Dreamcatcher | ONC 2020 Honourable Mention | ✔

Chapter Seven

A Skydragon.

Rav's hands shook as he tried to shield the creature. He threw a terrified look over his shoulder. The captain could be just over the curve of the hill. He could be watching, hidden in the bushes or the fog. The dragonette's poking nose was soft like new leather, but its baby scales would never harden into armour like most dragon species' did. It was what had made Skydragons so easy to kill.

"You have to hide!" whispered Rav. "He'll kill you if he sees you!"

The creature looked at him, then returned its nose to his hand. Rav tried to shuttle it back to the plants. Kill? No, worse. The man would sell it, or keep it himself until it was big enough to slaughter. Or he would cage it forever and make people pay for a glimpse. A horrifying thought chilled Rav to the bone. What if this baby wasn't even the last? What if the island had more? What if the captain caught them all?

A trill of what Rav imagined was annoyance escaped the dragonette as he put both hands on its body and tried to push it back into the plants. It was warm. Warmer even than most dragons. He had read in a book that it was an adaptation to living so high in the clouds, cruising for weeks on end without touching land. Nobody had ever figured out where they landed to nest.

No, no, no, no, no.

"Please!"

He could have run ten laps of Dreamcatcher's deck for how fast his heart raced. The dragonette was not biting, so he took hold of its body with both hands and tried to shove it back into hiding. It wrapped around his arm. It must have liked the warmth there, because it shuffled further so its whole tail could find purchase. Its chin rested contentedly on Rav's nonexistent bicep.

Rav stared helplessly at his new sleeve. The dragonette was a female, her scales cut more rounded than triangular. She headbutted him. How old was she? The last adult had been shot ten years ago, when Rav was eight. It was not uncommon for dragon eggs to take months to hatch, but that could extend to years when their mothers laid them with the biological time delay that swept dragon populations in times of stress or drought. He could only assume Skydragons were the same.

Gingerly, Rav lifted his free hand. As he touched her head, the dragonette closed her eyes and started to purr. Her baby velvet thickened between her horns, so soft he understood why Skydragon young were hunted for luxury purses and gloves. Something jabbed his hand as it moved down her nose. On top of her muzzle-tip was a nub of a spike, harder than her scales. An egg tooth.

"You just hatched."

No more than a month ago. Rav's heart ached. She would have broken out of her leathery shell to find herself without a mother to feed or protect her. No wonder she was so skinny.

Rav cast about for bugs. There were none nearby, so he navigated three-limbed to the next bush. Here he found two crickets and a large moth, which escaped as he tried to grab it. He pulled back a bubble-root to discover long, pale millipedes in the dead plants below. The dragonette sniffed these and turned up her nose, but she was amenable to the flat, speedy insects that scooted around the millipedes when their cover shifted. They had long tails that they dropped when grabbed, a fact Rav found out the hard way.

The dragonette devoured everything else that he caught. Rav did not realize how late it was getting until a whistle drifted hazily over the island's top. His whole body chilled. Sanjay was calling him for dinner, and he had found nothing for the captain.

Rav shuffled the dragonette's coils from his arm. She was sleepy now, and did not latch onto him again as he found a cave in the ground large enough to accommodate her floppy wings. She curled up in it obediently. Rav wondered with another tug on his throat if this was what a mother dragon would have done.