by Amelia Jade
“Well, I don’t want to know how crazy you must be to carve your own name into the bottom of each one of these,” she said at last. “But you can have it back. I’m going to go now. I think there’s a mental facility calling my name.”
Rhyolite didn’t recognize the words. “A what?”
“You know, a crazy person house.”
“I see. Why do you need to go there? Are you losing your mind?”
She laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. A dragon that doesn’t exist asking me if I’m losing my mind. Man, they are going to love me there. They’ll be telling tales of this for ages.”
“I promise you,” he said, letting his voice rumble across the cave. “I am the real deal. Not a part of your imagination.”
“That’s exactly what my mind would have you say if I were going crazy. You know that, right?”
Rhyolite pawed casually at the ground, digging up three long rents in the solid rock with as much ease as a child draws in the mud. “I am not part of your imagination, human. I am Rhyolite, an Earthen dragon, and I exist!”
The cave trembled with his proclamation.
Chapter Four
Aimee
“Uh-huh. Of course you are.”
She waved a hand at him dismissively. “You can go now. Poof. I command you to disappear.”
The silver-scaled dragon reared back in what seemed to be a combination of surprise and anger. His facial expressions—and she was fairly positive it was a he, based on his voice, but who really knew when it came to imaginary dragons—were rather similar to that of humans, despite the whole snout filled with razor-sharp teeth part.
“I am not some common peasant to simply dismiss,” he growled angrily, the long tail flicking back and forth in agitation.
Aimee rolled her eyes. “Listen, this has been fun.” She put the gold back on top of the nearest pile. “But you have everything back now. So, can I please go?”
“Tidy it up.”
She lifted both eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“You messed up my piles. You will tidy them up.”
Her jaw dropped. She was about to argue vehemently, but then realized she’d forgotten something. It was going to be hours before Angel could come back with the chopper. She was effectively stuck out here, with this…thing, that proclaimed to be a dragon, but of course couldn’t actually be one.
“Fine.” She set about restacking the piles, glaring up at him every chance she could.
It took her the better part of an hour and a half, but eventually each gold bar was back in a pile, and nothing looked amiss. “Are you happy now?” It was angering her that she’d actually given in and done the task, without telling her imagination to go stick it where the sun didn’t shine.
The dragon seemed to consider her response.
“Or are you hungry now that you’ve been staring at my ass this entire time?” she asked. “I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were human.”
“Why would staring at your ass make me hungry?” the dragon replied at last, sounding confused.
“Because you want to eat me now?’
She winced at the double entendre, hoping that he wouldn’t pick up on it. His language seemed to be out of date, suggesting that maybe he wasn’t from the present. After all, if a dragon was real, why shouldn’t time travel be possible as well?
“I thought I made it clear that humans are gross and not worthy of eating. Females especially.”
“You sound like my last two boyfriends.”
The joke went over his head.
“Never mind,” she said at last, wishing she had a better audience for her punchlines. “So why were you chasing me around?”
“For fun.”
“Fun? Seriously? You were doing that just for fun?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, let me tell you something, it was absolutely no fun at all. None. Not even close.”
A scary-sounding laughter boomed out from the silvery-platinum dragon. “Really? Because I had a lot of it.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but the dragon kept talking, abruptly switching gears.
“What is the thing that brought you here?” he asked. “What sort of contraption?”
“You mean the helicopter?” Aimee was confused. “Do you not know what that is?”
“No,” he replied. “That would be why I asked you.”
She gritted her teeth, forcing herself to do little more than glare at the arrogant dragon. “It’s called a helicopter.”
“How does it stay in the air? Hot gas?”
“Uh, what? No. It has a turbine engine that powers the rotors which angle the downward force of the air until it reaches such a point that the upward thrust is…”
His eyes went unfocused at some point and she sighed. Why is it any time she started talking about anything mechanical that men always seemed to tune her out? It wasn’t her fault that she enjoyed these things! She’d always maintained that it was the man’s fault, but now she was having the same effect on an imaginary dragon. Maybe it was her. She sighed internally. Right then she had enough other problems besides complaining about her lack of success with men. Such as the dragon that, despite not possibly being able to exist, seemed very much to be real.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
The dragon cocked his head. “You said the word ‘air,’ didn’t you? I know that one.”
She hung her head. “Okay, it’s like your wings, except if there were four of them, and instead of going up and down to achieve flight, they spin around in a circle, pushing the air down, until they’re pushing enough of it that they can counteract the weight of the body,” she pointed at him. “Just like your wings. Except it’s made of metal.”
“I see. So what kind of creature is an Engine, then? Is it a miniature dragon?”
“What? No. It’s not alive. It’s a machine.”
The blank look she got told her everything she needed to know.
“What year do you think it is?”
“Year?”
“Uh, yes. Like, the date. Today is January 24, for instance.”
“I’m not sure,” the dragon admitted. “I was fighting another dragon, and it was summer. He cheated and dumped a pile of rocks on my head. The next moment I fell out of the side of this cave and down the mountain, and it was winter. I suspect I was knocked out for a few months.”
“I suspect it was a little longer than that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, for starters, the helicopter has been around since roughly 1939 in one form or another, though over the past nearly eighty years it has gotten a little more advanced. So you would have known it had existed.”
He frowned. “That might explain the town I saw off to the east then. It was not there when we were fighting our battle either.”
“Drake’s Crossing?” She thought furiously. It wasn’t her hometown, but she’d learned a fair amount of its history since being hired there four years earlier. “That was founded something like one hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a decade.
“I’m beginning to think I’ve been asleep a long time,” the dragon mused, sounding distracted, and, for the first time, not threatening.
Am I really capable of having this sort of in-depth conversation with something from my imagination? Shouldn’t it just be all blood and guts, running, screaming, that sort of thing?
“You are from across the sea, are you not?” he asked suddenly, his yellow eyes focusing on her.
The vertical pupils reminded her a lot of a cat, though she doubted he would appreciate the comparison.
“Uh, I suppose, if you go back far enough,” she admitted after a moment. She’d had to think about his question. Of course he wouldn’t know what a “European” was. “But I couldn’t tell you the specifics of my ancestry besides it being European, which by the way, is what that area is called now.”
“There were no…Europeans, on this cont
inent when I came north,” he said, his mouth taking a moment to speak the new word. “My civilization came under attack by another dragon, and I was too weak to defeat him. I fled here to escape the extinction of my people.” The distaste at admitting his flight was palpable.
“What were your people?” she asked. “Where did they occupy?”
“They had a massive empire,” he said proudly. “I would fly it from the north to the south many times, just to see what they had achieved.” Then he grew soft. “But he killed them. He killed them all.”
Aimee had dabbled in human history in school, and now she fought to dredge up memories of classes. Then it hit her.
“Were your people the Mayans?” she asked in a shocked voice.
“Uh, the who?”
She pulled out her phone and punched in a search term, pulling up as many images as she could. “Will you promise not to hurt me if I come close?”
“I suppose,” he said warily. “Why?”
“Because this is kinda small, and you’re so huge, and—”
All at once the dragon was gone, and in its place was a human. Aimee’s jaw worked up and down as he—and holy-hot-tamale it was definitely a he—walked over to her. She stared at his impeccable physique, bronzed skin, and heart-stopping gorgeous blue eyes.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asked, pausing several steps away from her. “I promise not to hurt you.”
“Couldn’t you have done that from the start?” she snapped, her mouth running away from her before she could slap a muzzle on it.
“Technically? Yes.” He offered no further reply.
Not willing to let him get the best of her, Aimee crossed the remaining distance and started to show him images relating to the Mayan peoples.
“Yes,” he whispered. “But…what is this sorcery that you can show me all that? Are you a witch?”
Aimee burst out laughing. She clutched at her sides, careful not to drop her phone again, lest the screen crack—also, again. Tears streamed down her face as the stress of the past two hours suddenly caught up with her.
“You have to be real,” she gasped at last. “My imagination couldn’t come up with a line that terrible.”
“I don’t understand.” The same deep voice she’d heard earlier was now coming from this hella-hot hunk of ancient man meat. Dragon meat? Whatever, the point is, his voice sounds way better now. Probably ‘cause I’m not shaking in my boots.
“How can you not see the humor in this?” she snorted “You’re a dragon. A beast from legend that isn’t supposed to exist. And you’re asking me, a run-of-the-mill human female, if I’m a witch, because you don’t believe that I’m real. I’m a little rusty on the exact definition, but I think that qualifies as irony.”
“I’m a real dragon,” he insisted stubbornly.
Aimee just redoubled in laughter.
“What is so funny now?”
“I’m a real boy,” she said, mimicking a high-pitched voice before tugging on her nose as if it were growing, managing to do that all through the laughter. “It’s from…oh never mind, you wouldn’t get it. But trust me, it’s hilarious.”
“I have no reason to trust you. You stole from me.”
“I neither stole, nor was going to steal from you.” Aimee rolled her eyes, her humor dissipating but for one last chuckle as she replayed the scene from the movie in her head once more. Oh that was just too perfect.
“You were—”
“Listen, Rhyolite, your people were the Mayans. They died off nearly eleven hundred years ago.”
His eyes bugged out wide as she sobered, pronouncing the fact as if it determined his fate somehow.
“Eleven hundred,” he gasped, staggering and reaching out for something to lean on.
She backed away, not wanting to get involved. Instead he found one of his piles of gold, his hand casually spilling a dozen of them to the floor while he sought solidity. Finally he fell to his knees.
“I’m not cleaning that up,” she said, kicking a bar away from her foot and back toward him. “That wasn’t me.”
“Eleven hundred years.”
Aimee started feeling sorry for him. “Were you asleep for that long?”
“No,” he said. “I fled the purple dragon and came north, living alone for nearly five hundred years before the bronze dragon came. Which means I’ve been asleep for six hundred years, give or take some decades, by the sounds of it.”
“Your math checks out.” She felt sorry for him, but Aimee was still having a hard enough time believing any of this was truly happening, so her normal sympathetic tendencies were absent.
“Flow, this is Angel, we’re thirty seconds out. Are you ready for pickup?”
“Well,” she said before switching her mic back on. “This has been fun and all. But I’ve got a ride to catch.” Her hand flicked a button on the inside of the helmet. “Roger that, Angel, good to hear you.”
Rhyolite didn’t seem to hear her. He was still hunched over on his knees breathing heavily. It didn’t seem like he was going to hyperventilate, so she crept away, using the distraction to exit the cave.
True to his word, moments later the chopper appeared to hover above her, the winch already descending. Aimee grabbed it once it reached her level and hooked herself into it, giving an admittedly shaky thumbs-up to signal they could pull her in.
Jenkins had the bird headed back to base before she was back in the cabin.
“Enjoy your vacation?” Angel asked as she settled in to her seat, looking to the side out the window. “Must have been boring to just stand around there.” He paused for a heartbeat. “Sorry to leave you, but we ended up making it in time. Doctor said a few more minutes and it might have been too late. So, thanks for taking one for the team, Flow.”
She nodded, her eyes focused on the mountain as they flew away, eying one spot in particular.
“Yeah, it was boring,” she said distractedly. “I had a nap.”
All Rhyolite had done was scare her and try to kill her. So why was she hoping to catch one last look at him?
Chapter Five
Rhyolite
“Six hundred years.”
It didn’t sound real when he thought about it. Even speaking it out loud didn’t help him to reconcile the number.
“I’ve been asleep longer than I’ve been awake.”
Finally giving in, he sat on the floor, his rough homespun trousers from another age doing little to prevent the cold from seeping through. The cold didn’t affect him negatively, but it was still cold, a feeling he’d never truly come to care for. Which was just perfect considering he’d woken up in the middle of winter. Some god somewhere was playing tricks on him. Maybe this was punishment for fleeing the destruction of the purple dragon over a millennia earlier.
What else was I supposed to do? I was young and weak, and he had hundreds of years on me. I was still in my first century! You can’t punish me for being too weak.
He knew that wasn’t actually the case. But the fact that he’d been buried under the mountain for so long irked him. That meant the bronze dragon had won. Anger surged through Rhyolite and he felt the mountain answer back. Outside snow tumbled down as yet another miniature avalanche hit the region, this time caused by his actions. He wondered if the bronze dragon was still in the area. There had been no evidence of it, but there were plenty of mountains, and he’d not had the opportunity to explore much before the helicopter had arrived.
“Helicopter.” He said the word out loud, his lips fumbling to work their way around the weird combination of syllables. “What else have I missed?” he wondered silently.
The room had finally stopped spinning, a feeling of weakness that he’d never experienced before. After all, why should he? Rhyolite was a dragon shifter, the most powerful of his kind, and now likely one of the longest-lived beings on the planet. He was sure that others had survived to this day, though how many of them had fallen asleep or were still awake he didn’t know. All he was
positive of was that most of them had likely chosen to sleep, instead of being so rudely knocked out like he was.
“If I ever find that bronze dragon again,” he snarled, one hand reaching out to touch the ground as his anger grew once more, forging a grudge the likes of which he’d never held before.
Absently behind him the hole in the side of the mountain began to close as he manipulated the earth, once more concealing himself and his horde away from the sticky fingers of gorgeous human women in orange outfits. His eyes shot to the nearest pile, eyeing her stacking job. It appeared to be normal, without anything missing. He wouldn’t have put it past her to take something, though. No human could resist the splendors of his treasure, that was for certain.
Climbing to his feet, he proceeded to inspect each pile, ensuring that all the bricks were present, glowing faintly from the light he called forth from the very earth itself to provide illumination. With painstaking slowness he moved deep into his cave, into sections she hadn’t even touched, fingers dragging over the top of bricks with loving tenderness, a smile playing over his face as he remembered this adventure or that, and how he’d slowly managed to increase his collection.
It felt good to be awake again.
Again.
His mind was screaming at him, telling him that he’d only been in the fight of his life against the bronze dragon but the day before. Yet everything else made it clear he’d missed six or more centuries of living trapped in a pile of rock at the edge of his cave. Only a chance collapse of the mountainside thanks to an avalanche had exposed his cave and woke him up by rudely throwing him down the side of the mountain.
Rhyolite had suffered a lot of indignity in his life, but that had to be near the top of it. Thankfully nobody had been around to see it. That was the last thing he needed, for word to get around about how he’d slammed ass-first into a pile of rocks while sliding down the mountain. He could only imagine the jokes he would suffer. They would go on for decades.
“At least something is going my way. Too bad nothing else is.”
His cataloging of all his treasure had reached the last room. This was where he kept some chests full of coins, gems, and the like. Items that he’d yet to melt down into the easily transportable bars. There were supposed to be twelve of them. Rhyolite started counting in his head, but switched as he neared the end, his eyes confirming what his gut had already told him.
