Impossible for anyone to follow me there.
Leave not a single trace of my being,
So that no one knows in which direction I'm fleeing."
Standing in the snow outside the thick white door, he had to make sure that the mantra he'd just cast had taken effect. So he took two steps forward, the snow crunching under his boots as he did so. Twisting his head over his right shoulder, he gazed back at the spot he'd been standing in. His two dirty great footprints were about three inches deep, but as he watched, something quite literally magical happened. A swirl of wind, about the size of one of his boots, appeared from nowhere, directly over one of the footprints. Gently it lowered itself into the print, causing the beautifully formed, crystalline snowflakes to flutter about briefly, before settling back down. The footprint had been wiped away. Moving across to the other footprint, the small swirl of wind did exactly the same again. Smiling at the simplicity of it all, he felt confident he wouldn't leave any tracks, and so very quickly and carefully he started to make his way around the station, to the opposite side to that of the explosion. As he'd hoped, the disturbance had drawn people towards it, and with the exception of one very close shave with one of the base's engineers who was retrieving materials from one of the outbuildings, he completed his journey without being spotted. As sure as he could be that nobody was watching, he put on a burst of speed so that he ended up about five hundred yards away from the nearest outlying building. In his mind, he cut off the tiny trickle of magic that was constantly being drained in covering up his tracks. Widening his footsteps ever so slightly, as if to signify a stagger, he headed directly for the main building, still making sure he wasn't being watched, This, he thought, was where it would hopefully all come together, if, and it was a big if, he still possessed enough magic to cast the final mantra and make everything fit together. Deep inside he knew it was going to be close.
Still staggering towards the main building, he opened his jacket to about halfway, picked up a handful of snow and rubbed it into his hair and face, while at the same time, in his head, searched for the mantra that would ultimately get him back to civilisation and the dragon domain. Knowing what he was about to do was dangerous, in oh so many ways, it was the only thing he could think of that would get him back to somewhere remotely civilised really quickly. Trying to think of the words he needed, he could feel the heat and pain in his back start to build up. Silently, he cursed, knowing that he needed to cast the mantra now. If he could, it wouldn't matter if his back went into total meltdown, in fact, as much as he didn't like to think it, it might just make the whole thing more realistic. Unfortunately the words wouldn't come. For some reason they seemed hard to find, and the heat and the pain in his back were starting to become a distraction. Finally he found them, and accessing the remaining magic available to him, closed his eyes and began to concentrate.
"My skin and body, make them old,
Hard, pale tissue, blackened by cold.
My body overwhelmed by serious frostbite,
Looking like I've been abandoned for many a night."
Just as Flash finished casting the mantra and it began to take effect, his back erupted with fiery slices of pain weaving up and down, left and right. Instantly he dropped to his knees, eventually falling face down into the crunchy, wispy, white snow. In a strange way he stifled a laugh. Although his back hurt more than he thought possible, the changes the mantra were adding to his human shaped physique were undoubtedly more painful.
'Ha... the pain from the mantra is taking my mind off the pain in my back. How ironic is that?' was his last thought before he blacked out, face down in the snow. As he lay there, the mantra he'd cast followed its instructions to the letter, changing Flash's body and using up the last of the residual magic inside it. Mantra makers across the dragon kingdom would have been proud of the results of this particular beauty, even the famed and hard to please... Gee Tee. All across his body, the previously pristine flesh had been replaced by hard, pale skin, blackened dead tissue and horrifying blisters that would put even the most ardent marathon runners to shame. His hands, feet, nose and ears were the worst hit areas, as they would have been if he were genuinely human and had been stranded in the freezing wilderness on his own for a seriously long time. As well as replicating the frostbite down to the last detail, the mantra would also make him appear weak, confused and disorientated. Once he was found, he hoped it wouldn't take the staff at the base too long to figure out that he needed expert medical attention that he could only receive somewhere else... rather a long way away. That was the hope.
He awoke in debilitating pain. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be clear headed and cool underneath all the symptoms of the mantra, clearly the wound on his back was playing a massive part in things, because he felt worse than ever. Managing briefly to get to his feet and stagger some twenty feet or so, before once again blacking out, this round of events continued another four or five times, over the course of how long, he had no idea. Midway through his last excruciating stagger, he heard a scream off to one side. Dropping to his knees, he saw two figures in his peripheral vision running towards him, his life, he thought, was very much in their hands.
Every now and then he'd regain consciousness, vaguely able to remember bright lights overhead, voices, lots of different kinds of voices, and wires and tubes poking out of his damaged body. Eventually he'd lose consciousness all over again, this twisted routine repeating itself over and over again.
The voices weren't getting any clearer. Somewhere inside him, a little thought poked at him, telling him that he really should be able to recognise who the voices belonged to. His mind continued to ignore the thought and continued to hide in the dark recesses that it had made its own. Although he couldn't recognise the people the voices belonged to, he did start to recognise the urgency with which they spoke. Urgency was good, he thought. Urgency would get him out of this frozen hellhole and back to somewhere he could slip into the dragon domain and board the monorail back to London.
Tiny, intricate flakes of snow fluttered past his face, the next time he came round. Panic gripped him. Were they taking him back to the prison? Had he played right into their hands? Before he could find out the answer, he blacked out.
Realising he was somewhere different, he steadied the rising panic within his mind, so that just an underlying nervousness accompanied him. Looking up at a dirty white, narrow ceiling, he could just make out someone barking instructions but they were all but drowned out by an incredibly loud whirring noise that seemed to be everywhere. The sound of a door slamming shut close by made him jump, causing his back to spasm once again, just as the whirring got louder and his body recognised the sensation of movement. He was in some sort of vehicle, he thought fuzzily as his mind struggled to cut through the pain in an effort to make sense of it all. And then, with the noise increasing tenfold, it all became startlingly clear.
'I'm in a plane.' As the comforting feeling of the plane powering into the air tickled his body, a small tear ran down the side of his face.
'I'm going home,' he thought. 'I'm going home.' Once more the darkness took him.