Page 3 of The Dragon’s Captive

It was a dud. It didn’t work. She wasn’t a pioneering scientist. She wasn’t the next Marie Curie. She was just a silly woman standing in the middle of a gross old kitchen with tears in her eyes and mold growing on a half-eaten Thai takeout.

“Dammit!” She slammed her palm down on the counter, making the yet-to-be-washed cutlery dance.

And then it happened. A small spark in the air between the electromagnetic devices. A little pinprick that lit a spark of hope in her. She scuttled back, keeping out of its way just in case it did turn out to be volatile. Her protection was an armchair she had salvaged from the side of the street. She didn’t know what material it was made of, but she knew it was old and resilient.

Over about thirty seconds to a minute, the portal blossomed before her astounded eyes. There, in her poky little kitchen, was a gateway to another world. She could see bright green grass extending from the base of the portal out into a meadow, and beyond that… she couldn’t quite make it out.

“Oh. My. God.” She murmured the words softly to herself. “This is it. I’ve done it.”

Unlike the initial portals that had ripped the sky apart, this portal was stable and small. It stood like an open doorway, inviting her through.

“I really didn’t think that would work,” she said to herself. She’d worked the math out a million ways, but the odds of the real world conforming to mathematical expectations were always much lower than, well, the odds would imply.

What now?

Should she go rushing through the portal to dance in the beckoning fields of green? It was tempting, but Kate knew the dangers of the dragon realm—well, some of them anyway—and she was definitely not a fool. Transiting through the portal could have dangers of its own.

“I need a test subject,” she murmured to herself, looking around the remainder of her kitchen. Something gleaming caught her eye.

She grabbed the spatula and tossed it through the portal, just in case it burst into flames or exploded or something. It plonked down on the grass and sat there with the warm sun of another world making it gleam.

In an instant, Kate was jealous of the spatula. It had taken the one small step before she did. Still, it was best to be cautious about these things. There were dragons on the other side of that glowing portal. None were in immediate sight though. She wondered if there were any nearby. It would be just her luck to have opened her portal to a completely uninhabited part of the dragon realm and end up not meeting any dragons at all.

Of course, there was the possibility that there were more than dragons through that doorway. A certainty, really. A world that supported dragons as an apex species had to have other creatures to support them. Some of them were likely to be aggressive.

There was literally no information regarding the flora and fauna of the dragon realm, let alone its basic geography. The view she had in the middle of her kitchen was the most in-depth look anyone had ever had into the dragon realm.

“The first human in the dragon world,” she intoned. “Well, the first one to survive the irradiated environment. Hopefully.”

She turned to the little carry case of vials all strapped in nice and neatly. They contained the formula she had been working on for years, a potentially revolutionary treatment that, when ingested, provided prophylaxis against radiation exposure for about a month. She uncorked one of the vials, put the opening to her lips, and slurped it down. It tasted vile, like battery acid mixed with mud, but she choked it down regardless. She’d taken a dose a day earlier too, figuring it would be good to give the formula a chance to saturate her tissues. This was just a top up, a good luck shot for the road. She felt a little heady charge from it, a buzz that emboldened her as she looked toward the gleaming door between worlds.

With no reason to wait anymore, Kate grabbed a few supplies and shoved them in a backpack. Her notebook was first, of course, followed swiftly by a bottle of water, more vials of her personal radiation treatment in case she needed it, and some snacks. Not much really, but she didn’t need much. Unlike most intrepid explorers, Kate was able to push the boundaries of human experience from inside her apartment.

“This is it,” she said to herself, wishing she had a better soundbite, even for herself. Something along the lines of one small step for man… or something like that. She was nervous. Her stomach was fluttering and her heart was pounding in her chest. That really was another world she was looking at. A world in which dragons lived.

“Don’t think about it,” she told herself. “Just do it.”

With a corporate slogan on her lips, Kate stepped through the portal, and into another world.

The grass was soft beneath her sneakers, and when she turned around she saw the portal behind her, a doorway to a dingy kitchen standing in the middle of some of the most beautiful wild landscape she had ever laid eyes on. It looked small and ugly, standing in direct opposition to this brilliant land that was bright and seemed to go on forever.

Standing less than an arm’s length from the portal, Kate turned back around and simply looked, letting her eyes feast on this new world. The most eye-catching element was a mountain rising in the distance. It was a singular feature, not part of a range as she’d usually expect to see on Earth, and surrounded by water that could have been an ocean or a large lake. Once again, that was strange. What kind of geological process could create a single mountain in an otherwise relatively flat plain? There were some rolling hills behind her that obscured her view of the land in the other direction, but none at all near the mountain.

“Either the laws of tectonics are different here too, or that mountain is up to something,” she muttered to herself. It was silly, of course, to think of a mountain as being suspicious, but Kate was given to occasional bouts of silliness—such as the kind that had brought her across realms.

Movement at the corner of her eye distracted her from the suspicious mountain and she lifted and turned her head to see something flying in the skies not too far from the peak. At first she thought it was a bird, but as it swung lower and the shape of it became more apparent, she realized that it was not a small bird relatively close, but a very large, not-at-all-a-bird, quite far away.

Silhouetted against the sky were arched wings, a powerful body lined with ridges and scales, a long tail against which the back legs were stretched, creating an aerodynamic figure, and front legs too. The head of the creature was large, set upon a powerful and sinuous neck.

Kate clapped her hands over her mouth and let out a little squeal of excitement. This was the culmination of years of dreaming and dedicated study. She was actually looking at a dragon in flight. They were real, and she truly had found the realm in which they reigned.

Part of her had always been a little skeptical, even when she was working with the dragon tissue. It was hard to believe that the flesh she was handling belonged to a mythical creature. Plenty of people thought the dragons had been a hoax from the beginning, that it was all some government psy-ops or cover-up or something. The video evidence had only heightened their suspicions—after all, in a world where you could make anything look real, everything could be fake.

A second dragon entered her field of vision, heading toward the first. Kate watched as they flew into a circling pattern around one another, a beautiful dance of flight that left her awed as they began to dart and swirl and fly back and forth almost as if they were dog fighting like a pair of fighter planes. She watched, enthralled with the way they moved. They lost a lot of height during several of their maneuvers, bringing their powerful, mystical bodies closer to her.

They moved through the air in a similar way to dolphins moving through water, with a natural alacrity that was astonishing and beautiful to behold. She was stuck there, just staring at them, not even caring that the angle was giving her a serious crick in the neck.

Time passed without her noticing, but she suddenly saw that the dragons were growing bigger, drawing closer as they dipped through the sky. They didn’t seem to be as interested in one another anymore. They seemed to be checking out a target on the ground.