“… and then Old One yawns, this huge, huge dragon yawn, with the big bumpy tongue and the big broken teeth, rows and rows of them, and everything, and suddenly it’s like the biggest windstorm ever, a really hot and smelly windstorm, and it sends me flying, and I guess I hit my head and get knocked out, or maybe there’s like some kind of sleeping gas in the dragon’s breath, and then I guess Ariella finds me and takes me home, because I wake up here in Puke Yurt with a splitting headache and you guys staring at me like my face peeled off or something, and…” Clay faltered, nervous. “Wait, it didn’t actually peel off, did it? I mean, I look normal, right?”
Leira and Brett peered down at him.
“Define normal,” said Leira.
Brett nodded judiciously. “Yeah, it’s hard to say without knowing what the bar for normal is.”
“You guys are always so reassuring.”
Clay sat up and surveyed the round room, filled with mysterious medicinal herbs and ointments.
“So, they’re not here… are they?” he asked, looking out the window. All that was visible were trees.
“Who?” asked Leira.
“Old One. And the other dragons.”
“Here at camp? Should they be?”
“Well, yeah,” said Clay. “I mean, if they aren’t, then it was all for nothing, wasn’t it—the whole trip?”
“Why do you say that?” asked Brett. “It sounds sort of amazing, if you ask me. You got to go where nobody ever gets to go, or at least where, er, nobody ever gets to go back from.”
“Did I? How do I know it wasn’t a dream?” Agitated, Clay threw off his blanket. “I’m not even sure the dragons were real.”
Before Clay’s friends could respond, the yurt’s flap door was thrown back and Jonah stuck his head in. “Um, hey, guys?” he said, hesitant. “You might want to come look at this.”
Rubbing his eyes, Clay climbed out of bed, and they all peeked out of the yurt. Jonah pointed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the clouds.
The horizon was filled with undulating black shapes.
Dragons—hundreds of them—were sweeping across the sky, headed right for Earth Ranch.
And now it’s time to answer a question that (if you’re anything like me) has been eating away at you for the last few chapters:
What do you call a group of dragons? In other words, what is the correct collective noun? Is it a herd of dragons? A school? A flock? A pride?
Short answer: There are several answers.
While a group of dragon eggs may be referred to as a clutch, a group of very young dragons is a brood, and a group of grown dragons is most often known as a weyr. But that’s only if they’re on the ground. A group of aquatic dragons may be referred to as a lagoon. A group of dragons soaring through the sky is a flight, though some insist on calling it a stampede or a thunder.
If you’d found yourself among the dragons arriving en masse over the crater, I think you would have gone with that last word, thunder. With so many wings flapping at once, it was like being inside a hurricane; and if that wasn’t enough, their roaring and flame-spitting created a raging firestorm that was indeed thunderous.
Alas, Clay was the lone human to experience this firestorm. Leira and Brett had wanted to come, too, of course—all of Clay’s friends had—but Clay had insisted that it wasn’t necessary. (In fact, he’d asked Old One about bringing his friends along, only to be treated to an angry lecture about how dragons weren’t pack animals.) If a full thunder of dragons—a fleet?—couldn’t handle the job, what difference would a few kids make? As a compromise, Clay had agreed to wear the ski hat again, this time under the skateboard helmet. His head was hotter and itchier than ever, but he was grateful for the extra protection, especially with all the balls of fire streaking past him.