In The Lair of the Draca (Book 2)

In the Lair of the Draca (Book 2) Chapter 51: Liberation

Excited barking from the dragons near the creek bank filtered through the water in rippling waves, and Water Fly's sharp little ears heard them.The warning calls struck a nerve in the core of her primordial brain centers. While there was no real camaraderie lost between the water draga and the dragons of the land, the vestiges of a protective partnership from milennia past (when all draga shared a common ancestor) remained.

Up from the creek bottom rose the giant, stirring up cloudy layers of silt and sediment as her thick waist pivoted and a rudder-like tail stiffened for balance. Each of her wide, paddle-shaped limbs were about the size of a child's canoe and looked rather ungainly; in spite of this, they sliced through the water like a butchering knife toward the place where funneling bubbles marked an area of disturbance.

Water Fly recognized the scent instinctively and honed in, like a bee to sweet blossom juice. The creature in trouble was a Person-- her Person, the young woman who had sat with her on the bank of Haven's Creek and scratched the area above her ears, nuzzled her neck, and frolicked with her like a sibling during hours of throwing sticks, fetching them, and raucous tumbling. Water Fly was not able to speak, like the more intelligent Draca which even now hovered at the banks with great concern, but she could think using vivid imagery...and she could love.

Despite having grown to nearly triple her infant size, becoming acquainted with lakes, rivers, and bodies of water far from Hallow's Wood, and even making the incredible jaunt from Haven's Creek through to the rivers which wound between the Ice-Capped Mountains, Water Fly had not forgotten the loneliness of floundering without a mother--nor had she forgotten her friend, the bright-haired maiden, and those magical eyes, which had once peered into her own as though she were an equal.

Ziuta was in extreme distress now; Water Fly, drawing nearer to the point of concern and using the power of her finely-tuned biosonar, understood. She emitted a series of fine, nasal clicks at a rate of nearly three hundred per second. Within precious moments, Water Fly could detect not only the size of the 'person' but its sex, state of mind, ability to flee, and even whether or not it was wounded. Via the results of her ranging-- or judging the time delay between her signals' release and their return after bouncing off the distressed object, Water Fly was able to confirm that, yes, this was indeed her young friend from Haven's Creek.

Clicking happily, Water Fly edged foreward and overshot Ziuta by several yards, forcing her to double back. Sword-tailed fishes ballooned to a panicked swell and darted for their lives in hastily-arranged schools. Using the tip of her nose as leverage, Water Fly hoisted Ziuta's now-limp form off of the muddy creek-bed and quickly snaked beneath her, lengthening her sinewy form in order to serve as a sort of living, underwater kayak. In the water, dappled irregularly here and there by streams of star-light from the surface and plankton-like creek motes, Ziuta's fragile body seemed to wreathe like that of a cyanotic ballerina: a pale hand here with fingers splayed, a slim foot there, which had slipped out of its manacle in her struggle to breathe. Her beautiful lips were kissed with a deathly blue that was almost dahlia, and a single green eye stared lifelessly beneath a fringe of red lash. Her carioca hair extended from her head in long, worm-like strings, looking for all intents and purposes like a vibrant algae bloom. A lone sword-tail, prematurely separated from its community, nibbled thoughtlessly at one rosy nipple and was quickly snapped up beneath dagger-like teeth.

Water Fly, whose tender nose could smell the struggling hemoglobin on Ziuta's red blood cells, knew intuitively that she did not have much time.

Snout pointed skyward, the massive dragon steered her tail and began the rapid ascent.

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