Kerry Schafer - Wakeworld

Weston came to stand beside him. “It won’t heal. Not ever. We’ll need to hurry before she grows too weak to fly.”

Zee wanted to protest, to insist that she change back now, at once. But her words came back to him— this goes beyond my life, or yours. And so he said only, “How shall we climb aboard? I think the tail, yes?”

“If we can get there—we’ll have to climb those rocks to reach it . . .”

But the dragon lowered its head to the ground, making a small flameless snort. Vivian, Zee reminded himself, not some stupid beast. She could hear and understand. “Or, we get up this way.” He scooped up Poe and stepped onto the broad skull, holding to one of her horns for balance. The head lifted like an elevator until her long neck was level with her body, and Zee walked it like a plank and settled himself at its base. The scales were smooth and hard as stone, sharp edged. They could cut you if you weren’t careful, but he was taken aback by the jewel-like brilliance of their color. He’d been too busy killing dragons to much notice the beauty of their scales.

Weston settled beside him, the raven on his shoulder. The dragon wings unfurled and beat once, twice. A thrust into the air as she pushed off with all four feet, and then the wings were lifting them all, carrying them out and above the river, heading for the dim light that offered hope of an exit.

Zee felt the pull of the river at once. It sucked them down in a sickening plunge, like a glider on a downdraft. The dragon beat her wings harder to gain altitude and carry them back aloft. A foot she gained, two, but no matter how hard she labored she could do no more.

They flew about a stone’s throw above jagged rocks thrusting up out of the water, spray tossing so high into the air that he could feel it against his face. It slicked the scales beneath him, so that between the slipperiness and the pull of the river it was a battle to hold to Poe and keep his place.

Out of the corner of his eye Zee saw Weston begin to slide. The old man scrabbled with both hands on the dragon’s back, trying to find purchase. There was nothing else to hold on to, no friction. Zee flung out a hand, but he was too late and too far. With a cry, the old Dreamshifter slid away into empty air.

An answering cry from the dragon echoed through the cavern. Her wings stopped beating and folded back, and she plunged downward after the falling man. The river rushed up toward them, rock spikes reaching, seeking. Weston was going to crash, and the rest of them immediately after.

Zee braced himself, wondering if it was possible to survive that foaming stretch of water without being impaled or beaten to death on the rocks. A small jolt, and then the wings were working again, faster and harder, straining to lift up and away from the rocks. Cautiously peering downward, Zee saw Weston dangling just above the water, his backpack snagged in a dragon claw.

One of the straps snapped, and the Dreamshifter’s body jolted again toward the long fall. He flipped around and grabbed hold of the pack with both arms, clinging.

Zee stared, horrified, at what lay ahead.

There was no way they were going to make it.

The river dropped off in a falls that plunged a thousand feet into a swirling cauldron of foam and spray. Glimpses of stone teeth emerged and vanished again in the ever-shifting waves and white water. Beyond the falls, at the far side of the cauldron, a narrow ledge intersected the cliff. A faint light filtered in through a small opening in the stone—just big enough that a man might crawl through it flat on his belly.

No dragon would ever fit through that gap, nor was there room for her to land on the ledge. There was nowhere else for her to go, except back, and she would never make it. She was weakening, each wing beat more difficult and desperate than the last.

The cliff came at them with dizzying speed, and Zee knew they were too low to catch the ledge. He felt her intensify the effort, the great wings straining, beating harder and faster, gaining a few inches at a time. She had to see it, had to know there was no way there was room for her to set down there. Maybe the switches between human and dragon had disoriented her and she couldn’t see.

Zee braced himself as well as he could for the crash, clutching Poe, ready to roll or leap or whatever had the slightest chance of bringing them to safety. But at the last instant the wings curved and checked. The dragon swerved. Momentum pushed Zee sideways with too much force for his tentative hold on the slick scales. Across the wide back, into the air over the wing, fingernails scraping for an instant at the last hope of gaining a hold. Then he was flying, the tumultuous water reaching up for him from below, on an arc that carried him onto the ledge with a crushing jolt that squeezed the air from his lungs and left him dizzy and winded.

Unable to draw a breath or so much as lift a finger to intervene, he saw the dragon roll in the air so that her talons were extended upward, still grasping Weston by the strap of his pack. He clung to it with both arms, embracing it as salvation, his beard and hair wild and windblown. Another roll, a twist of dragon legs, and Weston was dislodged and barrel rolling through the air toward the ledge, still clutching the pack to his chest.

He was coming too fast and at an angle that would take him along the edge and shoot him back out over the water.

Zee managed to get his body in motion and flung himself forward to catch the spiraling Dreamshifter, both of them crashing down and rolling to a slow stop against the cliff face.

Zee was up again in a heartbeat. “Vivian!” he shouted, knew he shouted because of the strain on his throat, but his voice was sucked up into the roar of the waterfall and made no sound.

The dragon’s wings trembled once and then hung limp, doing nothing more than passively slowing her as she spiraled downward. He could see the hole in her breast, the black blood still falling, falling, to hiss into steam when it struck the water below. Her golden eyes were glazed and unseeing. She struck the water like an immense stone, without protest or struggle, creating a great drenching spray that rose all the way to the ledge. Zee’s face was wet with the droplets, tasting of grief, bitter and sharp.

Poe joined him at the edge of the cliff, perched precariously with his webbed toes over the edge. He stretched out his flipper-wings as if he were going to fly, and then dove, free-falling into the dark water below without so much as a splash.

Zee huddled there, watching, hoping against hope. Maybe Vivian would come back up, despite all the odds. Dragons were tough and hard to kill. They had magic. Surely Poe, at least, would bob back to the surface.

But the penguin was small, for all that he was at home in the water, and Vivian had been sorely wounded by the dragonstone. His doing, his fault. If she was dead, it was because he had killed her. This was knowledge he could not endure. He would rescue her, or die with her, one or the other. He took a step back, prepared for a running leap out over the chasm.

“No!” Arms around his waist restrained him, pulled him away from the edge.

Zee tried to fight, but he was off balance and Weston was using all of his weight to pull him down and back. He hit the stone with a jarring pain in the injured arm that shot red-hot spikes through his vision, but still he struggled and rolled until Weston’s shout stopped him. “Careful or you’ll take us both over!”

“Let me go.”

Stronger in spite of the injury, he twisted himself free of the Dreamshifter’s hands. Weston promptly doubled up his fists and delivered strategic blows to one laceration, and then the other. The pain made Zee gasp, froze him for long enough to hear Weston shout, “You can’t save her! Think! She’s a dragon. What are you going to do, drag her to the surface?”