HORNS (BoyXBoy)

Chapter 57

Chapter Fifty Seven

It was dark.

I floated in the black, warm and comfortable and completely at ease, drifting without form, without care, sheltered by a wall of shimmering gold. I felt safe here. Safe and protected. There was no stress. There was no worry.

Just this endless drifting.

I saw nothing and everything, three hundred and sixty degrees of perspective from beyond myself and yet there was no light, just endless black with those strange walls circling endlessly. In the dark I suddenly saw Echo, facing away from me, and reached out with flickering, half-formed, insubstantial fingers. He vanished like smoke the moment I tried to touch him. Confused, I floated around, trying to find out where he went and why.

I felt lonely, all of a sudden, and kinda sad.

I drifted for a time, and then he reappeared a bit farther away from me, in a new form. A thought bubbled up from me like air trapped under water.

'Ah... he's black and fluffy again.'

Faun-like ears fluttered as Echo turned and cocked his head at me, long tail dancing behind him as he hovered in a void of nothingness. He blinked curiously before he burst into dark smoke, and I wanted to let out a cry because why did he keep leaving me alone? Why wouldn't he stay...?

My heart ached and I felt like crying, which was weird because he wasn't doing anything. I tried to call out to him, to summon him back, but before I could two arms clad in purple extended all around me and a beautiful Chinese girl's face slid into my perception from everywhere. I tried to embrace him, but he vanished again... I couldn't catch him.

He was too fast.

Tears began to build up inside me and the darkness began to glow blue as I hovered there, in the void, wondering why I couldn't hold him. I wanted to hold him. My heart was breaking because it felt like he didn't want to hold me back, every time I tried he slipped through my fingers.

"Enough," a deep, familiar voice commanded, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. The golden walls encircling me came closer and closer, boxing me into a circle of brilliance. I was soon being squished in the center of them like a mouse being strangled by an anaconda.

I felt no fear, only waves of soothing comfort... and then, a face as big as a star came down towards me, golden and awe-inspiring and familiar. Huge, sapphire blue eyes stared at me from beneath a pulsing blood-red bead embedded in the golden scales. A forked tongue snaked out from between teeth as large as me.

A dragon... a golden dragon...?

It hit me, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I knew a golden dragon. A tingle touched my consciousness and a muddled question bubbled up from inside me, struggling to reach the surface.

'Huang...?'

The golden dragon's giant, bladed blue eyes blinked, pupils shrinking into slits. That enormous muzzle leaned down towards me and twisted, coming to rest on a golden coil in such a way that he could still look at me with one eye. I relaxed, because it was Huang Wu Tao.