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// An Audience With the Elder 
// Story: Across the Universe 
// by JewishKamikaze 
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	“Fluttershy! Fluttershy wake up! He’s here! Wake—Good morning! Are you ready? The Elder is patient, but we better not keep him waiting.”
“Erumph,” Normally it was Fluttershy who woke Hoov up. Several aerial adventures had passed since she had first heard of the Elder. Her eyes had trouble blinking smoothly as she had the jabbing sensation of crystallization beneath her eyelids. Prying the big yellow chunks from the inner corners of her eyes, Fluttershy exited her abode dizzily and followed a huge number of residents up the staircase. When the blood finally returned to her head, she noticed Tharur in front of her. He was speaking. She caught on to what he was saying midsentence.
“…so aren’t you excited? I mean I haven’t seen him in weeks! He’s always got something to say and he tells of weather patterns and he is just the most sublime! You will love him, I know. We haven’t taken you yet because it’s a little off-putting to see him for the first time. We just let you sleep mostly, along with the young ones and older ones who don’t fancy getting up this early. This one time…”
The one-sided conversation reached the top of the stairwell and strolled along through the forest with the group. Still weary from sleep deprivation and sore from trying a new stunt, Fluttershy was growing cold. The ground was thickly laden with algid dew, and the sky was filled with meager sunlight parallel to the ground, good only for getting in one’s eyes. Everything was frustrating her; there was nothing pleasant. She flicked back her mussed hair and sighed. Then she remembered the towel on her back, the one she took everywhere and used as an oven mitt while cooking. It had a few new brown spots that smelled more like burnt fabric than barbeque sauce, but for now, it served well as a sun visor.
Looking for some way to cheer up, she decided to try her best to smile. 
Tharur smiled back, “…see? I prophesized you’d be excited once you had arisen from your slumber.”
Fluttershy stopped smiling emptily and looked at him with a puzzled expression. She smiled once more, trying to mean it, and even nodded acknowledgingly. Tharur turned around and marched on sprightly.
After some time, Fluttershy’s legs grew weary while the air grew humid. The sun had finally decided that it was high time it heated something up, so it took the dew and confected it into a sticky and uncomfortably warm fog. The dense fog was restricted to a few feet above her, and it permitted her to see only the cloudless blue sky and as far as the third dragon ahead of her: Ezalg, whose bright green and yellow scales were heavily muted by the white veil. Fluttershy’s head drooped down as she fell into steady step behind Tharur, zoned-out.
A distant roar resounded in murky echoes. Fluttershy was too engrossed in her own thoughts concerning the planning of the intricate paths in the dark to be used the following night in order to reach the next thicket of ripened berries to pick. Her mouth watered imagining the crisp crunch each berry yielded and the instantaneous burst of tart liquid that permeated one’s mouth after. 
Again there was a roar, closer, that boomed from far behind. She snapped around and looked up. There was a lanky pillar of rising black smoke. Nobody else seemed to notice, and after a second, a wayward waft of fog obscured her vision, leaving only the heels of Tharur in front of her to see. Confusedly, she turned and kept going.
For a third time, a roar bounced its way into her ear. There was no hiding from the notion. A dragon had just roared. She witnessed the most frightening thing she had come to perceive up to that point. It had bumps on its long snout and sinister yellow teeth that jutted out at equally sinister angles. Its eyes, although distant, were an unavoidably cool, piercing blue. Its rough, scaly, corrupt-turquoise face was followed by a rough, scaly, looming, corrupt-turquoise body and finally a rough, scaly, looming, corrupt-turquoise tail complete with spikes and similar accessories that culminated into a perfect combination of fear, fright, and faintheartedness.
As a direct result of this trembling trifecta, she gasped suddenly, her mouth unhinged to the agape position, and her pupils dilated. The lightness that instantly occupied her chest, the sudden spasm that encompassed her legs and hooves to press the ground away, and the spontaneous way her face seemed to physically radiate a beam of awestruck energy contributed to her state of shock. It was especially terrifying to see it fly against a curtain of black smoke. It wretched another cone of fire downward and dove out of sight.
Fluttershy was stuck with nowhere to run. She witnessed it swoop down right at her from behind a wall of fog, staring down at her and piercing her to the core with its fierce eyes. It glided past her to land with a mighty stomp. In this fell swoop, the fog whooshed away dramatically. Tharur, now fully visible, turned to her excitedly. Awestruck, Fluttershy stood agape at what she saw standing amenably right in front of her. 
“He’s here!” Tharur exclaimed excitedly as he bounced over along with the rest of the trekkers in a big semi-circle around the beast. It looked down benignly at the congregation. From out of a tuft of fog, Nare emerged and put his arm around Fluttershy, who was now shuddering uncontrollably. Her eyes were fixed on the dragon. 
“Come now, Flutter,” Nare insisted. Beneath her, Fluttershy’s legs moved. There was a festive air intermingled with the absolute terror she experienced. Her legs trusted Nare more than the rest of her did. She was led up towards the coiled giant. The dragon sat down with its long, spiked tail in a lazy curl around itself, twitching. In addition, the huge naked membranes of its wings, crisscrossed with thick veins, were half-unsheathed and confiscated a huge partition of local sky. As she crept into its looming shadow, she could hardly bear witness to its grandeur. Dead-center with hundreds of the little dragon-people around her, she strained her eyes up in the most pitiful manner conceivable.
With its whole neck arched back, revealing a line of spikes running centerline through, the dragon had its head facing straight up. It wretched an isosceles cone of flame which extinguished after a brief burn in the sky, leaving only a small black cloud that drifted away leisurely. The dragon looked back down with malevolent-looking eyes.
It loudly seized air from in front of her. It seemed ready to expel it.
“Greetings,” went a low, neutral tone. “I am the one they call the ‘Elder’.”
I’m not dead. Run! Wait. No escape. Talk? How? Say something? What do I do? Um. Um!...
“You must be the… Fluttershy was it?” 
She looked up at him. He had a meaningful but curiously incomplete smile.
I guess it’s worth the effort then.
“Yes I am. It is wonderful to meet your acquaintance,” she smiled back at him. She felt as if another being had commandeered her; controlled chaos had overcome her senses. Fluttershy noticed that one of his outward-jutting teeth was missing; it did not have a counterpart— at least not in its original location.
“I have heard much about you—,” he turned and released a bark of fire at a nearby tree. “My sincerest apologies—I have the worst allergies. I’ve had it for the longest time. Whenever I fly around here, I try to cough on the uninhabited spots.” He chuckled, loosing some jets of smoke as it led into a coughing fit. He directed it upwards once more.
Looking around, Fluttershy noticed that the assembled dragons were not paying all too much attention to the conversation. Mostly they were chatting amongst themselves relaxed. It was surreal.
“So where do you come from?” She inquired, trying to appear friendly and not at all delectable. A cold shiver ran down her spine.
“You seem frightened. I thought this might happen. Almost nothing here eats—other things that live and breathe. Mainly fruits and crops and so on. I am from another part of this world, not too far away. It’s mostly made up of large caves with dragons like me, but none of them are quite like me. They are all odd characters.”
“How so?” forgetting her imagined peril and starting to become intrigued.
“They are characters: one speaks only of the delicacy that is s tangerine peel—if you can believe such a thing—another speaks only of defeating this Galbatorix and being ridden, and still others only of killing humans or sheep. When I inquired as to what either humans or sheep are, they had no idea. Some are blisteringly cool-looking, some speak a language of pictographs I don’t understand, some believe they control the seasons, some are nice and intelligent, and some are nasty… I prefer to speak with ones from Munecom, really.”
“So—so you’re not here to eat me?”
“Eat you? I hardly know you!” he cried. The assembly burst out laughing.
“I can see you are a dragon of the flying sort, too. Odd…” The Elder paused and shakily inhaled, attempting to not provoke any further coughing. He carried the air of having all the time in the world. His eyes were transfixed upon Fluttershy, as if examining every particle. If these kind people accept you, I am to accept you, too,” the Elder stated proudly.”
His blankly staring eyes drew themselves into sudden focus, each of them gazing intensely into hers from each side of the massive skull. “Hm… Zarquon almighty—they gave it to you...” a hushed murmur reverberated from the great gullet, “I see that they have given you a part of me. They must really like you, Fluttershy.” She looked about herself confusedly. “It’s around your neck—losing that tooth wasn’t my most agile feat, but I am honored that they gave it to you.”
“Oh well thank you. It’s an honor sir, really,” Fluttershy mewed.
“Yes, yes. Now…Nare, to other matters: there are storms in the immediate vicinity, two or three days out. It seems best that they roll in…”
After a well-articulated briefing on weather patterns and their effect on the valley as well as the politics of the great dragons living in the land of the caves along with him, the Elder made it clear that he would be leaving. Following a brief coughing fit, he looked back at the only pink and yellow soul in the crowd. “Goodbye, Fluttershy and the people of Butzbik. Until next time.” He heaved upward with a few beats of his great wings. The assembly was buffeted, nearby trees and grass leaned, and it became difficult to open one’s eyes. 
When the air ceased thrashing about, a dark circling figure called from far above, “Fluttershy, I will be passing through the valley every now and again. If you so choose, you may assist me in moving the clouds.”
With that, he soared away over a stalwart marble peak and was gone.
Nare moved his way to the middle of the already wavering semicircle. “Okay, everydragon. Time for breakfast!”