by Logan Jacobs
“Sela tried to plug it up with mud, balled-up fabric, and some flour-water paste,” Mira explained, “but there’s no way that’s going to last our entire journey.”
“Fucking hell…” I muttered. “How much water is down there right now?”
“Only about a foot or so,” Sela took over. “It’s nothing we can’t have the water dragon evacuate, though I don’t think any of the wood furniture or carpets are going to make it through the water damage.”
“I can live without a few rugs and chairs,” I noted. “What I want to know is, how fast is the water coming in, and how much time do you think we have before it becomes a major problem?”
Sela and Mira stopped bickering for a second and exchanged a stern look.
“There’s no way we make it home without a major repair job,” Sela sighed, “even with my patchwork, Mira’s right. We won’t make it very much longer before the water starts to come in again. And when that happens…”
“The boat will fill up with water until it sinks,” I finished the sentence and rubbed tiredly at my face. “Fuck. I don’t even know where we are right now… Please tell me the map in my wooden chest didn’t get wet.”
“We could tell you that, but it’d be a lie.” Mira frowned, and then she produced a soggy piece of paper.
I took the wet pulp in my hand and attempted to unroll it like normal. I slowed down when several bits of paper seemed to tear off in my hands, and soon I had the whole thing splayed out before me.
Thankfully, the map wasn’t completely destroyed. However, the borders of every drawing now bled across the paper in long, black tendrils, and it was nearly impossible to read any of the text on it.
“This isn’t too bad,” I admitted. “I can still see all the shapes and general locations of the islands, even if I can’t read anything it says. I guess if I ever needed to know the exact shape of one of these islands I’d be in trouble, but until that happens, I’m not going to worry about it. We just need to set this out in the sun until it dries up.”
“Where are we, exactly?” Nadir questioned as she shook like a wet dog and tried to get the water off her fur. “Are we still on course for the Isle of the Dragons?”
“Not a chance.” I shook my head and studied the map. “Tirian and Jemma? Can you two fly up and see what’s around us? I don’t want to be out in the open sea much longer if we can avoid it.”
Jemma nodded, and then the long-legged deer woman ran over and mounted Tirian like a jockey on a horse. The silver dragon beat his wings, and instantly they both took off into the sky. Their figures disappeared behind the thin layer of clouds above, and we awaited their reconnaissance.
As we waited, Malkey and Arrick climbed back onto the deck, and a knot of anxiety unfurled in my chest.
It looked good to us, Malkey admitted. Lots of scratches and chips, but I didn’t see anything bad.
“There were three spots that looked like they’d been patched,” Arrick added. “We didn’t want to touch those, though.”
“I’m very proud of you two,” I praised the boy and his water dragon. “That was a very important thing you did, something none of us could have done ourselves.”
“You hear that, Malkey?” Arrick grinned. “Dad’s proud of us!”
The lanky preteen slid off the back of his dragon, patted it on the side of the head, and then proceeded to do a quick victory dance. When he realized we were all watching him, my son’s face turned a deep shade of red, and he immediately stopped dancing, cleared his throat, and then brushed off his tunic like he’d just come out from dirt and not water.
Land ho! Jemma suddenly called out through the telepathic bond. There’s an island to the west, maybe about two or three miles away.
“Is it the volcano island?” I asked, even though I knew our chances were slim.
Not unless the volcano grew an entire forest in the last few weeks, the Niralope woman noted.
Damn. It was a long shot, but this all but confirmed we’d been blown off course. The Isle of the Dragons was unmarked, but I knew where it was in relation to the other islands we’d been on. It was to the north of the dragonkin’s home, and several miles south of the Niralope island. Unless the place Jemma was looking at was unmarked, too, that meant we were way, way off course.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I grumbled.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” Arrick asked.
“You see this island here?” I pointed to our home base on the map. “This is where we live. These two islands up north are the ones where I met the Niralope and the Coonag peoples, respectively. Now, the Isle of the Dragons is supposed to be right here… If we’re seeing another island that isn’t one we’ve been to before, we’re probably miles and miles off course.”
And that was probably actually a generous estimate. There was a small island far past the Isle of the Dragons and even further out from any of the places we’d been before. That must have been what we were seeing.
“Well, the good news is it’s a straight shot back,” Mira noted as her finger traced along the soggy paper. “We just overshot it, that’s all.”
“We’re not going anywhere if we don’t get that hull fixed,” I reminded them. We’re going to have to drop anchor in the shallows near that island and then hope we can find enough supplies to fix those holes while we’re there. If we don’t sink before we get there, of course.”
Jemma and Tirian landed back down on the deck of the boat, and I instantly charted a course for the unidentified island. As we drew closer, the floating land mass seemed to sprout out of the water and stretch up to the sky, and even from this distance, I could see it was ninety-percent forest, with lots of marsh and flatlands and not really much in the way of mountains or rock formations. The beaches had much darker sands than the ones we were used to, and the grains were a putrid brown color that looked like it was permanently wet, even though it was far up from where the tide came in.
Once we were just off the shore of the mysterious island, Mira called out to me from her post.
“Raise the sails?” the golden-scaled dragonkin woman asked.
“Nope, we’re going straight ahead, but at half speed, no maybe a fourth speed,” I corrected and then watched as my crew’s faces all went wide with horror.
“B-But Ben…” Jemma sputtered. “If we do that, we’re going to beach the ship!”
“Exactly,” I reaffirmed. “If we beach The Dragon Queen, then she’s not going to be taking on any more water while we look for a way to permanently patch the damages.”
“Won’t that also make it much more difficult to get her back out onto the water?” Sela’s eyes narrowed at the thought.
“Not if we ‘beach’ it in shallow enough water,” Mira replied like a schoolteacher explaining the Pythagorean theorem. “We don’t have to take it completely out of the ocean. We just have to make sure we get in shallow enough water so the holes in the hull are raised above the surface.”
“Yup,” I agreed. “The beach also looks like it has a bit of a gentle slope to it, so after we fix the ship, the high tide can take us back out again. With a little bit of help from the dragons, of course.”
Sela looked somewhat skeptical of my plan, but I knew she wouldn’t argue with her king. Honestly, I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure about this plan, either. I also wasn’t sure how long we would have to stay on this new island. If it was anything more than a day or two, we’d have a sunken ship when we came back to it. As much as I trusted Sela’s engineering skills, there was no way her thrown-together patches were lasting any significant amount of time.
It was like duct-taping a hose back onto a radiator. Sure, it worked, but if you didn’t fix it properly, you were eventually going to have an even bigger mess on your hands.
So, my crewmates raised some of the sails to reduce our speed, and I planned to drop an anchor once we were close enough to soften our landing. We needed some speed, though, if we wanted to properly beach The Dragon Queen. If we went to
o slow, we’d float up to the shallows, bump into the ground, and then float back. It was a fine line to walk, but I knew how to walk it well.
“Drop anchor,” I called out when it was time, and my crew rushed to do my bidding. I felt our speed drop a little more, but the shore was so close now. “Everybody brace for impact!”
I placed my feet onto the boards of the deck, gripped the wheel tightly, and prepared for the crash, but it actually was much smoother than I thought it would be.
There was a long, dull thud from the very bottom of the ship as it crested into the sand and pushed forward with heavy resistance. Soon, our speed slowed down to a simple crawl, and then the vessel finally lodged itself onto the beach with a final lurch. The sudden motion caused us all to stumble forward and threatened to knock us off our feet, but we were all still upright when the dust had settled.
If we could make it through what was essentially a hurricane out on the sea, there was no way a tiny bump was going to knock us off our feet.
Once we were safe and secure, I relinquished my spot at the wheel, walked over to the side of the starboard side of the ship, and peeked over. Down below, I could plainly see the areas Sela had patched and, sure enough, parts of the patchwork were already starting to fall away.
I commanded my crewmen to drop the anchor, and then I headed down to inspect the inside of the ship. When I reached the floor of the lower deck, my boots squelched into a deep puddle of water. The ocean had most certainly found its way inside of our vessel, and it was nearly up to my knees as I sloshed through the cabins. Thankfully, most of our important documents and tools had been laid up on the wooden table at the center of the navigation room and hadn’t quite gotten destroyed by the incoming flood.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t say the same things for our private trunks.
I waded through the water back to my cabin, forced open the door, and then instantly ran to the trunk I kept inside. It had already been opened, and my heart sank when I looked inside and saw it had been penetrated by the briny water. Some of the items inside were still salvageable, but anything that wasn’t made of fabric was pretty much ruined. So, I set my clothes out on top of the small wooden desk in the room, and then I placed the entire chest up onto the desk chair so it wouldn’t get any more damaged.
When I finally came back up to the top of the ship, my friends were all looking at me with concerned expressions on their faces.
“How bad is it, Dad?” Arrick gulped.
“Not too terrible,” I admitted. “But we’ll have to haul everything out once we clear out the water and get back to our home island, just so we can see what’s even salvageable.”
“Does that mean we need to grab some buckets and get to bailing?” Lezan suggested. “That could take us hours…”
“We won’t have to do that,” I explained to the Coonag women and the rest of my friends. “The dragons can make short work of the water in no time at all.”
Water? Tirian spoke up timidly. I’m not exactly a water dragon. In fact, I’m the exact opposite of that type of dragon.
“You’re not going to be cleaning out the water,” I clarified to the small silver creature. “I’m putting you on evaporation duties.”
Evaporation duty? Tirian pondered.
“Yep!” I grinned. “Malkey can go down into the lower decks, suck in mouthfuls of water, and blast them out into the air through the loading area. Then, while it’s in the air, you can hit it with a blast of your fire breath.”
“Won’t that run the risk of burning down the whole ship?” Jonas inquired with a raised finger.
“Not at all.” I shook my head and smiled at the soothsayer. “Have you seen how far these guys can shoot water and fire? Hell, I bet they’ll send it so high up, it’ll just get reabsorbed by the clouds before it even has a chance to land back down.”
“Is that something that can happen?” Nadir questioned as she cocked her head to the side. “You can make your own clouds out of water?”
“That’s all they are in the first place,” I clarified to the black-eyed Coonag leader. “Just evaporated water that releases its excess moisture when it gets too heavy.”
The Coonag woman’s mouth fell agape. “You’re saying clouds… are made of water?”
“Nonsense,” Mira scoffed. “The clouds are the personal satchels of the sky god Nebos. It’s how he delivers the world’s lifeblood to the different islands. But, every now and then, a bird will puncture his satchel and accidentally release its contents down onto the world.”
“Ahhh… That makes way more sense than Ben’s explanation.” Nadir nodded.
I opened my mouth to correct them, but decided against it at the last minute. There was no reason to rain on their parade, and even less of a reason to get into a science lesson about the water cycle right now. So, I simply smiled, nodded, and turned to Malkey.
“What do you say, Malkey?” I asked the water dragon as he wagged his tail with excitement. “Do you want to become a living water fountain?”
Oh, yeah! The copper water dragon smiled. Count me in. I betcha I can get it past you every time, Tirian.
Not a chance, Tirian shot back playfully as he spread his wings and took to the sky.
We watched as Malkey shuffled over to the opening of the cargo hold, jumped down inside, and disappeared into the bowels of the ship. Below, we could hear his lumbering footsteps as he made his way through the flooded deck, and then soon his slender copper lips poked out from the cargo hold.
Ready? he laughed telepathically.
Bring it on! Tirian cackled from a few dozen feet above us.
Suddenly, Malkey made a soft raspberry noise as he pursed his lips and spat a massive stream of water up into the air. Tirian held his ground as the spout rocketed into the air, and then a soft orange glow rose around the perimeter of his mouth. The silver dragon heaved his body downward as he unleashed a small stream of white-hot fire into the incoming spigot and then held it all the way down, until all of the water had been turned to steam in the air.
Tirian looked down on Malkey with a smug expression, and he didn’t even have to say anything to get under Malkey’s skin.
There’s plenty more where that came from, the copper water dragon grumbled. You just got lucky.
You call it luck, I call it skill, Tirian teased.
“It looks like these two have everything under control here,” I observed. “We should get down to the beach and see if we can find a place to make camp for the night. I’d wager we only have a few hours of daylight left, and I don’t want to be stranded out in the dark on an island we know nothing about.”
Mira released the ship’s ladder down the side of the vessel, and we all climbed down until we hit solid ground. Since The Dragon Queen was just a small schooner vessel, we didn’t have to go far, and it also was able to beach itself in just a few feet of water. The waves only came up to about my stomach, which meant we didn’t even have to swim to get to the beach. Soon, the water around us lowered, and we were out onto dry land.
Behind us, Tirian and Malkey were still playing their game of fire versus water, and it looked like Tirian was showing off now more than ever.
“I hope that doesn’t give away our position,” Mira noted.
“It won’t,” I promised. “We’re far out from any other islands, and we didn’t see any other ships for miles. Then again, if we did attract the attention of an orc ship or two, we’d at least have something to salvage wood from. After we wrecked it, of course.”
“That’s why we’re proud to bear your children, Ben,” Lezan purred, and her dark eyes glittered with lust. “You’ve got the spirit of a Coonag man, mixed with the intellect of a dragonkin.”
“Technically, I’m not a dragonkin,” I corrected them both. “I’m a human. I just turned into a dragonkin once I took over as Draco Rex.”
“A… human?” Nadir quirked her head. “I’ve never heard of that species before.”
“Neither had we before
we met Ben,” Sela explained. “You should have seen him when he first arrived on our beach. He didn’t have any scales or anything. Just tanned skin that was soft to the touch, covered with a sprinkling of hair. Also, his ears were rounded and tight against his head, not like our fan-shaped ones.”
“What a strange-looking creature,” Nadir giggled with a wink. “But I bet I would have still found him amazingly attractive.”
“Oh, he was…” Sela trailed off as her eyes went dreamy. “Now that he’s one of us, though, he just looks ten times more attractive.”
“Come on, ladies,” I joked and held out my hands. “You’re gonna make me blush.”
“Yes, ladies, please,” Jonas added with a hint of playfulness. “You’re going to make me blush, too.”
All of us got a chuckle out of Jonas’ humor as we began to saunter around the beach looking for anything that might come in handy. It was a pretty straightforward area, with dark brown sand littered with bits of bone, stone, and seashells. The flora that made up the tree line, however, seemed much different than any of the other places I’d been to before.
The trees and bushes were simply massive, and not just in the way of height. The dark mahogany trunks of the trees stretched hundreds of feet into the air, with several equally wide spindles of branches shooting off at various intervals all the way up.
Most peculiar of all, however, was the fact the leaves were equally as large. Each single leaf on these trees was at least ten feet wide and just as long, and they appeared firm and waxy with a moss-green tint and several light green veins that ran beneath the surface of their skin. I didn’t know how much rain it took to keep these giant things watered, but I figured this was a place where a monsoon was not an uncommon occurrence.
Meanwhile, the floor of the forest looked like it was covered in tropical plants like ferns and hibiscus and poinsettias that were just as oversized as the trees around it.
What was this, some sort of mirror world island where everything was blown up to epic proportions?
