I was far from home.
As far from home as it is possible for a human being to get. Not a far place, a place apart, a place not touching reality, isolated.
Forget the normal. Normal was gone. Normal belonged to the real world.
There was magic here. Not like “ah, the moonlight was magic.” Magic as in cause and effect didn’t always cause or effect. The magic that negates all human knowledge, that invalidates ten thousand years of human learning.
Usually, gravity worked, sometimes not. No way for that to be, or course, gravity isn’t something you can turn on or off, if it was it wouldn’t be gravity. If gravity could come and go, wax and wane, then things could fly when they could not possibly fly.
Like a dragon, maybe.
Can’t possibly lift something as heavy and dense as a dragon, all that scaly skin, all that muscle, all that dense bone, not with wings, not with leathery wings like a pterodactyl. Wings that were not a tenth of what they had to be, not a hundredth of what was needed to raise this creature, this logic-killing monster into the air.
An elephant with wings! Dumbo, but not cute.
And fire. Could fire burn inside a living creature? Absurd. Ridiculous. Fire inside what, the belly? The intestines? The liver? Liquid flame spilling out of flesh, out f the monster’s mouth, and that was supposed to be real? That was happening?
I stood, rooted, yes rooted, like my toes had frown down into the dirt looking for water and now I couldn’t move them because my feet were attached to the earth itself, or whatever passed for earth in this hideous, terrible place.
Run? How could I run from the dragon who pressed the tall trees down with the wind from his impossible wings and flamed the dry bushes in the night?
I could only stare. A miracle, that’s what it was. A dragon.
“Damn it, April, run!” Jalil yelled.
His face was wild, not like Jalil, eyes wide, mouth stretched into some indecipherable shape, half grin, half howl.
Only Jalil cared. About me. And that, not much. David and Christopher were mesmerized, bewitched. More magic. She had gone to them, touched them, spoken to them, and they had lost themselves.
They stood with pitiful swords drawn, defiant and foolish, waving their impotent weapons up at the killer from the sky.
Jalil grabbed me, pulled me, dragged me. My feet moved, missed a step, tripped, up again, and now I ran. But not far. I had to stop, to see.
“Go back to your master, Merlin! Tell him I am not his!” Senna screamed. Her voice was a tinny, faraway shout, a sound all but erased by the vastness of the noise, the howling wind, the bellows sign of leather wings, the crackle of underbrush bursting into flame.
The dragon inscribed slow, tight circles above the clearing, a living tornado, flying like a bird of prey, and eagle with green and yellow skin, with talons that could carry away a child, a man, a horse, what couldn’t it carry with gravity meaningless?
Jalil and I huddled in the woods, unprotected by bowed trees and whipped grass and dirt flying in little cyclones. But the dragon didn’t care for us. It watched Senna.
Have her! Take her! I cried silently. This is her nightmare.