Chapter 3
The shock wave from the time-quake struck the present and immediately caused everything around me to suddenly move and shift. Parts of the room appeared to be receding while other parts appeared to be twisting and bending in odd and impossible ways. It wasn't long before the world around me looked like that famous drawing with the stairways going in every which direction. Reality was rearranging itself to conform to the new past and it was quickly becoming difficult to tell up from down, or what any direction was anymore for that matter. Despite all this, I felt no motion at all.
Connor was of course affected by this as well. Without warning, he suddenly appeared to quickly recede into the distance as if he was being pulled to some far away vanishing point. It was a strange and disturbing sight. He was moving away from me rapidly, as if he was falling in a horizontal direction, yet he somehow remained in sight and simply became smaller and smaller. At the speed at which he appeared to be moving, I shouldn't have been able to see him for this long. It didn't make any sense, but little of what I saw did at the moment.
Connor's hope that the gear would protect me from the time-quake seemed to be correct. Reality was in chaos all around me, but so far it was leaving me completely unaffected, even as things became more and more chaotic.
What was once my familiar stable was now a jumble of unidentifiable shapes moving and swirling in every possible direction at once. The sight became more disorienting and dizzying than I could handle and I had to shut my eyes. Instinctively, I tried to hold on by digging my claws into the floor. The only problem was that the floor didn't feel like it was quite there anymore. But it wasn't quite nothingness either. There was something there, but I couldn't quite manage to get my claws into it for some reason. The more I tried to grip it, the more it slid away from me. There didn't seem to be anything firm underneath me, but I didn't seem to be falling either. Nothing was making sense.
Then without warning, I suddenly felt something firm and solid beneath my feet again. I stood still for several long moments, hoping the ground would stay where it was. My eyes were still shut tight and I realized now my heart was pounding and my teeth were clenched. They called me the dragon of legend, but I wasn't ashamed to admit that I still felt fear. Given everything that I had been through, I think I've actually felt fear on more occasions than most dragons. But Connor had given me some key advice a long time ago: He said that only the insane didn't feel fear. What made a brave dragon brave was not being fearless, but instead being able to face the fear and having the will to act and to do what had to be done in spite of the fear. I never forgot that.
The ground had remained stable beneath my feet so far, and so I decided it was time to do what had to be done. I gathered up my courage to take a look. I unclenched my teeth and opened my eyes slowly, uncertain as to what I might see.
