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Keon knuckled down in a stone loaf. Mahon made himself comfortable from a best-guess safe distance.
Right. No rush.
I took a couple of deep breaths to prime my lungs, then closed my eyes. Instantly, the teetering feeling started, and the conch-shell void-song began, and the deep urge to catch myself before I fell. But I drew the magic inward, summoning the ribbons around my wrists, over and over, and flipped myself into dragon form.
Keon flared his finlets and rumbled. “Very good!”
I flapped a little faster to indicateyes, yes, it is!
“Breathe,” Mahon reminded me.
“That seemed much easier today.” Keon’s voice rumbled, sort of tangled up with the limited magic he had. If I focused—like straining to listen or see in the distance, but with my magic—I saw specks of light dotting the tips of his scales. The little speckles dotted his mossy fringe and decorated the thin membranes of his wings and finlets.
My lung started to burn.
Okay, not breathing on my own yet. Brainstem hadn’t taken over. But Iwasbreathing, and it felt natural and easy to do, I just had to do it manually. Time to start working on perfecting my flap-flapping. Then I could work on slithering.
“Careful.” Keon advised as I flap-flapped myself a yard higher. “Taking off is the easy part.”
Land dragons like Keon and Auryn had bodies, necks, and tails, and when they descended, they either glided in and flared their wings at the last minute, or they lowered themselves by lowering their hindquarters and tails and tilting their wings roughly perpendicular to the airstream to generate lift while also doing a controlled flop out of the sky.
I was all neck and tail. It seemed I naturally kept my lower serpent parts coiled slightly like a pig’s tail, but if I relaxed consciously, I could unwind it to be loose like a satin ribbon. So I fiddled with my wings, testing rotating them in their sockets to change their angle of attack. That’s when I discovered I could extend them out—likereallystretch—and give them more surface, as well as articulate the joints on each tip to increase not just the length, but the relative shape of the wing.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Forward. Back. Forward. Back.
And do the cha-cha...
This was going to besoawesome once I got the hang of it.
I toddled over to Keon and slowly descended in front of him, letting my body drop naturally into its best evil serpent impression. I folded my wings back against my spine. They tucked neatly one over the other.
Keon flicked his finlets and gently booped his snoot against mine, then offered me his cheek. Did we rub together like cats? I leaned forward, touched his cheek against mine, and a shiver rushed over my scales.
Then I lost my balance and flopped onto him, and got hooked on his left wing with my head in the dirt on the other side.
Ack.
I flailed. Wings went everywhere. Tail and neck went everywhere. Horns bashed into his side, so I flailed in the other direction, and horns got stuck in the dirt.
I made sad little squeaking noises, similar to a dog chew toy.
Mahon burst out laughing.
That was not helping! Laughter might be the best medicine, but it was not helping this clearly mechanical issue!
And now mywing was stuck,trapped between my body and Keon’s wing, and my wing membrane was hung on the pointy ridges of his wing edge, while my other wing flapped helplessly and buffeted him about the finlets and neck and face. And I wastrappedlike a sad little burrito.
I made more pathetic chirping noises.
Panic gnawed on my brainstem. The deepoh shit get out get out get outpanic. A ripple washed over my scales.
GET A GRIP, HELENA.
I imagined myself wrapped up in that blanket, with Auryn and Akoni teasing me. And what they’d done to reward me for enduring it.
