He should be more careful. He had enough experience with strangeness happening to him in the forest that he knew better than to risk it, but if this was the forest dragon, then he wanted to find her.
A sense of movement overhead caught his attention.
Jason paused, looking up.
High overhead, the canopy seemed to part. As it did, a pair of deep green eyes looked down at him.
He smiled. Glancing behind him, he saw that the iron dragon and the other two were still quite a ways away, so Jason approached the tree, crawling up the trunk, working his way up toward the dragon. He had done this once before, and he understood what was involved, and he knew to dig his heels in as he worked his way up.
Each movement came slowly, and he dragged himself along the tree, pulling himself. By the time he reached the dragon, he was breathless.
His body ached, but he was not willing to let go. He looked around and saw no other movement in the forest. There was a sense of the height. A wind blew through the trees, though it didn’t make any sign of trying to push him off. He met the forest dragon’s eyes.
“You summoned me here,” he said.
The dragon watched him. She blinked.
When she did, something seemed to shift. She shimmered, colors swirling along her spine, and then disappeared.
Jason cocked his head to the side, studying her. “An illusion?”
The dragon shifted. She did so subtly, with barely more than a hint of movement, and as she did, the trees seemed to sway. It was almost as if a wind caught Jason’s tree, moving it. There was no sense of being tossed from the tree, no worry on his part that he might be thrown free, and yet Jason still held on tightly, afraid of what might happen.
The illusion shifted again.
This time, he was certain of what he saw. He stared at the dragon, frowning.
What was she trying to show him? Was it just about the illusion?
She had a way of camouflaging herself within the trees.
“I don’t understand. Can you tell me why you summoned me here?”
The dragon turned again, and there came a certain sense of movement once more, almost as if the leaves were fluttering overhead. As he watched, he realized where that sense came from. It was from within the dragon, and it was her scales seeming to shift, the color sliding along them.
Not just a camouflage, but the dragon using a sense of illusion.
He watched, focusing on what she did, thinking about the power involved. Was there any way for him to replicate that?
He didn’t have the same connection to power. And he didn’t have the same link to the forest dragon. There had to be some way to understand what the dragon was able to do, though as he focused on the dragon, he still didn’t understand any better.
“Can you speak?” Looking at the dragon, he had to think she would have some way of communicating, but so far, she hadn’t said anything to him. Maybe she couldn’t.
If so, why not?
The other dragons all were able to speak, most of them easily. Why wouldn’t this dragon be able to do the same?
The dragon just watched him, saying nothing. It got to the point where Jason no longer expected that the dragon would be able to say anything to him, but he thought there would be something he could learn from the dragon. If she did have some ability to camouflage herself, and if there was anything he could learn from it, then he needed to better understand it. When it came to heading to Lorach and trying to know what was there, recognizing the camouflage, recognizing what he could do, was going to be important.
The dragon pressed her face forward.
She rested her head on the branch nearest him, and Jason looked into her eyes. She said nothing, though he had a sense of power from her.
“If you can’t speak, do you have any other way of communicating?”
She pulled her head back and the colors swirled along her scales once again. It happened briefly, quickly, and it was a flash of color that then faded.
As quickly as it happened, Jason wasn’t sure what it was, but then it was gone.
She could speak in colors. She could camouflage, and she could create an illusion, and she could speak in colors. If he were to communicate with her, he would have to find some way of understanding those colors.
For his part, Jason didn’t know if there would be any way to understand anything. He needed some way to reach her, and yet, without comprehending how she was trying to communicate with him, what she was trying to say, there might not be anything for him to learn here.
He stared. She seemed to understand him.
“Can you understand what I’m saying?”
The colors shimmered along her spine again, spreading out to her scales. As they did, it looked almost like leaves fluttering in the breeze. Nothing more than that.
Jason glanced down at the forest below. No one was moving. There should be signs of Sarah and Henry, but he didn’t see them. As he focused on the forest, thinking about the sense of the others down there, he realized he didn’t even detect the dragon.
Had she somehow cut him off?
He turned his attention back. “Is that your doing?”
The dragon pressed her head forward and breathed out heavily.
“I don’t know what that means.”
The colors along her side shimmered again, and as they did, Jason held tightly. His grip was starting to slide, and if he didn’t move soon, he might slip down the side of the tree.
“I want to understand you.”
The dragon used her strange ability again. The colors shimmered, leaving him uncertain as to what she was doing and what she was trying to get across to him. The more he stared at her, the more certain he was that she was trying to communicate with him, but he didn’t really understand. It was a strange sensation, and he couldn’t help but think there was something more that he needed to know, to understand, and yet as he strained, trying to focus on the dragon and the colors she showed, he wasn’t able to come up with anything.
“The other dragons have some way for me to communicate with them. They can talk with me.” He shifted, wrapping one arm around the tree, and tried to pull his hand up, revealing the iron dragon glove. “With the iron dragon, I have a different way of connecting to him. Do you have anything like that?”
With the ice dragon, there was a shared heritage. Because of his familiarity with the cold of the ice and the stone, Jason had a connection to the ice dragon that he didn’t have to the iron dragon. But because of what had happened with the iron dragon, the way the pearl had melted around his hand, he wondered if there would be some other way for the forest dragon to reach him.
She pressed her head forward and stretched past him.
Jason was nearly thrown free from the trunk of the tree, and he scooted around, trying to hold tightly to the trunk, but the strange way that she moved, slipping around him, made it so that he was unstable. He scrambled and squeezed his heels, holding on.
A part of her back glittered strangely.
Jason stared at it. When he had seen her before, there had been no glittering like that, and the more that he stared, the more he wondered if there was some reason for it to do that.
The colors swirled, taking on orange and red tones and hues of brown. Then they flashed back to a deep forest green.
He reached for that part of her, touching it, and when he did, it came free.
He held up his hand and his breath caught.
Even up close, the scale looked something like a leaf. It was small, easily smaller than the size of his palm, and there were three points to the leaf, with veins running through it. Colors swirled off to the side when he tipped it, and it had a smooth texture to it.