She snatched her hand back with a gasp, the image fading, and stared at the lizard, her eyes traveling over a matching scar on its own features. “It—it’s you,” she breathed.
“That is my true form,” the lizard told her. “The form I take in Ragond. Now come, stop this foolishness. We must leave here at once.”
His true form…he was a dragon. What? That was crazy. Was it crazy? Nova let out a bit of a strained laugh, putting her hand to her forehead as she tried to think about this rationally…as if one could think rationally about a talking lizard who imprinted telepathic images of dragons and, you know, talked. What was she supposed to make of this?
“This is insane,” Zephyr was saying now, shaking Nova’s arm a little and pulling her away again. “Come on, Nova, this…it’s a hallucination or something! It has to be a hallucination! Snap out of it!”
“Pardon me!” the lizard hissed, drawing up to his full seven-foot height and once again towering over them, his eyes flashing as he flicked his tongue out again. “I am no hallucination!”
Zephyr let out another slight shriek, yanking Nova farther away and starting to half-run back into the woods. “No, no, no, no, no!” she gasped. “Nova, come on! We—we need to get the freak away from this freakin’ giant TALKING LIZARD, right now!”
Right, she…she was right. Nova finally let herself be pulled away, running with Zephyr back through the woods, tripping over a couple of loose stones or tree roots in their path and ignoring the splashes of the occasional puddle as they ran straight through them. Neither girl looked back this time or listened when the lizard tried calling them back. They just ran. Finally, they made it back to the house and slowed to a stop, gasping for breath and looking back to make sure the thing hadn’t followed them. They seemed to have lost it, so Nova relaxed a little, leaning over and resting her hands on her knees. She couldn’t believe it. They’d literally been chased from the woods by a talking lizard.
Nova turned back to the house, frowning as she realized all the lights were off inside. Stephanie and Todd must not have noticed they were gone and shut up the house and gone to bed with them outside. She could still climb back in through her window, technically, but...she’d totally called it. They didn’t care two straws about her or Zephyr, and she knew now without a doubt that she just couldn’t go back.
She turned to the forest again, staring into the trees and biting her lip, a strange sort of excitement coming over her now, her heart beating a bit faster.
“Nova,” Zephyr said insistently, grabbing Nova’s hand and starting to look panicked. “Nova, please, come—come inside!”
But Nova couldn’t move. She was rooted to the spot, torn between two impossible paths. How could she go back into a house where she wasn’t wanted, choosing to go back to a life of anxiety and uncertainty, never knowing what tomorrow would bring except that she would never be happy in it? On the other hand, how could she go with the magic, talking dragon-lizard?! It was ridiculous, and she knew that, but…was it really all that unbelievable? Or more like, wasn’t it too unbelievable to be nothing more than a hallucination? She was a pretty creative person, but she couldn’t ever imagine hallucinating something like that—and the fact that Zephyr had seen it, too, made her think maybe it had been…well, real.
“Nova, please,” Zephyr begged her. “Come inside, please, Nova…”
“I…I can’t,” Nova said, stepping away from Zephyr. “I can’t do it. What if I could find my mother?”
“No!” Zephyr exclaimed. “Nova, are you really going to listen to a talking lizard?!”
“Well, which is stranger?” Nova asked, feeling the corners of her mouth twitch into a bit of a smile, despite the situation—or maybe because of it. “The fact that it’s talking, or the fact that it might know my mother?”
“It…I…Nova,” Zephyr said again, biting her lip and looking even more worried, not offering a response.
“Look,” Nova sighed, taking a step back towards the woods. “I can’t miss this chance. I have to try. If you had the chance to see your parents again, even if it seemed crazy, wouldn’t you do it?” She glanced past Zephyr, back to the house, and took another step backward. “I’m sorry. I can’t go back; I’m sorry.”
With that, she turned to run back into the trees and left Zephyr staring after her.
She felt guilty again…but she couldn’t stay there one more day, not if there was even a remote chance she could find her mother.
She made her way back to the clearing, but the lizard wasn’t there.
No…no, it had to still be here, she thought to herself. It couldn’t have vanished already! Feeling a sudden sense of desperation, Nova stood still for a moment, not sure how to get it to come back and reaching up to grasp her pendant, looking around. “Hey!” she called into the night. “Lizard! Come back, please. I’ll listen now!”
There was no response.
Maybe Zephyr was right and she’d imagined the whole thing. She gritted her teeth, shaking away the doubt and starting to search the area. If he’d left, he couldn’t have gone far—and if he’d never even existed, well…she’d go home and chalk this up to some weird, confusing dream she’d tell Zephyr about in the morning. But there were plenty of tracks in the dirt which were too large for the kinds of animals that usually came this close to town, and when she made her way to the part of the woods where the lizard had first appeared, she saw plenty of broken branches and scratches in the trees where the thing must have been climbing. At least there was some evidence he’d been there and she didn’t feel insane, but…where was he?
Maybe she’d missed her chance. She never should have run away. She’d missed her chance, and now she’d never find her mother, never getting her questions answered! She hadn’t meant to screw this up, too. It wasn’t fair. What was she supposed to do now? She couldn’t go back, she just couldn’t—not now, not when she’d been so close to finally leaving!
She groaned, holding up the pendant around her neck again, looking at the dragon etched there and noting how it seemed to glisten in the moonlight, the orange and green streaks in the shining silver even more pronounced than usual. She felt like it was calling to her, or—or like she was calling to it…. She closed her eyes, giving into a fit of childish, foolish wishing. She had to get out of this place; she had to get out right now. What was the lizard’s name again? She frowned, recalling the brief conversation and trying to remember the name it had given, and then, when she remembered it, gripping the pendant tighter and calling it out instinctively.
“Korgad!”
At her call, the lizard appeared in front of her and she instinctively took a step back again, the beast giving her another serious look and then stepping forward, once again bowing his head towards her.
“Touch my head.”
Nova took in a deep breath, stepping forward and reaching out her hand. But this time, when her fingers rested against the lizard’s scales, no image flooded her mind. Instead, the lizard himself lit up in shimmering, copper tones, glowing softly—like her pendant—in the moonlight. The light enveloped him, and under her hand, the beast began to grow and shift, the head changing shape as Korgad’s snout elongated and large horns began to sprout from his head, wings unfurling from his back. He spread them wide, the span easily stretching from one end of the clearing to the other, and shook his head like he’d done earlier to lose the leaves, this time doing it as if he were shaking out a new skin, Nova pulling her hand back and easing away from him to get the full image. His scales were different now, too, having shifted from the dark grayish sort of green of a komodo to the more earthy green she’d seen in her earlier vision, and as he opened his eyes again—his large, expressive, fiery eyes—she saw that they’d also changed to that burning amber, his gaze seeming to pierce her soul.