The hill moved.
Trees crashed down off it.
The earth groaned beneath it as roots snapped and broke apart.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. All I could do was take in what was rising in front of me, larger than anything I’d ever seen before. There were brief flashes, impressions that broke through the haze that had fallen over my eyes and mind—claws and teeth and wing, oh my gods that was a wing—until a great eye turned toward me.
It blinked, slow and unfocused. The eye was bigger than I was, the skin around it cracked deeply. The iris itself was heterochromous, shoots of red and green and blue. Even as I watched, the colors seemed to swirl together, moving around the iris like waves crashing.
The eye itself moved left to right, and the little lights around me flew forward, running along the hardened skin.
The creature groaned, a deep rumbling thing that I felt vibrate from the ground up through my legs and hips until it buried itself in my chest, wrapping around my heart and squeezing.
The eye focused now, sharper, the gaze knowing.
And it was centered on me.
I took another step back.
I opened my mouth once, twice, but no sound came out.
Because I was at a loss. I had all the pieces to put together what I was seeing in front of me, but they were all jumbled in my head. I couldn’t find or sense the pattern in them.
Finally, I did the only thing a person could do if they were in my position and faced with a gigantic hill monster after having been bad-touched by an old lady into the middle of the woods.
I waved and said, “Heeeyyy there.”
The eye blinked.
“I’m just gonna back away slowly,” I told it. “We can pretend this never happened. You… you just go back to sleep. Or whatever you were doing. I didn’t mean to wake you up, and I promise it’ll never happen again. Don’t mind me at all.”
It started to growl.
“Okay, so you do mind me. That’s just swell. I’m going to get out of your hair. Not that you have any hair. No, you just have scales and teeth the size of Tiggy, and oh my gods, why are you moving toward me, you fucking psycho! I’m going to punch both her tits, I swear to—”
The eye tilted away.
Only to have a great gaping maw pointed at me instead.
And even though I was whiting out in terror, I had a vague understanding of the shape of the head in front of me, the way the reptilian lips curled around teeth, the twin slits at the end of the snout that were its nostrils. A hard ridge rose on the top of its head, fanning out in a half-spherical protrusion, like a bony crown. Sharp, pointed juts of bone stuck out from the top of the crown, gleaming brightly in the starlight.
I knew what this was.
It was a dragon.
Bigger than any other I’d seen before.
In the D
ark Woods, which meant it was—
It opened its jaws and—
“Sam!”
I jerked my head left. Ryan was there. I was in the castle, staring up at the ceiling. I was in the—
I looked right. The dragon took a step toward me that caused the earth to quake under my feet. Its foot was gigantic, easily the size of a carriage, with wicked sharp claws digging into the ground.