Chapter Fifty
The last time Frida and Lucky had plunged headfirst through time, she’d been unconscious.
This time, it was reminiscent of her experience of the Kraken’s Rift on Melody’s pier.
Frida almost bit half her tongue off as they spiralled.
Stars whizzed by like fireballs, and in the opaque darkness, pockets of time opened up around them.
Memories. Floating like bubbles in the black soil.
The time when Frida took her first step.
The time when she and her mum had made that ice cream cake and it had melted all over the sofa.
The time when she’d first met Antony and Hamish.
All of it whooshed past and she cried out, desperately trying to reach for them, to grasp those moments which seemed to be happening all at once and all together.
But they were being pulled downwards. Pocket after pocket, time after time tumbled by, as if they were being dragged deeper and deeper by some gargantuan beast. The time when Moira the manticore had tried to snap her hand off.
The time when her mum had cried when she’d heard that David Bowie had died.
The time when she first saw the golden LEZ Gates.
There were other worlds too, worlds that weren’t hers, that she was given glimpses of.
Hamish, no older than eight sitting on a doorstep alone, crying.
Raziel, curled up on a teal velvet sofa being fed sugar cubes.
Lucky chasing capybaras. Her mum as a teenager on the shore of a lake, with wild blue hair and piercings.
A man Frida didn’t know stepping off a ten-storey roof and tumbling, end over end, onto the tarmac.
She screamed when she saw that, her throat burning, as tears ran down her cheeks.
And there was the terracotta dragon, bursting through the cloud on wings of scarlet.
Deep soil and water, sky and fire, everything, everything and nothing.
She breathed it in with great gulping breaths, all that time and earth and life and death and love and loss and magic.
And her heart ached as she stretched her fingers towards the ones she most yearned for, not quite able to reach them.
She didn’t feel the bump coming.
One moment, lost in the pockets and unspooling ribbons, clinging to Lucky.
Then – bump.
It didn’t hurt, per se, but it was a very big bump.
It took her a long time to realise she was alive.
For a while, she just lay there, on that spongy wet ground.
One breath, two breaths, another minute, and she remembered what oxygen was.
She rubbed her eyes. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes again and drew in a disbelieving gasp.
Jungle everywhere, and not Dragon’s Deep jungle either.
This was a green as far as she could see.
This was a green that was wound through the fabric of the very atoms themselves.
This was a green that contained multitudes.
A cacophony of life and death, much like the spiralling galaxies they’d just plummeted through. This was real. This was not the LEZ.
All around her was the thunderous roar of insects, the cries of birds, the howls of jungle cats.
The snuffling of a giant anteater, the ticking vociferous bellow of a colony of ants.
The drone of mosquitos. The air was heavy, and thick steam twirled between the boughs.
Sunlight blazed through the canopy of emerald that seemed to go on forever. A scarlet macaw flew overhead.
‘Little stink?’ Frida heard Lucky’s beloved chirp.
She spun, breaking into a huge smile. Lucky was lying behind her, nestled in a patch of slanting sunlight, his neck craning upwards as he, too, watched the macaw’s red wings arch across the sky.
Peachy-bronze light played over his glassy scales.
He had a blissful look in his saucer-like eyes, and a happy mauve blazed in his belly.
She was about to throw her arms around him, so overjoyed was she to see him, when something moved in the bushes to their left.
Both their heads snapped around, Frida drawing instinctively into Lucky’s chest. Quickly, he pressed his wings around her, pulling her close.
‘What’s that?’ she murmured, peering through his talons towards the undergrowth.
‘There are many scary things in forests.’ Then he paused, collecting himself. ‘But I am not afraid.’ Although he didn’t sound very sure of it.
‘Me neither,’ she said, gripping a dribble-coated strand of his beard in her fist and pressing herself even tighter into the freezing place beneath his neck, the leathery scales across his belly now a dull, terrified maroon.
She could hear his heart like a booming drum.
Then she heard the unmistakable padding of heavy paws coming towards them, and the massive trunks of prehistoric trees bowing backwards, as if asked to do so by a voice neither of them could hear.
Then something – or someone – loomed out from behind the lianas, and for a moment, silver blazed across Frida’s eyeballs, blinding her.
‘DADA!!!!!’ Lucky shrieked.
Frida was nearly trampled as Lucky burst forward, galloping through the undergrowth, straight for a small, silver-scaled dragon.
Her eyes widened in disbelief. This wasn’t a silver like Dian’s, or the corrupt silver of the LEZ.
This dragon was a colour that seemed to belong in the brown soil itself, that ran in seams through the rock and earth, a molten primordial silver that coiled around her mind with talons and smoke.
The jungle seemed to go dim, and quiet.
Inches away from flattening him, Lucky pulled up short, his sides heaving. ‘Oh Dada,’ he whimpered. ‘I missed you so much.’ Great swollen tears welled in Lucky’s golden eyes.
Frida gulped down a sudden knot in her throat.
‘Your dada,’ she mouthed in wonder. How could that be possible?
But even as she thought this, she looked around.
They were in the . And this was Lucky’s father.
Alive! She digested all of this as she marvelled at the silver dragon.
He was a lot smaller than she’d expected, barely a third of the size of his son, smaller even than the terracotta dragon.
Frida quaked in her boots to think how large Lucky’s muma must have been.
But despite his size, a Godzilla-sized power oozed off him.
She remembered the lightning above the woods, the leaden clouds, the silver stars that had seemed to drag them down, and down, and down, and she wondered.
‘My son.’ His voice was like Thor’s silver hammer, and his eyes were the same molten ore as Lucky’s.
Lucky let out a cry of joy, thrusting his adoring snout into his father’s chest, giggling like a desperate wild bird. ‘Dada!’ he chirped. ‘Oh Dada, I thought I’d never see you again.’
Lucky’s father chuckled, a deep rumble of a massive rock shifting below the earth.
Gently, he nuzzled his son, as Frida tried to surreptitiously brush away her tears, but they’d been falling thick and fast. She was bone-tired.
Overjoyed for Lucky, yet acutely aware of a stab of pain so sharp it felt like a broken rib.
A fragment of her own loss, floating in her chest.
When the silver dragon turned his ancient, whiskered face towards her, she caught her breath.
There were so many wrinkles around his scarred face, his eyes were almost wholly lost. He might have been older even than the terracotta dragon, she thought.
But those golden slits weren’t marred by milk. They were sharp and fixed on Frida.
‘So,’ he murmured. ‘Here you are.’
Frida bowed clumsily. ‘Ah, hello, uh – most esteemed, venerable, dragon, sir.’
The crinkles around his eyelids deepened. He was Dragon-Gandalf.
Lucky righted himself and bounded over to Frida excitedly. ‘Little stink, this is my dada! I knew it was him all along, really. I was just pretending to be afraid!’
The silver dragon made a low growl in the back of his throat. It made the hairs on Frida’s neck rise and Lucky immediately looked mortified.
‘I’m sorry, that’s not true. I didn’t know it was you at all. And I was very afraid!’ He hung his head, peering down at them both adorably through long golden eyelashes.
The silver dragon shared a long-suffering look with Frida, making her heart swell as he dipped his snout into his big silver beard to hide his smile. ‘Babies are meant to try us, are they not?’
‘I’m not a baby, Dada!’ Lucky squealed.
His father inspected him with all seriousness.
‘Are you not? How strange. Are you sure?’ He made a big show of looking beneath Lucky’s armpits, between the cracks of his wings, within his scraggly beard.
By the end, Lucky was giggling so riotously, a family of capybaras snuffling in the undergrowth had to turn and flee.
When the silver dragon stopped, Lucky lay panting in the leaves and the silver dragon turned his attention back to Frida.
She tucked her hair nervously behind her ears – windswept was not the word for it now.
It was more like space-and-time-swept. But when the silver dragon spoke, she forgot all about that.
There was such sorrow in his golden eyes.
‘I think my son is right, he is not a baby.’
‘No,’ Frida said quietly. ‘His bravery has done you credit, sir.’
The silver dragon looked pleased. He nodded, as the capybaras returned to their snuffling. ‘Come then.’
Frida blinked at him. ‘Come where?’
She needed to get back to the LEZ. But then she remembered how fantastically she’d failed – the terracotta dragon, Dian, her friends. Would there even be a zoo to go back to? Did she even want there to be? The tiredness suddenly felt like a weight on her very soul.
‘Frida Rose,’ the silver dragon beckoned to her, gently but firmly.
Lucky, who she loved with every inch of her broken heart, wagged his forked tail, sending a troop of multicoloured parrots soaring. Next to him, his dada was still as a mountain, and as boundless, the slanting sunlight slipping off his scales.
‘For now,’ he said, ‘be soothed to know all is as it needs to be.’
She let out a choking breath. She had the too-real memory of Dian’s last words to her.
I think I must go home, Frida Rose. The anguish settling over their features, the resolution of the coming destruction sank deep into their bones.
The whole assembly of creatures coating the woods in a thousand kinds of tears.
But the silver dragon’s eyes were so sure, she found herself nodding. Then she gathered her freefalling heart and walked into the trees after the purple dragon and his silver father.