I am Dragon (Dragon Fires Rising Book 2) Marc Secchia (most read books .TXT) 📖

She touched his cheek. Well done, my Dragon. You were – and always are – magnificent. Welcome to the Vaylarn Archipelago.

I feel as if the ocean just regurgitated me.

Too true, she chuckled. Come on. Drag yourself up a little ways out of the water. Then, you can sleep. I’ll keep watch. It’s the very least I can do.

Thanks.

Stretching her limbs into a star shape that no Dragon could hope to emulate, the tiny Princess turned and smiled at him. We did it! Happy dance!

Ugh, glad you have the energy.

Come on, shift that old carcass, you wonderful grump. Up onto the beach now. Two more steps …

Pestiferous Prin … he fell asleep mid-sentence.

* * * *

Dragon awoke feeling like a sack of lead dumped in an unexpectedly salty desert. Cracking an eye open, he took a moment to try to figure out if he could possibly move. Everything hurt as if he had wrestled all night with a hundred Sea Serpents and come off the loser. Badly.

Still, his best friend slept in his paw.

That was his Dragon hoard. Right there.

The navigator orb rested upon her bosom, which rose and fell with each shallow breath. Dragon wondered idly how it was that her Draconian had suddenly taken a giant leap forward in vocabulary, complexity and fluency. Could it be that a process similar to the idea that Dragoceanic was somehow built into the heritage of every Sea Dragon, pertained to the Humankind? The very idea would throw a few scaly noses that he could name severely out of joint. Humans learning draconic languages by innate ability? Unthinkable!

In Azania’s case, the evidence definitely fit the theory.

A firm poke in the eye for draconic scholarship.

As to why he was muddling through the intricacies of inter-species linguistics right now, he could not imagine. Shaking his head at the random mental antics intruding on sensible thought, Dragon curved his head around to observe the crystal. A laughably wriggly red thread led to their current location; if he had it right, right beneath Wave Dragonhome. Well. Only a couple of hundred miles off course. Nothing to worry one’s wings about, right?

This spotless white sand qualified as the most beautiful, solid, welcoming patch of ground he thought he had ever stepped paw upon. Above, a blue-washed sky proclaimed that the storm had blown over. Several white blobs that he took for gulls drifted across the lapping waves just offshore.

Hard to imagine the monstrous swells they had arrived in.

His dinky Princess chuckled in her sleep. Hmm. A fond scent memory? Warm thoughts of the egg sac that bore her? Mammals had wombs. There his brain went again. Insert arbitrary information lifted from his cranium.

“Are you watching me, Dragon?” she murmured.

Not even opening her eyes?

He said, “You smiled in your sleep, which distracted me while I was looking at our route.”

“As tangled as my hair?”

“Almost. Some pretty spiffy navigating there, Princess.”

“I only applied what King Jos taught us about the likely route of the currents,” she protested. “We certainly put a few miles under our belts, didn’t we, my strong and totally awesome friend?”

“Mmm,” he purred. “Beneath our wings, you mean.”

“Same thing.”

Decline the bait. “So, game for a short flight, Princess? Hop to the top and meet the mighty Dragonesses of the Archipelago. Hope they are vaguely friendly toward a large foreign male and his sidekick, the dark assassin of the desert?”

“Intriguing pair. I simply must meet them,” she joked back, yawning and stretching. “Mid-afternoon already?”

“I’m surprised they haven’t found us yet. Aren’t you?”

“Quite.” She rose with a lithe flexion and dusted the sand off her trousers. “Given how relentless and martial Aria was – very odd indeed.”

“Too right.”

Forced by the size of the bay to wade out into the sea before launching into the air, Dragon drifted a short ways along the dark cliffs before finding the updraft he had been searching for. The steady flow of tangy, briny air made the ascent straightforward, despite that the cliffs were half again as high as he had imagined. Only the seabirds nesting on the cliffs did not appreciate their arrival. A raucous chorus of honks and caws accompanied their rise to the top, a truly majestic vantage point that commanded a view out over the sparkling Lumis Ocean to the south and east. Spinning slowly in the air with a stirring action of his wings, he and Azania gazed over the Archipelago with growing delight.

From phenomenal dark cliffs on the near side to craggy volcanic mountains alongside palm-fringed white beaches in the distance, the first island, sometimes called ‘Dragon Island,’ had many kinds of beauty that somehow blended into a seamless whole. The interior mountains and cliffs were uncompromising, talon-edged massifs that appeared to have shrugged off the effects of time and erosion. The talons off his right wing completed the Dragon’s paw effect to perfection. The two they could see before a headland obscured their view, were stark stone surrounded by the bluest of oceans. Away to his left, the landscape mellowed into offshore coral reefs, green meadows, rampant piles of wildflowers and hundreds of the ubiquitous coconut palms.

Dragon realised he had mistaken the location of Wave Dragonhome. Here atop the cliff was nothing bar what he took for a quartet of combat circles. The real action happened beneath his paws, inside the cracks and tunnels that his careful survey revealed created a honeycomb effect that might penetrate deeper into the headland than he had imagined.

The Dragons must have lairs below, yet all was quiet. Eerily quiet.

Fire stood hot in his chest as they completed the circle. Nothing and nobody; only the haunting cries of the seabirds.

“Let’s go find our –”

“Dragon, you’re bleeding!”

“Oh, so I am. Quite a lot, come to think of it.”

The Princess stared along his flank.