The Amazing Adventures of PonytailGirl, Chapter 7: The Lightning Dragons

BOOM! “There's another one! Look!”

“Where?” ZAP! “No it isn't.”

“Yes, watch.” ZIP! “Ah! See? It's fast, but you can tell.”

“YOU can tell. It's....” BANG! “Oh!”

“Boys! Get back in the tent!” their mother called. BAM!

“Mom, come out here! Look at this! It's dragons!”

“The lightning looks like dragons flying, Mom.”

“Enough with the dragons. Bending Chalice, you get in here. BlazeDragon97, you hear me! Bring your little brother!”

“Aw Mom.” Bending Chalice turned away as his brother grabbed him by the arm and hauled him in. “It really is, Mom,” he said as she took a towel to his hair. “Hey!”

“It's a good thing your dad had a clear night last night, because tonight isn't it!” She said as she took their flashlights and shoved their pj's at them. They were getting in a last camping trip before school started. The first two days at Grayson Highlands had been great. They had gone bouldering and canoeing and wading and no one had cared if they got wet. The first night they had gone to Whitetop Mountain with the telescope, and tonight their dad and oldest brother had gone back. The storm had come up unexpectedly from the south.

“Are we gonna go hiking tomorrow in the rain?”

“We'll see. I bet it stops. There. There ya go. Better?”

“I wanna see the waterfall.”

“I said we'll see. Now go to sleep. It sounds like it's letting up anyway. Maybe that's your father coming back.” After a lot of noise and confusion caused by two more people crowding into the tent, everyone settled down and there was quiet for a few hours.

“I gotta pee.”

Groans. “What?” “You take him.” “Mumph.” “We shouldn't have let him eat that watermelon.”

“Somebody come with me.”

BlazingDragon got delegated. It is always cool in the mountains at night so they took their jackets, but scorned the umbrella. It was only a drizzle. On the way back, being boys and having flashlights, they took the little side trail they had discovered during the day. “Could we see bears? Do they have bears at night?”

“Naw. They only have wild ponies here.” The quiet night and soft sound of the drizzle was inviting. “You wanna go over to the pond?”

As they started across the meadow, a bright flash suddenly streaked across the sky, thunder crashed, and the rain came pelting down again. BOOM “Dragons!” Bending Chalice's yell was drowned out by the storm.

They ran for the trees and nearly collided with a tall man they hadn't seen at the campground before. He had a long coat and a lumpy hiking stick. “You boys need help? What a night!”

“Did you see that lightning?” Bending Chalice gasped. “It's not really lightning.”

“I know,” the man agreed.

The next lightning strike came so close that they felt their hair stand on end. It hit the pond ZAP ZAP ZAP and a huge cloud boiled up. It obscured the valley and then in slow motion it rose up and floated away. They looked back at the pond. The water was gone. Almost in a daze they walked over and stared in. It was dry. There was something out in the middle. Moving. Bending Chalice started climbing down the bank between the rushes, but his mom's arms held him back. BlazingDragon shook off his dad's hands, jumped down, and started running across the dry pond floor.

He heard them coming after him. The thing bounced and squawked. It lifted its head and looked at him. It was a baby dragon. It was obviously a baby. It's head was large, it's wings were small, and it was only the size of a labrador retriever. A fat one. The huge eyes blinked and without thinking, he rubbed around its eye ridges and down its neck. “There, there. I've got you.”

The tall man opened a satchel and handed Bending Chalice something like a dark fat carrot. “Here, son, why don't you see if he's hungry.” The mother made a convulsive move but let him take it.

“Here, baby,” he whispered, wiggling it with one hand. Everything was quiet. The storm had blown itself out. The baby munched messily.

“Well,” the stranger said, “well. Here I have been following this pod up from Florida watching for babies, and now I don't know what I've got.”

“Following?”  “What do you mean? It's a dragon!”  “Didn't I see you up on Whitetop tonight?”

“Yes, I was there. Yes. But what kind of dragon? Some kinds of dragons lay eggs and leave them, like sea turtles. Some watch their eggs, and some – some seem to bypass eggs at times. Lightning dragons are supposed to be able to. That's what I was hoping to see. I looked for a large, active pod and followed it.”

“He's mine! I found him!”  “No, you can't keep a dragon.”  “But look at him.”

“To begin with, he's a wild animal. And no, you can't keep him. But I'm collecting dragons for a sanctuary and you can come visit him.”

That was how it began. Nobody slept much the rest of the night. The next morning Franklin came back for them and took them up to the floating island. Lightning Dragon Master Olivine had been studying the baby. She determined that he was a Plasma dragon, a Lightning-Water hybrid. The boys named him ShockWave. They liked the eggs at the nursery, and helped them hatch: Lightning, Sonic, Storm, Current, and Magnetic. They liked Norbert and Nippy. They enjoyed learning to play magic flutes with PonytailGirl and Spiderdog to help calm the hatchlings. But nothing can ever take the place of a baby dragon that you discovered yourself in the middle of a thunderstorm.

One visit when both parents were present, Master Rudna sat them down and told them about the Fire statue and the prophecy. “The places in the poem,” she said, “Thessaly and the rest, are in Greece and Turkey. All of them have tall mountains named Mount Olympus. The names in the last verse are dragons from old folk tales. A desert hermit once had an Earth dragon called Zector. The hermit died, and the dragon was famous for waiting for him to return. A Metal dragon named Slameg the Singer helped Morison the miner find the veins of purest ore. He beat time with his tail. Kessi was a Water dragon who was known for saving people from drowning."

 "One of the places is Cyprus," added Master Dalfgan. "We are interested in it because they still have  sightings of a sea monster near Ayia Napa in the southeast. It's similar to the Loch Ness stories."

Their parents would not let them go alone on a mysterious quest. Bending Chalice was after all only five, and BlazeDragon was ten. “Oh, you're absolutely right,” agreed Dalfgan. “Parents should come."
The first expedition was scheduled in two weeks. They were going to the Mount Olympus in Thessaly, the famous one, because the wizards knew the area very well. Erudine power crystals had been mined there for centuries.

The thing that worried the wizards was Euboea. According to the inscription, one of the shrines was there. Unfortunately, that was also the location of the Scar of the World, an ancient Greek name for a large crack that had opened up and split off a 90-mile long piece of Greece from the mainland, creating the island of Euboea. Only the wizards remembered that the cataclysm had been caused by an attempt to meddle with a magical ruby monument that had stood there. There was no way to know if the shrines were equally dangerous.