Project iDragon

005 pt. 2 Night Out With the Dragon

Whether he understood me or not, he spread his wings silently, taking the form of the night as the low shine of street lights seems to dim in his presence. Without a backwards glance he beat his wings twice and took off into the sky.

For me, it wasn't quite that simple. Being a human with nothing that could qualify as wings, I was stuck doing the dangerous teenager thing since sneaking out of a second story window – even though my sister was fast asleep and my parents weren't even home – was the best idea I could think of at the time. Luckily there as a convenient tree growing against the opposite side of the house – so convenient in fact, that if this were a story, some would probably say it was only planted for the reason to further the plot along.

I quickly light stepped across my roof's steep incline, and prayed to God that my sister didn't wake up and think we were being robbed (not my first time on the roof, and wouldn't be the first time she called the cops on me). I peered over the edge of my roof and had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up. If I was the sort of person who was afraid of heights, I would have certainly emptied my stomach over the edge, but as it stood, my entire body wasn't feeling too good either way I stepped over the gap between the roof and the tree and started making my way back to solid earth.

And to further prove that I hadn't really thought my plan through, I found that I had to make a ten-foot jump from the lowest branch to the ground. To put things simply, after finally making it to the lawn I found that I wasn't dead, but my ankles weren't exactly singing my toons either.

I found Slephon waiting impatiently at the base of the tree. He nudged at my ankles when I didn't get up and I hissed under my breath making him scamper back a few steps in the surprise.

"Don't worry about it," I told him as I rose to my feet. "I just learned that there's a reason we installed a front door, that's all." He offered my hand a soft nip in consolation then bounded around the yard, waiting for me to lead the way. I smiled despite the dark and limped across the yard toward the main street.

"Follow me," I reminded him even though there was no need. Since the moment, he had pushed away from that car, he hadn't left my side – maybe once or twice to try and catch the neighbor's cat or inspect the falling leaves – but he always came back. There were a thousand things to fear when taking care of a dragon, but with Selphon, running away was not one of them.

Together, Selphon and I took to the night. We stayed away from the main roads, and Selphon walked as much of the way as possible so not to attract any unwanted attention (I mean, come on, what would you do if you saw something the size of a dog flying around your neighborhood at night?) A few times we had to cut into people's yards when cars came just a little too close, but with the hours and the misty weather, there weren't too many traversing the night for leisure.

There was a small children's park on the other end of a nature walking path on the other side of my house. But the woodlands one had to walk through to get to the park were too eerie to make the place a high destination for children (if anything it was the nature trail itself that got the most attention since it was a highly recommended hot spot for the city's writing community – they even set up picnic tables with charging port just off the path), and resulted in the place not receiving the proper maintenance it needed. For the most part, especially in the wee hours of the night, it was abandoned.

Selphon was able to ditch the shadows once we came to the nature trail. The half naked branches allowed for little light to see by, but a greater paranoia restrained me from flicking on my phone light. I shivered against my jacket and played with the drawstring of my bag nervously, trying to ignore the fact that it was digging into my shoulders. My dragon bounded up ahead until I couldn't see him in the thick darkness, only hear the snaps of twigs he stepped on and his chirps of surprise as his wings got caught in something they shouldn't have.