Chapter 20: Chapter 20
The fog billowed around the man standing across from Nya. Slate, he’d said his name was. With the glint of the moon radiating off of the thin veil of wispy white, he looked even more sinister than before. She stared at him, not sure how to address what he’d said. Once her mouth was working again, she asked, “Did you say… you are the dragon?”
He nodded. One single bob of his head, nothing more.
“But… that’s impossible.” What did he take her for? Some sort of a fool? An idiot. “You’re not a dragon! You’re a person! Obviously.”
He snickered at her, his perfect lips pulling up into a snide smile. “At the moment, that’s true. But I can be a dragon again any time I’d like. Nya, I’m a shifter.”
Her eyebrows shot up as again she tried to process what he was telling her. That wasn’t possible! Shifters had faded from the earth many years ago, when the Heart of Magic went missing. Rumor had it that the gemstone was being kept in the evil kingdom of Beelzanborg, but Nya had no way of knowing if that was true. Regardless, shifters were no longer in existence, so this person standing across from her, this Slate, had to have lost his mind.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked, taking a step closer to her.
Nya had let her guard down while they were talking. Now that he was moving again, she was back in her ready position, her hand on the hilt of her sword. Her change in stance caused him to roll his eyes, something she didn’t appreciate. “No, I don’t believe you,” she readily admitted. “That’s impossible.”
“Then… where do you think the dragon went?” he asked her.
It was a legitimate question. She had noticed that the massive beast had just sort of disappeared. “Hell if I know,” she admitted. “Into the fog.”
“Don’t you think you would’ve heard that? Or seen it? The fog is not that thick.” He turned and gestured over his shoulder in the direction he’d come when he’d first walked back to her.
Nya had to consider his point for a moment. She hadn’t seen the dragon take off into the sky, and while she’d been preoccupied with picking herself up off of the ground and assessing the danger the man in front of her may pose. “You’re trying to convince me that you are the dragon?” she asked, not wanting to believe it was possible, but she didn’t see any alternative either, what with the dragon being gone and having not taken off from the mountain behind him.
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” he said, folding his arms across his muscular chest again. “I’m Slate Everclaw. I come from a long line of shifter dragons. We used to occupy the land where your kingdom and the other eleven are now located, before we were robbed of our most precious treasure, one that allowed my people to withstand the human threats that were slowly encroaching on our lands. Without the gem, my kind cannot transform without the moon in the sky. So… we were forced to take to the mountains. We hide away most of the time, choosing not to face the world in our more vulnerable human forms. But one day, we will regain the source of our power, the Heart of Magic, and then, we will fly again.”
Listening to his speech, Nya could tell every word was heartfelt, and she began to feel slightly sorry for his plight. Until she recalled that, if she was indeed speaking to the dragon, then he was also the one responsible for murdering Gavin and all of the other sacrifices. “You may seek to gain my sympathy, but I have not forgotten what you’ve done one night a month for more years than I have been alive!” She raised her sword again, pointing it at him, the anger inside of her nearly launching her off of the ground to take a run at him.
“Sacrifices?” He asked the question like she was speaking another language. “I’m not sure what you’ve been told, princess, but the people that I collect every week are not sacrifices.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked. “What else would you call them? Dinner?”
He laughed. He actually laughed! It was a rich, warm chuckle that would’ve sounded warm and inviting if Nya wasn’t ready to stab him between the eyes. Standing there, with his arms folded, he said, “While I was initially disappointed to miss out on someone with the girth of the man we left behind, I am now thinking perhaps you are more of an asset than I first realized. Would you like to see what’s become of your… sacrifices?”
“See?” A queasy feeling overcame her stomach as she thought about him carrying her off to a pile of bones where she may or may not become his next snack.
He relaxed slightly as a smile overtook his face. “I’m going to shift back into a dragon now. I expect you to climb aboard and put that sword back in your sheath. If you want me to reveal my secrets, I can’t be dead.”
Nya stared at him for a long moment, her mouth hanging open. “You’d actually trust me to climb back on your back, knowing that my sole purpose in coming here was to destroy you?”
With a shrug, Slate said, “That was before our conversation. I understand you have a purpose, and you’re very dedicated to it. But I think it will be worth your while to see what I have to show you before you run me through.”
“And why in the world am I to assume that you’re just going to stand still and let me stab you once we arrive?”
Again he was laughing, but that was okay with Nya because she actually wanted to hear that sound again. There was something about his laugh that made her feel all tingly inside, like nothing she’d ever experienced before.
“I never said I’d just stand still and let you kill me, but I have a feeling, when you see what I want to show you that you won’t want to kill me after all.”
Nya couldn’t imagine a situation where she wouldn’t want to kill him--if what she thought he had done was reality. The longer she spoke to him, however, the more she began to wonder if everything her father had ever told her about a Dragon Moon wasn’t true. “I’ll be the judge of that,” Nya said.
“Fair enough. Now, if you’ll excuse me….” Slate took a few steps backward into the fog, and before her very eyes, the human form before her shifted and grew. Nya blinked several times, not trusting her eyes. But it was true. Slate truly was the dragon. And now, in his large, threatening form, he turned around and stooped down for her to climb aboard.
Everything about what she was doing seemed wrong. Yet, without further thought, Nya put her sword back in the sheath on her belt, and with her shield slung over her back, she climbed aboard the dragon’s back, wrapping her arms around his neck and settled between his massive wings. This time, when he took off, flying higher up the mountain, she felt safe--but she was still aware that she could be making a drastically wrong decision in willingly going with the dragon further up the mountain. Her choices were limited at the moment--kill him and stay atop the mountain, stranded until she also died or fell off trying to make her way down--or trust him to bring her up and show her whatever it was he thought would be of interest to her.
With her long blonde braids blowing in the wind funneling off of his back, she held on tight to his scaly neck, looking out at a starlit sky as they flew over dark, jagged mountains. “I must be dreaming,” Nya murmured.
It wouldn’t be the last time she had that thought that night.