Inferno Legacy: Valor of the Dragon (Book One)

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

            Blackscales awoke at about five the next morning feeling wonderfully refreshed and ready to go. While he was amazed at how little sleep he needed, he figured that he was going to need less and less over time, thanks to being a dragon rider. His eyesight was growing sharper as well, since he could clearly make out Omen’s sleeping figure in the gloom.

            The rider pulled himself out of bed and paced the room almost silently, thinking about what he should do until the others woke up. He finally decided to just go down the stairs to the tavern and see if he could overhear anything exciting. With as much stealth as he could manage, Blackscales opened the door and slipped out of the room. There was a draft coming from a hole in the wall, though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. He was suddenly reminded to visit some sort of clothing shop before they left the town.

            As he stomped down the stairs, he wrapped z

his coat tight around himself and pulled it halfway over his face. He was somewhat sad but not surprised for some reason when he saw the same woman at the counter, scrubbing at a glass in a futile attempt to get it clean, but what dirtied it so much in the first place was beyond Blackscales. He tried to hide his surprise when he saw Autumn seated at the bar with a glass of plain water.

            “What are you doing awake so early?” Blackscales asked, sitting in a bar stool next to her.

            Autumn seemed to be in deep thought when she heard him, but ignored it before she smiled and replied, “I woke up at about midnight, and had a hard time getting to sleep after that, you know Aval’s snoring will keep you awake if you’re within a league of him. I imagine I’ll pass out on the road later.”

            Blackscales laughed at her words, and then suddenly noticed that she was staring at her glass in deep concentration again, and it was beginning to confuse him. He tried to ignore it, twisting around and staring at the different parts of the tavern to see what he could. All he saw was an immense amount of evidence that there had been a bar fight the previous night with likely a few gold in repair costs.

            “What’s on your mind?” he finally asked after twisting back around to face his friend.

            Autumn looked at him with an almost regretful stare before she replied, “My mother. Ever since our father left when we were only four years old, me and Aval have been cared for solely by our mother. She worked hard over the years, spoiling us and being overprotective of us. It seems sort of cruel for me and my brother to just abandon her like that after what she did for us, and there isn’t even a guarantee that we’ll survive our adventure, let alone come home again.”

            Blackscales felt his own misery at leaving his parents, but it was probably much less than hers, since his parents relied more on independence and him raising himself. He felt a bit heartless at his lack of emotion upon leaving his home town, but he quickly overcame it with a new belief he received; that he was meant to go on the trip ever since he was born. He did understand how Autumn might have felt, since he had seemingly felt more love from her than his own mother anyway.

            He suddenly noticed that he had stopped looking at Autumn after she first spoke to consider his own feelings. When he looked back, he saw that a single, pale silver tear streaked down the side of her face until reaching her jaw and stopping right next to the long scar that Inferno had given her. The rider was seated to the right of her, and since the scratch was on the left side of her face, he could only see it a tiny bit with her facing towards him slightly.