The Legend of Puff
Chapter One
Puff looked down.
The drop was hundreds of feet - thousands, maybe, he thought with a gulp. His sharp little claws kneaded the ground, anchoring him more firmly to the rock beneath his paws, and he closed his wings resolutely. If he had his way, he would still be in the warm, toasty egg. There was no way he was going to jump off this cliff, it was absolutely ridiculous, when his mother told him to she must've been joking...
He shot a glance at her, and she growled, motioning with the tip of her tail to the empty air that Puff was supposed to be flying through.
Puff gave a whine and cringed under her intense gaze, but didn't spread his wings. No siree, no flying for him...
His mother approached him, and he skittered away. But he couldn't move fast enough, not with his long tail trailing behind him, catching on rocks and slowing him down, and she caught him.
He flapped his wings feebly, trying to show his mother that the thin membrane couldn't hold him up in the empty air, and opened his eyes to the fullest extent, pleading in all his cuteness. It worked for a lot of dragons, why couldn't it work on his mother?
His mother was not impressed. She looked at him with half-hooded eyes, and he shrugged apologetically.
Still holding him, she began to move toward the entrance of the cave.
Puff closed his enormous eyes. He knew what was coming, and he didn't want to see it –
Nothing was holding him up. He was plummeting toward the forest below, eyes still tight shut, and he knew there was only one way to stop his descent –
Phwoom! His wings caught the air, and he rose on the current of wind, drifting gently from side to side.
He opened his dark black eyes, and looked down.
He blinked at the trees speeding by on the ground below, at the sea sparkling to his left, and the mountain peak that reared up in front of him.
Haltingly, he folded one wing, and dipped down a few feet. It was as easy as walking - easier, even, for the wind supported his over-long tail, and he could go as fast as he wanted without its weight tripping him up.
What had he been afraid of?
He gave a crow of delight, and flapped his wings, marvelling at the way they caught and held the rushing wind. He could go anywhere with these.
Free! Free as a bird? Birds were not free. They were prey. Prey... His stomach grumbled, and he kicked his little paws in delight at the thought that he was old enough to catch his own dinner, and not rely on his parents and the other dragons in the nest to regurgitate their own kills for him.
And to think - just a few minutes ago he had wished he was back in his eggshell! The eggshell was for babies - he, Puff, was already six weeks old. Six weeks old and flying.
The wind gusted against him, and he fought it, feeling generation-old instinct vibrating inside him. He knew - for the first time - that he was born to fly.
Night Fury.
The words seemed to whisper in the trees' branches, and sigh in the sea's waves. He knew that he wasn't a pure-blooded Night Fury, but did it really matter if there was some Zippleback in him? You couldn't really tell. Sure, his scales were tinted slightly green, and the double tail of the Zippleback seemed to have combined into one extra-long Night Fury tail, but he had inherited the wings of a Night Fury, and that's what mattered.
The opposing wind blew again, and pushed him backwards slightly. He looked up for the first time, and saw dark stormclouds looming over the sky.
A mile away, another was looking up at the gloomy sky. This was not a dragon. He was a small boy, with thick hair that stuck out from under his horned helmet in a spray of shocking orange, and huge, forest green eyes.
He turned back the way he had come, and the small stones that made up the path he had been walking crunched under his heel. With the presence of an oncoming storm, he felt small under the massive slate sky, small and exposed. Behind him and around him, dark pines stuck from the ground, pointing to the heavens like signposts. Ahead of him on the path, lay the same black trees, cloaked in dusky green needles and sheets of yellow dripping moss.
He shivered. He didn't want to be caught outside in a storm, and the mountainside was creepy enough without pattering sounds of rain and roars of thunder and flashes of lightning that illuminated things better left unseen.
Especially the thunder. He hated thunder. It scared him - it reminded him of dragons.
He didn't know what exactly frightened him about dragons. The small ones made him jumpy, the way they skittered and hopped and snapped with sharp little fangs. The larger ones emitted an aura of pure power that intimidated him, and made him want to run to his mother and have her gather him up in her arms. His father wouldn't comfort him, not if the problem was with dragons, but he didn't need him. He was seven. Too old to be consoled by his father anyway.
He was halfway back to his village when the storm broke.