The siblings froze and stared at each other.

« Ufgnpe ucroj owx cjtneex... » a voice muttered in Silt's head.

They stood there for several minutes, even forgetting to breathe, and glanced around in circles, looking for the slightest sign of the mysterious dragon.

But nothing. No one in the village seemed to notice anything suspicious. He had simply disappeared before their eyes.

"Was it a ghost?" Bister asked.

"I thought they didn't exist," Alder replied in a tone showing that she was thinking the same thing.

"Ghosts, you can walk through them, right? Then why did I get a bruise from bumping into him?" Pine retorted.