Page 2 of Dragon Cursed
She paused, her hand on the gnarled bark of an oak that had no doubt stood when her great-grandmother was born.The thick, grey-brown bark was deeply furrowed with age and rough against her palm.
She closed her eyes and let her awareness stretch outward.Beyond the whisper of leaves overhead.Beyond the scurry of unseen creatures weaving through fern and brush.She searched for the unmistakable signature of the Aos-sí bloom — the bright, silvery current that had threaded through her dreams all week.
Nothing.
Then—
A hollow opened in her senses.A darkness.A void where life should be.Vast and unnatural, a place where the living pulse of the forest simply stopped.Not cruel.But grieving.
Breath snagged in her lungs.The unnatural presence loomed against her awareness like something colossal sleeping beneath deep water — ancient enough to dwarf mountains, heavy enough to crush the life out of every living thing.
Its sorrow rolled through her in slow, crushing waves, until her chest tightened around it and her eyes burned with sudden, inexplicable tears.
"Who are you?"she whispered into the stillness.Her voice sounded small in the vast silence.
Cold slipped between the trees without warning, threading beneath her collar and skimming across damp skin.The mist thickened around the roots of the oaks, swallowing the birdsong one voice at a time.Even the whisper of wind through the upper branches ceased.The air grew thick, charged with a warning that prickled her skin and raised the fine hairs on the back of her neck.
Her eyes snapped open.Every instinct screamed at her to turn back, to flee this place that felt both sacred and dangerous.But her feet remained rooted, her worn leather boots sinking slightly into the damp, mossy earth.Something about that sorrowful presence called to her — a loneliness that echoed in her soul, a loneliness that she rarely acknowledged.
She waited there.Strained to hear footsteps.Movement.Anything.
There was nothing.Eventually she grew restless, urgency overriding her fear.She needed to find the Aos-sí-bloom before another child died.
"Just a little farther."She pushed forward, her muscles tight with tension."It has to be close."
A narrow deer trail wound upward toward a rocky outcrop.As she climbed, the feeling of being watched intensified.Not the casual observation of a forest creature.Focused.Deliberate.The attention of a predator.
Or a forest guardian, like the ones her great-grandmother had written about in the family histories.Poppy had never met one.That didn't mean they didn't exist.She was, after all, carrying a book full of drawings and pressings of plants that didn’t exist.Not in any modern book, anyway.
The trail opened into a small clearing where sunlight finally broke through the canopy, illuminating a cluster of pale, glowing flowers nestled in the crevice of a moss-covered rock.
Aos-sí-blooms.
Their petals were almost translucent, with veins of silver that pulsed with a light of their own.
She gasped."Oh, you're more beautiful than the books described."
She approached slowly, reverence in every step.Kneeling before the rock, she reached for the nearest flower, fingers trembling.As her skin brushed the cool, silken petal, a jolt of energy shot up her arm — pure, healing magic that made her head spin and left a tingling warmth in its wake.
Her ancestors had been right to write about this flower.It was magnificent.
The sky darkened without warning.
Poppy looked up, startled, as clouds gathered with unnatural speed and blotted out the sun.The temperature plummeted.The air crackled with an energy that made her skin prickle and the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.
A shadow fell over the clearing, so vast it eclipsed the entire sky above.
And then she saw it.
A dragon.
A real one.
Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird as she slowly tilted her head back.The air stalled halfway into her lungs as the creature unfolded above the clearing.
She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, half in awe, half in disbelief.
The dragon was still there.Not the mythological creatures of storybooks.Somethingreal.Something magnificent and ancient and terrifying.Scales as black as midnight, each one edged with emerald, reflecting what little light remained.Enormous wings, leathery and powerful.Eyes that glowed with an inner fire — powerful and intelligent and filled with a pain so profound it made her want to weep.
