Read Online The Pygmy Dragon by Marc Secchia - Free Book Online Page B

stop. But no matter how hard she ran, the Ape did not slow, nor was she fast enough to catch up. She cursed her little legs. She screamed at the heavens. She implored him to turn away from death, and choose life. Hunagu only moved faster. Eventually, he turned and regarded her with eyes grown as green as the verdant mountain slope.
    “I must leave, little one,” he rumbled. “The spirit world lies ahead. The living cannot go there.”
    “Don’t leave me, Hunagu!”
    Pip ran on, desperate, sobbing, wanting only to be with her friend and to hold him.
    “Stop! Do not enter the spirit world, or you’ll die.”
    “Please, Hunagu,” Pip cried. “Turn back. Come back with me. There’s still time.”
    “It’s time to leave.”
    “Hunagu. Hunagu!”
    Her screams vanished into a world deaf to her fate, to her needs. All was against her. Even the heavens made no response, nor the spirits. Cold, numbing, uncaring Island-World. Pip stumbled and fell to her knees.
    “Please … don’t leave me …”
    Then, in that place of utter loss, her tears switched to fury. She had already lost too much–her parents, her tribe, her home and her life. Now her only friend? It was too much. Pip reached deeper than ever before, deep into the unknown foundations of her being. She tore from herself an enigmatic power, a word that rang the world as though a giant bell had tolled, just once, a word of such devastating command that it tore the fabric of the green mountain and brought the suns to a standstill.
    I forbid thee! Pip roared.
    Hunagu shuddered to a halt. He turned; his green eyes terrible to behold. He said, “What have you done, Pip?”
    Slowly, gathering speed, the Ape thundered down the slope toward her. As he rushed on, he seemed to gather force like a breaking storm, and wings and teeth to match that force. Pip quailed. The dream-Ape slammed her out of her reverie and back into the real world.
    Pip woke with a wordless cry and the taste of blood in her mouth.
    Hunagu slept. But for the first time in weeks, he breathed easily.

Chapter 8: Gone Tomorrow
     
    H unagu never spoke about the dream. For all she knew, he did not remember his sickness. Pip threw herself into caring for him. The great Ape began to shovel his food into his maw with his usual zest, and was soon swinging his way up the climbing frame again.
    Pip studied maps of the Island-World, trying to work out a way of returning home. She would escape. She would steal a Dragonship. The only bit of poison in the Cloudlands, as the saying went, was the matter of a war raging between her and her goal. She continued her studies with Master Balthion, while Duri and Arosia left for their different schools. Balthion instructed her in advanced forms of Sylakian swordplay and taught her how the different Islands had come to be friends or enemies.
    In the summer following Hunagu’s illness, Balthion began to mutter about a disturbance among the Dragon-kind.
    “Too many wings over this Island,” he grumbled. “The Sylakians are on high alert. All of my old friends in the army are saying that the Dragons are searching for something.”
    “There have been many Dragons overhead,” Pip agreed. “Reds, Yellows, even a Blue.”
    She did not mention the being she had come to think of as the Dragon of Shadow. Recently, the nightmares had returned with renewed power, so much so that Pip did not know if she had imagined another passage of the creature nearby, or not. Was it real? Or spirit? Or simply a figment of her overworked imagination? She was unsure she truly wanted to know.
    “Blue? Name the Blue Dragon powers,” Balthion shot back at once.
    “Blues specialise in water and lightning attacks. And Dragon fire, obviously.”
    “Name the forms of lightning.”
    “Direct strike, sheet lightning and ball lightning,” said Pip.
    “And?”
    “Um … what do you mean, Master?”
    “There’s one more. Rare. The most dangerous of the lightning-based attacks.”
    Pip scratched