“We’re on the right track,” Marie announced, for perhaps the third time in an hour. Of course there was no evidence that they were going the right direction. Nothing suggested they were going wrong either.
“Sure we are,” Helen said. “An’ maybe we’re not just wastin’ our time here tryin’ to find something that doesn’t exist. It’s just marketing, Marie. I don’t know how to tell you. But if there was really somethin’ goin’ on, the whole bloody army would be here. There ain’t no dragons.”
She was briefly drowned out by the sound of a helicopter from overhead—the third one that had flown over them in the last hour. More than their village usually had in a year.
It wasn’t an army helicopter, at least not as far as Marie could see. Just plain white, with letters on the side she couldn’t read. No guns, no soldiers flying it, nothing.
“Explain that,” she said, pointing up at it anyway. “Obviously someone wants to look.”
“It’s too soon to say,” David interjected. Once she’d said anything, it wasn’t all that unusual for him to take her side. But at least he was polite about it. “We’re looking for something really big, so at least it should be easy to find. If it went this way, it would’ve left tracks somewhere.”
Helen didn’t argue with him, even if she might’ve kept it going with Marie.
Thanks. “The river is that way… it’s real muddy since last night. Maybe the dragon got thirsty.” She pointed, and the three of them set off again. David kept the camera in hand all the time, the little square of a GoPro atop a hand-sized tripod. He seemed to be recording far more than he needed to, since they hadn’t found anything interesting yet. He’s probably just humoring me.
“It’s gonna be late in another few hours,” Helen said. “Sooner or later, we’ve got to go back to my place for supplies. I promise not to mention this at school tomorrow when we don’t find bloody anythin’.”
Marie grinned snidely back. “And I promise not to make fun of you when we take awesome video of this dragon eating a deer or something, and we’re all over the news. I’ll say all three of us were brave explorers and we can be on the talk shows together. Even though you were complaining the whole time.”
Helen rolled her eyes, but she didn’t say anything else. Just trudged along in her sandals. That pretty white dress and her bare legs were getting progressively covered in mud the further they got. Marie’s boots might be old and too big, but at least they kept her feet nice and dry.
David stuck out an arm, so suddenly she almost smacked right into him.
There was no way for her to miss this. The muddy riverbed now bore the impression of something gigantic, like a horse had fallen over in the mud. The sun was out now, and had done a fairly good job drying the print.
David pointed his camera directly at it, circling slowly around.
“There’s a claw there…” Marie said. “Not a hoof. Look up front. Those are lines for the fingers.”
“Or maybe it’s just some weird lines from a stick or something,” Helen said, though her voice had lost most of its amusement. Replaced with the first trace of genuine curiosity from her.
“I don’t think that’s what they’re called,” David said, though not very loudly. “Is that a wing, you think?”
Marie followed his gesture, then bent down to scoop up a bright pink feather that had been stuck in the mud. She cleaned it between two of her fingers, holding it out.
It was longer than any songbird’s feather she’d ever seen—more like an eagle or a bird of prey. Except that it was bright pink.
“Oh, I see what this is.” Helen’s eyes widened, and she took a step back. “This is a prank. Like crop circles, yeah? Someone up and thought that they could pull one over on dumb kids like us. Pink feathers, honestly… it’s just painted. That’s not even a very clever prank. That dragon was orange, and it didn’t have feathers. It ain’t no bloody dinosaur.”
“Or it’s real.” David extended a hand, and took the offered feather. “We could use paint thinner on it, see if the color comes off.” He handed the feather back, twisting around so his huge backpack faced Marie. “I’ve got plastic bags in the outside pocket. We can keep the sample in there.”
As silly as he sounded, Helen didn’t mock him. It looked like the effort cost her a little, but in the end she just turned away. “I hope this was good enough. This is what you came for, yeah? Somethin’ real silly you can point to and claim it was proof the dragon came this way. Now we can go home, and you can tell me you were right and I was wrong.”
“No,” David and Marie said together.
“There was more than just a dragon. Maybe… maybe someone’s magical farm animals…” But she trailed off. It sounded so stupid when she put it like that. “There was more than just a lizard on the boat,” she finally said. “And this means they came this way. Look.” She pointed into the mud. There was a set of clawed footprints leading away from the hole, and patches of clean grass around it. “Anything interesting out here, David? Check your map.”
David immediately rushed to obey, flipping his backpack onto the ground at his feet and digging around in it.
But Helen cut him off. “Don’t bother. I downloaded an app for this. The only things out this way are…” She scrolled around on her expensive phone for a few seconds. “There’s the river, obviously. We’re looking at it… the barrow… and a cave. Barrow has a nice fat lock on it. Maybe we could check the cave? Popular spot for vagrants and gypsies, but maybe it’s got dragons in it this time.”
“Sure,” David said. “Yeah, we could do that.” He hoisted his backpack, which rattled and clanked as he did so.
“But after, we’re done,” Helen said. “That’s it.” She stuck her hand out towards Marie. “Promise?”
She never would’ve agreed ten minutes ago. But now… now that seemed like any easy promise to keep. There were tracks in the mud, and they seemed to be leading straight for the cave. This should be simple.
“Deal.”
But things weren’t as simple as she initially thought. The tracks away from the river went less than fifty feet before they stopped abruptly, melting into the grass and the rock and the ground too torn-up to show tracks effectively.
“Getting nervous yet?” Helen asked, tapping her fingers happily against the screen of her phone.
“I am,” David said, apparently not bothered by the lack of a trail. “Are we… are we sure going to the cave is such a good idea? I mean… they might not want visitors. That dragon wasn’t that big, but it might still eat meat. We’re made of meat.”
“Special effects artists eat sweets,” Helen said. “They’re just computer nerds. And they won’t be out here. The more of this I see, the more I think it’s all faked. Like those videos that can fake who’s talking so you can put whatever words you want in someone else’s mouth? That’s this. None of it is real.”
The cave itself seemed ominous enough to Marie on its own—a stone fissure in the rock that rose just a little taller than she was. An adult would probably have to squat to get inside, and the space beyond was even darker than the entrance.
She put out a hand to stop them, raising it to her lips. Helen didn’t argue, though from her expression it looked like she wanted to. Or maybe she just wanted to say something snide.
“Can you hear that?”
Helen listened intently. There was no way she would miss the sound coming from the cave. Like a snore, but… deeper, more resonant. Like it came from several different mouths.
David nodded. “Sounds big.”
“Psh.” Helen waved a hand. “Sounds like wind to me. There’s not gonna be anything here.” She turned away, lifting her phone into both hands. “You satisfy your curiosity. I’ll be here not getting even dirtier than I already am.”
“Do you have a flashlight, David?”
He stopped, rattling around in his backpack for a few seconds before producing a pair of elastic headlamps. Once he pushed the button on each one, it shone bright enough to be hard to look at even in direct sunlight.
“Keep an eye on my pack,” he said, setting it down against a tree beside where Helen was standing. “Okay? It would slow me down if something happened in here.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen,” she said, but she didn’t put up much of a fight. Not with him.
“Got your camera?”
He held it up in response, grinning. “Let’s find us a dragon.”
Ocellus was at that moment suffering a bit of a minor meltdown.
She had woken after only a few hours of uncomfortable sleep on the cave floor, after being spoiled for so long by comfortable beds at the School of Friendship. Pharynx had said that living with ponies would make her soft, and he’d been right about that.
But it was voices that had woken her, voices speaking in that same strange local accent and sounding like they were very nearby. She almost changed into something small, crawled away into the dark recesses of the cave and let one of her friends deal with it.
But she’d become more responsible since her exposure to Equestria. Instead of hiding, she would step up to protect her friends.
Just about every creature needed more sleep than a changeling, so it didn’t surprise her that none of her companions hadn’t been woken up. They couldn’t help with this even if they had. There were tools at her disposal that none of the others had.
A pair of footsteps started splashing their way through the cave entrance. They didn’t sound very large, and that might’ve reassured her if they were still in familiar territory. Whatever creature was coming was something she could get away from, or at least fight.
But that was no benefit here. The locals had managed to break a dragon scale without enchanted weapons—or maybe they enchanted so well that Ocellus hadn’t even been able to sense their spells. Either way, she had no desire to anger them.
She toyed with the idea of changing into something dangerous—but she didn’t actually know what sort of predators lived out here. Maybe the locals had already exterminated all their timberwolves. Maybe they wouldn’t be afraid of a cockatrice. Or maybe they would be so frightened by whatever monstrous form she took that they used a weapon that could break dragon scales on her. She didn’t think anyone but Sandbar in their group could survive such an attack.
There’s one kind of creature I know they don’t have. No changeling in the world had ever mentioned creatures like this, or a strange land with endless machines and tiny furless things. And so far as she’d seen, there was no sign of pony habitation here.
They’d shipwrecked on a strange island. But even so, the new would seem less dangerous than a monster. When we shipwrecked, the aliens didn’t attack Yona. Only Smolder’s fire-breath scared them.
There was no danger of Ocellus accidentally breathing fire.
She stopped short of actually keeping her natural shape, though. Some deep, fundamental instinct in the back of her mind refused to allow her to show herself to a stranger who was also some other creature.
While she deliberated, the voices were getting closer. She had to leave now if she didn’t want them to stumble into the others.
Ocellus changed into her usual unicorn shape—looking almost the same as she was, save that it was a little less sunken, a little more natural. She glanced once at her sleeping friends, then turned to surge forward into the water. She lit up her horn, and wasn’t too surprised to see what seemed to be lit horns coming from down the cave.
Except that these horns of light were on the heads of the flat-faced aliens, not ponies.
“Hello!” she called, quiet enough that she hoped none of her friends would wake up. “I guess you found our hiding spot.”