Chapter 2: Lost

The dragon was beautiful. It's giant wings beat in the air like a tremendous bird. It's tail snaked out behind it. The silver skin shone brilliantly as the sunlight gleamed off it.

"I have to be dreaming," I said aloud. I swallowed hard as I continued to stare at the dragon, mesmerized by it. I finally took my eyes off it and looked back to the men. They didn't seem at all concerned about the dragon. They just continued marching onwards, their faces grim.

The dragon let out a tremendous roar. The men stopped their march, one of them shouting orders. I glanced back up to the dragon. He was holding his place above the men, looking at something in the sky that was in the direction the men were marching to. I followed the dragon's gaze. It was another dragon! It was flying right at the silver dragon. The new dragon had skin of deep blue. The men below the silver dragon were making a formation of some sort, the leader still yelling out orders.

The dragon roared once again. The new dragon was closing in. At almost the same time, both dragons opened their maws and tremendous jets of flame burst forth. The silver dragon missed the blue one as it dove under the fires. The silver one was hit by the blue though, and it looked like it had gotten hit in the face.

Several of the men below the dragons suddenly unleashed a volley of arrows at the blue dragon. Many missed their mark, but several hit the blue. The stream of arrows ended, and I heard the men's leader calling for them to reload their bows. As I watched, many things began bursting out of the ground around the men. Their decaying flesh still clung in some parts to their bodies. They were clad in old, dirt-encrusted armor. Their rusty weapons still looked mean. They began to shamble towards the men.

The men cried out as the zombies fell upon them, their old blades hacking into the men. I could see the small army of men trying to come around, to rebuff this new attack. But it didn't look like they were doing very well. The zombies could take hits that would kill a mere man.

I looked back up at the dragons. The silver one was losing badly. Their breaths of flames had gone, and the blue one now swooped around the silver one, raking at him with his talons, or biting into him with his teeth. I could see the blood on the silver one even from where I was. The blue one took another pass that was a vicious attack. The silver one began to plummet lifelessly to the ground. With horror, I realized that he was falling right towards me.

I began to run, moving as hard and as fast as I could. The silver dragon slammed into the hill behind me, where I stood only seconds ago. He slid down the hill, his body careening down where I had climbed up the hill. I stopped and looked back at the battle in the valley, my breath coming fast in my unexpected exercise. The dragon was now swooping down into the men, picking a few up at a time with his gigantic feet. He would then fly high into the air and let his captives go, letting them fall to the ground. Between the zombies and the blue dragon, the men were getting decimated.

It was over before too long. After all the men that had tried to run away had been struck down, the zombies began to crawl back into the ground where they had come from. The blue dragon flew over the battleground for a few more minutes, to watch for any survivors, I suspected. He took one last pass over the dead men, then he saw me. I froze. He could kill me in an instant. He hovered there for a heartbeat, his wings steadily beating, holding him aloft. He seemed to be deciding if it was worth it to kill one lone teenage boy. He gave out a roar that shook the ground all around me. I fell to my knees and very nearly wet myself. I thought for sure that I was going to die right then and there. But the dragon must have decided that I was absolutely not worth the time it would take to kill me. He turned and flew back in the direction the men had been marching to. I watched his huge form fade away until he was a speck in the distance.

I got to my feet and ran as fast as I could back to the tunnel. This was crazy. This world was like something out of World of Quest, or out of one of my fantasy novels. Only those places were make believe. This was real. I had seen enough, and now that I could have gotten killed by an actual dragon, I just wanted to go home.

I stopped as I got down the hill to where the tunnel was. The silver dragon's body lay on the hill, its dead body covering the tunnel. There was no way I was going to be able to move it. I sat down on the ground and stared forlornly at the dragon's corpse. What was I going to do now? I was trapped in this place, with no way to go home. It was like being inside the World of Quest game, with no way to turn the game off.

It felt like I sat there for an hour or more, but I'm sure it was less. I finally stood up and started walking. If I was trapped here, then I would need to find out more about this world. I needed to find a village or something where I could talk to people who could tell me about this place. I climbed to the top of the hill and looked all around me as far as I could see. I saw no signs of civilization. To what I guessed was the north of me, dark clouds hung distantly in the horizon. Plus, that was where the blue dragon had come from, so that didn't seem like a direction to go. To the east of me was the dead men and the woods on the other side of the valley. South and west both had more and more hills. I figured that I could get into the woods and climb up trees to get a better look around. So hitching my backpack over my shoulders, I started walking.

I gave the battleground a wide berth. I had thought about taking one of their swords, or maybe even raiding some of the corpses for money, but I felt really uneasy about stealing from dead men. Besides, I didn't know what had made those zombies come up out of the ground like they had. They may have been reacting to the presence of those men, and my going into that area might cause them to rise up again. So I definitely avoided the area of the battle.

It didn't take me very long to reach the woods. I generally kept walking in the direction I thought was east. I wished that I had brought a compass with me, but I wasn't thinking that I would need something to help figure out the direction I was going. I told myself that the next time I went exploring in some strange tunnel near my home, that I would have to remember to bring a compass.