The Dragonet Prophecy: Chapters 5–13

He sat down in the middle of their cave, his wings askew behind him, and started poking through the scrolls on the floor.

The heavy tread of dragon footsteps reached their ears, along with an ominous clanking.

He grabbed the chain and let go at once, hissing with pain at the searing heat.

Tsunami paused, glaring at her mutinously, then took another breath in and opened her mouth.

Even her usual aloof expression was gone.

"...He has a stone that fits in this slot." He tapped a grooved niche in the stone wall.

"Acting like a martyr won't help right now."
Glory bristled. "I'm not acting like a martyr. I'm trying to make sure nobody gets killed for no reason."

Slowly, as if the stone were eating her alive, grays and browns and blacks crept over her scales. All her beautiful colors faded away. The shadows and crags behind her appeared perfectly reproduced, as if the dragonets were seeing right through her.

The river eddied around the blurry outline of Glory beside him.

Her chains were taut around her legs and neck as she leaned toward them.

Tsunami was right; this hole was smaller than the gap to the guardians' cave. Well, it was flatter, but wider, too, more like a snarling dragon mouth, complete with sharp outcroppings like teeth.

With a jarring shock, he hit a spur of stone and dug in with all his talons.

It felt like the cracks between his scales were singing high-pitched arias of pain.

A moment passed, and then Tsunami's stripes began to glow along her wings and tail. She even turned on the whorls of light along her snout.

The idea of Tsunami leaving them for another SeaWing with cool glowing scales made Clay feel extra-blobby and drab.

"How high could it be?"
"And how many sharp rocks could there be at the bottom?" he countered.

The waterfall crashed along beside him, cascading into a foamy pile of bubbles only a short distance below his dangling back claws.

Her luminescent scales didn't cast light very far; he couldn't even see the stalactites that were probably up there.

The river plunged out of the cave and straight down a tall, sheer cliff.

"And you came after me anyway?" Clay said, appalled. "Why didn't you tell me you were hurt?"

Tsunami found him rolling blissfully in the muddy banks of the river. "I don't think most dragons get this excited about being so dirty," she said wryly.

Her powerful tail whipped around and slammed Clay into a thicket of prickly bushes.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry," Clay yelped, floundering free.

He upended it, and a pile of jewels and trinkets tumbled out, bouncing and sparkling across the grass.

"I know you like bringing her pretty things to cheer her up, but I saw this first."
"All right," Clay said diplomatically.

Tsunami led the way, staying low and swooping around trees, diving into chasms where they found them.

A crevasse cut through the rocks a short distance away. When they peered down into it, they could see a stream running over pebbly gravel and sandy mud.

Clay gingerly fit one of his own feet into a print. It was dwarfed by the size of the other dragon's talons.

Clay breathed another burst of fire at the wall on his side. It looked like ordinary flat stone with a few fissures running from the ceiling to the floor. He scraped his claws through the cracks.

"What if it's a magic word? Or some kind of talisman we don't have?"

"Easy," Starflight had said loftily. "It's because we have all these special powers, and we don't want to make regular dragons feel inferior."

"Special powers like what?" he'd asked.
"You know," Starflight had answered, irritated. "Telepathy? Precognition? Invisibility? Hello?"

"It is not creepy!" Starflight had cried, his voice rising. "It is magnificent and imposing!"

A forlorn little shape was huddled by the river, trailing her talons in the water.

"Kestrel was pretty furious," she said. "I just had to listen to her from my hiding place. Those two got the brunt of it."