Fight or Flight

Chapter 18

Simon

Flying is the worst thing ever.

I don't have any idea how Katerina can stand it. This is the strongest evidence I have uncovered to date that she is lying to us, and has actually been bewitched by the dragons. I can think of no other reason why someone would willingly get onto one of these sadistic giant bats and allow them to fly you somewhere. It is far easier to believe she was forced into doing it.

Flying is cold. It is loud. The wind is always in your face. The ground is very, very far below you. The only thing keeping you from falling to your death is a dragon, one who in my case I am still completely certain would be just as happy to laugh at me while I fell as to try and catch me.

It is also incredibly boring. I do not know if Enola was simply ignoring me when I tried to talk to her, or if the wind was just too loud for her to hear me, but either way I spent the entire flight in silence. With nothing to do but hold on for dear life.

The only thing that makes it worth considering at all is, perhaps, the speed. Being able to travel in a straight line without having to follow a road out of your way through connecting villages, or around rivers or other obstacles, cuts travel time considerably. And as much as I hate to admit anything positive about this sour pink lizard, she is much, much faster than a horse and cart. Other than a single stop to let Captain Mason's escort know they could turn back, we flew straight here without any interruptions. In a little under half a day she had finished a trip that before had taken me four days by horse.

I personally believe she went out of her way to make the ride as turbulent for me as possible, but she carried the cart in her hands the entire way, and all of the crystals survived the trip without suffering damage. If anything, they seemed to have done even better in her care than had I taken them by horse – the normal nicks and chips I have come to expect were nowhere to be found, and the raw crystals were just as unblemished as when I first pulled them out of the tunnels.

Even with the added convenience, I wish that blue dragon had never brought this saddle. I am certain he worked with Enola to get back at me for annoying her, and that he is laughing at the whole thing from wherever he is now – which, according to Enola, is chasing after some bandits that were spotted around here.

But as much as I hate flying, it does seem to have had some sort of impact on Enola's mood. I would not call her 'cheerful' by any means, but I suspect this is the closest to 'happy' as she is capable of being. She has asked me two questions about the town – why she couldn't land at the soldiers' barracks directly (or, as she called it, the 'knights' castle'), and if we were deliberately taunting dragons by building houses that were so clearly flammable – and while those may not seem like much, that is still more interest in human behavior than I have ever seen in the two months I have known her.

Enola's claim that my close work with the crystals would interfere with magical senses seems to be holding true. I was forced to meet with a court mage as part of this month's delivery, but despite being around him for some time and even touching him as part of handing over the crystals, he did not discover I was a Wellspring, and quickly excused himself on account of a growing headache.

Crystal mining would seem to be an effective way to hide ourselves from magical detection.

Though I still cannot help but wonder – if such a concentrated mass of magical power causes headaches for a mage, and clouds their ability to sense magic...

...why does Enola want to live there?

I do not believe her excuse that dragons are unbothered by the crystals. The blue dragon that occasionally visits Enola has avoided entering her lair each time I have seen him, and kept a noticeable distance from me at other times. It may be that he simply dislikes being around humans or being underground, but I don't think that is it. I think it is more likely that the crystal energies bother dragons the same way they do human mages – meaning we can use it as protection from dragons too – but that Enola is somehow a unique exception to that.