Lost Change - Snippets

Getting Cold Wings

This might be the last time I ever do this.

With the big fear of Nate's response out of the way, I had been able to start seeing new problems. New things to be concerned about. I had time to dwell on all the other possibilities that would come with my decision to join the solitary silver in his city far, far north of the flock. Trenil had noticed my apprehension growing as he had prepared for the move - boxing up all the odds and ends around the house, taking down most of the perches he had installed, patching up the holes left in the walls, and other steps that slowly tore down the familiar surroundings I had become used to over the past year. He had become more and more concerned as we got closer to moving... and today he had brought me to the park, to spend the day with my friends in the flock.

Because tomorrow we would be leaving.

It took hours to travel between the cities, even by the fast shuttles the Kymari had. It had taken Nate months to cover the distance, maybe even years. If something went wrong, if I needed help from one of my friends... I could talk to them in an instant with the mindspeech, sure, but they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. It would just be me and Nate.

If it turned out we were miserable together... if he found out the hard way that it was too much... or if being so far away from the others was too much for me... there wouldn't be any help coming. No option to slip away in the night unnoticed, and escape back to the safety of the flock. The flock wouldn't be there. It would just be me.

It was still a complete mystery to me as to how Nate managed to live like that. The idea that he had made it all by himself, with no one to turn to even just for advice, and had done it for eight years... I wasn't sure I could even do it for a week.

I sighed and pulled my wings back in. The gold dragonet started grumbling again, but I stood up and kicked off the sandy floor, stretching my wings back out into several quick wingbeats that launched me into flight.

Sleep wasn't going to come like this. Maybe a game would help.

~

"Are you sure you're okay?" Jonathan tilted his head up from the game board to look at me again, a slight frown and concerned droop of his ear tufts plain on his expression.

"I'm fine." Even I didn't believe the drained sounding warble that left my mouth, and I knew that the mindspeech would have carried the obvious tinge of a lie to it if we hadn't both agreed to use actual sounds. It was a lot harder to bluff an opponent when you couldn't bluff, and it took a lot of fun out of most matches. "Let's just play the game."

"Well, but..." The blue dragonet across from me hesitated and looked back down at the crude board, and specifically at the pawn I had just moved two spaces forward. "...this is the station for checkers."

That didn't make any sense; the small rocks were all inside the crude lines, and there weren't any spaces between...

I squinted at the sandy ground, then sighed. There had been other lines that I had completely missed, adding extra squares to the board that I had completely missed.

The blue dragonet grinned lightly as I reached forward and pulled the 'pawn' back into place. "How are you doing, Ivy? Is Trenil still treating you well?"

"He is. He's been busy preparing for the move, but he's still making sure I have everything I need." My ear tufts flicked a little in a dragonet 'smile', since I knew why Jonathan was asking. "You can let Amanda know that she doesn't need to bite anyone."