Wings Of Fire: Heart of Oak

Ghost

A/N: Yep, I got the chapter title from The Dragon Prince, lol.

Holly's POV

Holly opened her eyes.

She was lying on a mountain, in broad daylight, surrounded by pine trees.

She sat up and squinted at the orange sky.
Where was she?
It didn't feel like she was trapped in a forest of evil vines. At least, she didn't THINK so. She couldn't feel the expected sensation of tendrils worming underneath her claws.

She held out her talons, and looked at her wings.
They LOOKED like hers.
She certainly FELT like herself.

WHAT?

She looked at the trees again.
They sure didn't LOOK sinister.
In fact, their very aura said Nope, we most certainly are not interested in taking over your mind.

She felt something clutching her leg, looked down, and saw Dusky.
His eyes were closed, and he wasn't letting go of her.

"Dusky, where the crap are we?", Holly asked.
He shook his head mutely.

"How 'bout you, Bait?"
Bait grunted.

It definitely didn't look like Pantala; it looked more like Santuary, the dragon village that she and her friends had visited while they were on Pyrrhia, which also had lots of pine trees.
But there were no dragons in sight.

Holly spotted an overlook beyond the trees.
She walked over to it, dragging Dusky along.
She gazed at the land below.

She hadn't been sure what to expect, but it definitely wasn't what she actually saw - a peacful human city.
It looked similar to to pictures of Iran that Holly'd seen in history books.
There was a huge wall surrounding the city.
It looked almost indestructible.
Inside, there were humdereds of houses. many with ornate roofs, carefully placed and organized.

"Whoa", Holly breathed.
Dusky peeked out of one eye, then shut it again almost right away.

There were also gardens and fields at the far ends, probably where the lower class lived and worked.
The middle of the city had lots of towers, and tents that looked like silk markets.
There also seemed to be several temples, and a palace, that towered over everything else.

"Dusky?", Holly asked again. "Does any of this look familiar to you?"
He shook his head.

She squinted at the city, and realized that there were shapes moving among the houses and on the roads, so small from here, that they looked more like ants than anything else, but Holly didn't think they were dragons,
They didn't move like dragons, and none of them were flying.

Holly strained her ears to see if she could hear anything.
She'd discovered that if she leaned back, she could hear almost anything from any direction.
Above them, a hawk lazily circled.
The trees peacefully swayed in the light breeze.

But somewhere nearby. . . . were those voices?

They were pitched to a little too high and fast to be dragons.

Humans.

Holly scooped up Dusky and flew into one of the trees, perching in a spot wheer the needles were thick enough to hide them from the ground.

There were four of them, slouching and swaggering up the mountain, bonking into one another, and shouting, and breaking branches off of trees as they passed.

One of them stopped, picked up a rock, and threw it at a nearby tree.
"Yeah! That's right!", he yelled at it.
Two of the others scrampled around to grab rocks and do the same.