Broken Path, Starless Tail - 7. Chapter 7

Surreal. This dream was positively surreal. He’d gone from freezing, feet trampling on twigs and smooth pebbles covered in bits of snow that drifted over the dirt path to a spring path. The dirt was warm through his socks.

“Hey, hold on.” Beckett wasn’t sure why he said it, but he couldn’t resist the urge to take off his socks and wiggle his feet into the dirt. The fox stopped, hopping up onto a rock dripping with lime green moss. The dirt on the path was soft, burying my toes to the knuckle, all but hiding each toenail under the loamy soil.

Had it rained recently? The earth had that fresh scent, like warm leaves and disintegration, but underlying it was a tang he didn’t know. Beckett sniffed, trying to decide what the air smelled like, but he couldn’t figure it out.

“Are you ready to go yet, human?” Paerus flicked his tail, his ears on the swivel constantly.

“My name isn’t human. It’s Beckett. You don’t hear me calling you fox.”

“I hope I don’t hear you calling me anything. We shouldn’t be talking here at all. We’re still too close to the blue clan. We don’t have time for you to be wiggling your human toe beans in the dirt.”

Toe. Beans. Okay, that was freaking cute. But Paerus was still rude. Then again, he seemed pretty nervous, or maybe that was just typical dream fox behavior. Who knew? Beckett sighed. He shook out his socks before he folded and tucked them into his back pocket. “Let’s go.”

“Thank you.” Paerus trotted ahead of him, tail high and ears still quivering like crazy like he was trying to hear everything or anything. Beckett couldn’t hear anything but their steps, well his really.

Smooth dirt or not, Beckett was getting tired by the time they reached a part of the path that tilted downward and lead into a valley. The sun was rising high overhead, and they left the cover of the trees. He was instantly warmed by the sun, but it didn’t beat down on him or make his eyes or head hurt. The light was almost watery, in a way that the normal sun wasn’t.

Beckett was so busy looking around he almost stepped on Paerus, who yipped, “Hey, look where you’re going!”

“Whoops, sorry.”

“Better yet, stop. We’re here.”

“Here, where?” The trees were tall in the distance, a mix of tropical and leafy types he didn’t know existed in the real word or not. He was pretty sure that color of moss on the rocks wasn’t real—lime green was a dead giveaway for fake plants—and the flowers reminded him of something he’d seen in an Alice in Wonderland morph painting one time. They were all close to what he knew but completely wrong at the same time. Either the wrong color or shape or size from what Beckett expected, making the landscape seem both inviting and wholly unfamiliar.

“Wow, humans have really gone downhill in intelligence since the last one portaled in, haven’t they?” a voice said.

“Who said that, who’s there?” Beckett turned, but he didn’t see anyone else besides him and Paerus.

“I did.” A small snail, or rather a large snail compared to the ones on Earth since this snail had a shell the size of his fist, clung to the rocky outcropping next to him. It extended one attennae and then the other toward him slowly. “You didn’t even notice any of us.”

“Us?”

“I say, how rude.” Another voice, this one whispery at first followed by the sound of clacking, came from higher up. He glanced into the tree above the rocks and spied an owl, half-covered in moss, and blinked. How was he supposed to see that. It blended right it! And it was snapping its beak at him!

“Not on purpose. There’s just so much to see here, and it’s all new to me.”

“Of course it is. And you are all being rude yourselves. You know how our camouflage works until someone has been made aware of our presence.”

And that… that was a tiny dragon. The snail had looked sort of like another rock. The owl had looked like a mossy bump on the tree. The tiny red dragon was in the midst of a small field of flowers, also red, and Beckett hadn’t even seen it, even though it was a dragon!

Beckett couldn’t stop staring at its small wings and claws and those wide eyes. “Would you like to take a picture?”

“Um.” He patted his pockets. “No phone, sorry.”

There were titters and snorts and clacks all around him. “Phones. Silly human.”

The owl thing hooted. “Are we sure Parallax sent the right one?”

The tiny red dragon sent out a wave of hot air. “Yes, we’re sure. Now stop being mean.”

“And my name isn’t human, it’s Beckett.” He was really tired of being called human in that tone. Beckett looked at Paerus. “I thought I was going to see my guide and pick a dragon.” He looked at the tiny red one in the flowers. “Not that I wouldn’t like you,” he said. “You’re very cute. Just a little… small.”

The other animals were all larger than he expected or had some sort of strange mutation that blended their bodies with the forest around them, both plant and animal. The red dragon was a tiny version of a perfect dragon, but too small to be safe to lead him anywhere on any sort of quest. He’d get hurt or eaten or something probably on the first day!

Which made Beckett sweat to think about.

“I am perfectly adequate sized, thank you,” the dragon said in a huff. “But let’s go.”

Once again he was led off by a creature who gave him little to no information but who expected him to follow like a good little human. Beckett sighed but did exactly that.