by Kate Seidel
Chapter Six: Never Trust a Dragon
Coju didn’t have a great wake up call. Coju had returned to the campsite on the mountain, tired and nervous. A few moments later he had heard dragging footsteps. Coju knew this to be Emrys. Then he had finally drifted to sleep, only to be awoken a few hours later, at dawn, by a roar that shook the mountainside.
“Earth move!” Moon shrieked. Emrys had braced himself against the ground, sword in hand, and Coju was shaking unsteadily. Moon, however, had not experienced an earthquake before. She teetered towards the edge of the mountain uncontrollably. Another roar shook her right off the cliff. If it hadn’t been for the tree residing on the edge, Moon would have definitely fallen to her death. But the death-defying girl clung for dear life onto a root extending over the edge.
“EMRYS! COJU! HELP ME!” she screeched. Both boys stopped trying to secure their own footing and ran unstably to help her. But they never reached the tree. A dragon the size of the Roverdio tower glided down from the mountaintop and crushed the ground between Moon and the two boys. Lucky for Moon, she had been climbing things her entire life. So she scrambled up the root, tearing her fingernails in the process, and shakily flopped onto the stable ground. She lay there shaking. Emrys pointed to the sky.
“FIREBALLS!” he yelled. Quickly, Coju and Emrys rolled out of the way, but Moon had heard the news too late, and was only now getting up. A wayward fireball zoomed towards her head. She screamed. But just as the flaming sphere was about to make its home in her head, a blur of brown flew in-between the two. The fireball struck the object, causing it to let out a screech similar to Moon’s.
Then the fireball dissipated, leaving a charred mound of motionless fur. This was our never seen friend Jamaku the monkey. Moon collapsed again near the fur. Emrys and Coju dashed over to her. On inspection, Coju noted the size of her pupils: huge. Then the dragon chose to attack. Coju, having been lazy as a child, was slightly chubbier than Moon or Emrys. This gave him an edible appearance to the dragon. So the great Chazor opened his mouth wide, revealing a forked red tongue and reflective silver teeth. He snapped at Coju’s extended leg. Coju whipped around and (completely by accident) kicked the magnificent dragon in the nose. The dragon jerked back, almost confused that a tiny human such as Coju would DARE to even touch him, would dare to defy death when Chazor was the one to bear it.
“PUNY HUMAN, YOU ARE GOING TO REGRET YOU EVER LAID YOUR UGLY LITTLE EYES ON ME!” Chazor roared angrily. Then he let loose a torrent of white flames that singed off the bottom half of Moon’s hair. She did not notice; she was too busy hyperventilating. Then the dragon lunged for Coju again. Coju tripped backward. This went on for a while. Coju had figured out that the dragon would follow him, so eventually the two warring multicellular organisms were far away, closer to the mountain’s core.
Emrys tore his head away from the panic-ridden Moon to squint ahead, where Coju and presumably Chazor the dragon were fighting. He didn’t see either of the two, just a huge explosion resulting in a mushroom cloud the precise shade of dung.
Pebbles, sticks, trees, and other debris flew down the mountain as a huge windstorm struck the mountain. Emrys highly doubted that this was chance, and this was confirmed when the red dragon, enormous despite the distance, reared out of the cloud, wings spinning frantically.
“Ah! Jamaku! Run!” Moon screamed. Emrys turned back to Moon, who was huddled in a ball.
“Moon, you’re going to be okay! Now listen to me!” he told her. She looked up at him with huge eyes made for a five year old who woke up in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm. “You see that ditch?” Emrys yelled over the chalk-on-blackboard winds. He pointed to a small indent in the ground, big enough to shield a small figure like Moon from any major bodily harm. She nodded. “Go over there, and stay there!” He ordered. Moon started to stand, but then she fell on her knees, hands to her head.
“No! Coju! Run!” she shrieked, clawing at her singed hair.
Emrys sighed exasperatedly and threw Moon rather unceremoniously over his shoulder, where she continued to scream. A huge tree clattered down, right where Moon and Emrys had just sat, rattling the ground and causing Emrys to stumble. Both he and Moon hit the ground. Moon instantly curled back into her ball of relative safety while Emrys struggled to regain his lost breath.
“Moon!” He sputtered. “Go to the ditch!” Moon looked at him confusedly, crawled the few feet into the ditch, and collapsed there, her scream lost to the ferocious winds. Emrys then turned to the cloud with his sword glued into his hand. He scrambled up to the cloud, and with no self-preservation in mind, chucked the sword into the cloud. It clattered near Coju’s feet. Coju grabbed it and just in time blocked a jet of flame from incinerating his eyebrows and surrounding areas. He stabbed upwards and the sword found its mark: the dragon’s neck. Sadly, Coju and the dragon were too far away for the sword to hit anything important. It only enraged Chazor more. The dragon stood on his hind legs and brandished his wings. This lifted Coju in the air, on account of the vicious winds tearing around the mountaintop.
“I have you now, puny mortal!” Chazor rasped joyously.
But in his supposed victory he had created too much wind, and it tossed Coju onto the mountain’s higher peak. Coju landed hard on his feet and noticed that he was surrounded by oval boulders the size of Emrys’ figurative head (the size of a swelled up watermelon). On closer inspection, there was a snakelike outline silhouetted inside. Dragon eggs, Coju heard inside his head. Thanks, he telepathically said back. Then as Chazor approached, Coju positioned his sword over the closest egg. Coju saw Chazor’s eyes widen, revealing the glowing green irises. They were rather eerie and Coju wished he would stop staring.
“Don’t come any closer or I’ll stab it!” he yelled. Chazor narrowed his eyes. Coju felt awful for threatening an innocent youngling, but he didn’t even know if he could pierce the silvery shell. Evidentially Chazor had no clue as well, for he backed up.
“Let me and my friends go alive, and you must promise to leave this country forever more!” Coju shouted, brandishing the sword. Chazor’s eyes gleamed.
“I swear as a dragon I will leave you and your friends unscathed and will leave this country with my eggs.”
Coju nodded, and then he walked towards the edge of the mountain, preparing to climb down. Just as he was about to hop down onto the closest ledge, he felt a spiked tail encircling his torso. At first he wriggled and tried to escape, but he found that sharp spikes dug into his stomach every time he moved. Coju continued to attempt to escape the iron grasp, but to no avail.
“Never trust a dragon, puny mortal! I believe our dear cousins serpents should have taught you all that!” Chazor hissed gleefully. With that, he dug the spikes deeper into Coju’s stomach, and released him off the cliff, where Coju plummeted down to the rocky grounds below. As Coju fell, he felt a searing heat at his back. Coju’s eyes closed, drawing him into blackness reminiscent of the black ravens from the Twilight Wood. The last thing he heard was Moon’s scream.
