AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It got brighter and heavier.
All downhill from here.
Gather. Bunch. Pull.Push.
KEEP GOING FORWARD.
DO NOT SCREAM.
Auryn’s weight pulled medown.
I tumbled down the cosmic hillside.
Twenty-Five
Iflopped over and over through rough sand and splatted into shallow water.
Ow.
I flopped, tried to get up, realized I had no legs or arms, ended up face-down in two inches of water. Inhale attempted. Got mouthful of wet sand. Flopped. Realized wet membrane wings were wrapped up around my body. Lizard brain panicked and I flailed, chirping. Everything turned to frost and ice, and now my snoot was frozen to the sand.
Great. I had just survived the firmament, and here I was, about to drown in bathwater because I’d rolled myself into a frozen dragon burrito.
“Don’t touch her!” Auryn was shouting as a scuffle broke out in my general vicinity.
Burning-warm hands grabbed my horns. Radiant sunlight attempted to melt my frost, but my frost laughed at the ambition of stars.
Auryn yanked my horns back and wrestled me free. I inhaled but flailed, all tangled up in my wings.
“Shift,” Auryn commanded in his best no-nonsense voice.
Oh yeah. I could just... you know...shift forms.
Human form had me tangled up in my own limbs, but Auryn sorted me and hauled me out of the shallows onto the frost-covered beach. In fact, everything was caked in ice and frost-burned to a crisp.
But the portal was gone.
“Oh no.” I ran up to the rock. Auryn caught me right as I was about to plaster my hands all over it.
“Don’ttouch it!” Auryn hauled me back with both arms around me.
“No!” Huge cracks ran through the rocks, splintering where the black portal had been with nine jagged lines in the now mundane rock face.
“Youcan’ttouch it,” Auryn growled, his entire body warm. “You will freeze your damn fingers off.”
Pangea Pandora, how many times now?
Auryn glowed with his soft, liquid gold light, creating a pocket of warmth in the deep, bone-chill of the area around the portal. The walls were covered in a deep layer of frost, and the waterway was frozen so solid the water had retracted back from the shore half a foot. The boat we’d taken was rooted into the deep ice. The beach crunched under our feet. All the greenery down the waterway was dead.
Auryn turned me around. Ropes of magic spiraled up his wrists, forearms, to his shoulders, looping around his neck. Gold shine moved over his hair as it twisted and shifted in an unseen breeze, gold and shadow more than dark strands. The glow traveled up his neck and under his chin, illuminating his beautiful skin from within, and his eyes were luminescent discs of yellow-green glass with a star shining behind each.
I waited for him, or the others, to askwhat happened, but they didn’t.
He shifted his grip to hold me with one arm and extended his other towards the waterway. Ropes of light extended off his arm and dispersed outward into an exquisite, radiant glow. It bathed everything in warmth. The waterway returned to its liquid state. Frost dissolved. The boat bobbed back into place once released from the grip of the ice. The sand softened.
But the plants stayed dead, and the portal stayed gone.
I put my hands over my mouth to hold in my sobs. Tears went down my cheeks.
