Once he reached her body, he grabbed her arm to pull her up, but something caught his attention on his left side. When he turned, he was face to face with an aqua blue sea dragon. Startled from the glowing green eyes, the boy swam towards the surface, barely making it due to his lack of air. He swam with one arm towards the shore, fatigued and aching, carting the unconscious girl in his other arm. The current had slowed down, making it easier for him to swim with the girl.
As he heaved her onto the shore, he heard a loud splash behind him. He turned and found the dragon leaping out of the water’s in an arch. Its body was longer and thinner compared to other dragons he had seen flying through the skies. It had small wings to help it glide through the waters and webbed feet with long, silver talons to swim faster. It was a beautiful sight to see it leap from the waters making it an omen of good luck.
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Lika came-to just before a few hours later to find herself on a sandy shore of the river. She was stiff and tired from her fight with the river, then she remembered everything that had happened. Where was the boy that had saved her? She looked around to find him hiding in the shadows of the trees. Lika moved towards him in a slow walk to keep her aching body from collapsing if she went any faster. Once she reached him, he jumped up so quickly, that she nearly screamed, but he had his hand over her mouth before she could do so.
“Keep quiet, they could be anywhere nearby,” he said quietly. Lika could feel his tension and his heart moving at fast speeds from his fear. “Stay quiet and keep close to me, we’re leaving right now.” He released his grip on her and led her away from the river.
“Wait, please tell me who you are and why you’ve come to save me,” Lika pleaded quietly. “Why did you not take some other soul that was in need of assistance? Where would you be taking me so desperately as though I was some goddess? You have yet to tell me anything, apart from fighting a river and staying quiet in a sleeping forest.”
He stopped and looked at her, pity showing in his eyes even though the sun had long since disappeared and the moon was only a fingernail’s crescent. “I can’t tell you my real name right now but back home I am called Blue and I want you to call me that for now. I know you have questions that need answers, but now is not the time nor the place. The humans will use their mutts to search for us, that is why we went through the river. In the morning, they’ll find us if we don’t move. I’m sorry about all of this, but I will explain things later when it is safer for you and I.” He didn’t speak in the formal language that Lika had been taught when she was younger. He might have been a lower classed pheasant but his amulet suggested otherwise. His voice seemed to plead to her to make her understand how appalling the situation really was.
Lika nodded, “Alright, I’ll trust you for now; lead the way out of here.” Blue raced towards the rivulet that connected to the Serpentine River, but it also dried out the further out you went making it a dangerous path to take. No horse would be able to fit through the tight spaces and dogs would be a burden to take down the high gorges. As they moved farther to the dried out creek, Lika began to notice many things she would never have thought to see in her lifetime.
Trees were growing on the rock beds growing vertically with the ground rather than their usual horizontal ways. Small lizards stuck their tongues out to taste their scent as Lika and Blue raced by, some even skirted away in fear they would be eaten by a new predator. Frogs croaked warnings to others about trespassers in their small area of a territory. A few dragonflies would hum passed them to see what sort of a creature was in this odd territory of theirs. It seemed as though every creature was watching them and telling every other species of animals of what these new creatures looked like and what they seemed to be doing.
Blue gently tugged on her arm to ask her to move faster, but the footing was slippery and sodden even though the rains had not fallen for a week and the waters of the river long since gone. Lika tripped on a dug up tree root but Blue had caught her before she fell to the ground; he was so agile and swift it gave her the impression impossible that she would be unable to follow him anywhere. They climbed the muddy grounds onto hard rocks covered in emerald moss making it much worse to climb. Blue didn’t falter at all but Lika could barely keep up with his pace without stumbling over the moss and rocks. She was at the point of collapsing from fatigue. Her mind was swimming in the river again but at the sound of barking dogs, her mind came back to terms that she must run.
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Submission Name: Midnight's Twilight (Part IV)
