“This isn’t working,” he said in frustration at his inability to clear his thoughts.

Try something else then, Zahara said in an encouraging tone. Before using my mind to sense things around me,I like to remember the time I spent in my egg. It was a warm and comfortable place, where the noises of the outside world were muted. The muffled sounds couldn’t distract me. Maybe you can remember when you were in your egg and then you will be able to clear your mind?

Anders chuckled slightly, I didn’t hatch from an egg like you did.

That’s weird, Zahara said.

One of the many differences between our species, Anders commented, forgetting how little time Zahara had spent among any race other than her own.

Anders closed his eyes, trying to remember his mother and father. At first, he felt a warming presence, but the harder he worked to focus on what his parents looked like, the less he could see. He was about to voice his frustration again when he had an idea. The warm presence he’d felt when he first thought of his parents was the most comforted he’d felt in years. He decided not to try to remember what his parents looked like, but instead to search for the feeling he had of them being near. He felt the warming presence return, which cleared his thoughts completely.

“Hey, it worked! I actually did it,” Anders said surprised at the method he’d used.

Did my egg trick help? Zahara asked.

Oddly enough, it did, but in a slightly different way.

“Okay,” Ivan said, continuing his teaching aloud. “Once your mind is clear of all distractions, you can begin to reach out with it, letting the magic within you sense the areas around you. The sensation will be strange at first, but you’ll soon learn what to look for. Start out by reaching out in a specific direction before trying to use a multi-directional sweep,” Ivan said.

Anders nodded, preparing to replicate what he’d managed to do. Again, he thought of having his parents nearby. The comforting warming sensation gave him the ability to void his mind of all distractions, bringing his mental faculties to attention.

He knew Nadir would be running slightly behind them, so he decided to test his abilities by sensing for Nadir. Keeping his focus on the empty space between Zahara and the valley floor beneath them, Anders let his mental search cast out. The vast empty space behind Zahara felt cold as his thoughts searched further in a linear direction down toward the world below. Anders felt as though his body were falling through an endless sky, waiting for the ground to arrive. His head ached with the numbing chill that came from the space between them and the ground below. Like a flash of light, the sudden appearance of the features below came into Anders thoughts. He could feel the blades of grass along the valley floor, the dips and rises of the topography as he extended out behind them. Suddenly he could sense a warmth. This warmth was different from that of his memories. This warmth was physical and felt near. He focused in on it with excited anticipation. For a moment he thought he’d come across an animal moving along the plains, but quickly noticed the pace at which it was running and recognized the form to be their elf companion, Nadir. Anders identified the elf’s familiar presence and let his connection break away.

Wow, he thought to himself, shaking his head in alarm. That’s freaky.

Next, he searched out in front of them, expanding his mind to the area where the elves encountered Merglan. The slopes of the mountainsides felt burnt, trampled and disturbed. He couldn’t explain how he knew it, but he’d become increasingly aware of the tremendous amount of pain and anguish resonating from the area. Unable to keep his mind locked on the location, he winced away, gasping for air as his mental search broke.

That’s where he attacked them, Zahara said.

“Can you feel that?” Anders asked over his shoulder to Ivan.

Ivan nodded, responding over the rushing of the wind as they flew. “My skills are not as powerful as they used to be, but I can feel the place where they were attacked. It isn’t as strong a sensation for me as it might be for you and Zahara, but I’m aware of the mark it’s left on the land.”

Zahara circled the site of initial attack several times, soaring lower with each pass. After ensuring no one was in the immediate surroundings, they landed on the hillside where the fight began. Anders and Ivan hopped off Zahara’s back, coming to land on the scorched earth. The burnt area continued to smolder where the dragons had begun to engage in combat. This extended out for several acres in each direction. The dead trees along the forested hillside hung askew, snapped and mangled after large dragons had crashed into them. In the center of the turmoil, Ivan found a significant depression in the ground, presumably where one of the dragons had crashed into the side of the mountain with great force.

“Anders. Over here,” Ivan called to him. As Anders approached the edge of the shallow craterlike depression, Ivan pointed into it and said, “Look.”

A small puddle of blood pooled on the burnt ground.

Anders stepped into the depression and knelt, examining the scene. “The dragon must have been injured after the impact,” he said.

Ivan nodded, “If the injury occurred during the impact, the blood would have splattered. It appears as though the dragon who crashed here sustained this injury after making its initial impact.”

Nadir came rushing into view, quickly coming to their side. Anders was surprised to see the elf hadn’t even broken a sweat and did not seem to be out of breath in the slightest.

He doesn’t even look tired, Anders said to Zahara, astonished that the elf had run all that way without showing any evidence of exhaustion.

Elves are funny like that, Zahara replied. They’re able to travel great distances very quickly, just like us dragons. Except that my species’ means of transportation is much more efficient than stumbling along the ground like a fool.

He doesn’t seem to have stumbled. It’s incredible how they can do that.

Zahara sighed.

With a sweep of his eyes, Nadir quickly examined the crater where Anders knelt. He crouched down next to Anders and swiped his finger in the puddle of dragon blood, bringing his crimson-tipped finger up for a closer look. He eyed it carefully for a moment, then said, “They fought along the mountains to the north.”

“You can tell that from the blood?” Anders asked amazed at his tracking abilities.

“No,” he said smugly. “I was here when the attack began. I saw them battling farther to the north. The riders were trying to draw Merglan farther away from his fortress.”

“Oh,” Anders said his cheeks flushing with embarrassment.

“Let’s get back to the skies and continue searching,” Ivan said.

Anders and Ivan climbed back onto Zahara, settling on her scaled back. They had to hold on tightly as she ran down the hillside to get more lift for takeoff.

Once they’d returned to the sky, the three of them continued searching the area with their minds. Anders slowly began to get the grasp of using the magical energy within him to mentally explore an area in one direction. Recalling and then disregarding Ivan’s warning, he decided to attempt to sweep out in multiple directions at once. Anders focused all of his attention on imagining that his mind was like many arms reaching out in all directions. This resulted in the overwhelming sensation of understanding each element in the topography sprawling out around them. The many cliffs lining the mountain slopes gave him sudden pause as they were abrupt changes in his mental world.

Suddenly his head snapped back as if he’d just smashed into a wall. Anders felt a vice-like grip pinching down on his brain, squishing it with increasing pain. In the sudden attack on their bonded minds, Anders noticed that Zahara was beginning to lose control of her flight path. She must have been feeling the same pinching pain that Anders was because she dipped and lulled, swaying through the sky. Anders reached up, gripping his head in hopes that the pain would somehow go away. Zahara let out a loud roar and began to fall rapidly. Her wings no longer carrying them through the sky, she was going straight down toward the ground.

Over the tremendous pain attacking his mind, Anders could barely tell that Ivan was shouting to them both. Anders couldn’t hear him clearly and, judging by the lack of response from the dragon, Zahara couldn’t hear Ivan’s shouts over the excruciating pain either. Blinking his eyes rapidly from the pain, Anders saw the ground fast approaching as they fell. Zahara struggled to regain control of their descent, but every time she tried to open her wings, something seemed to force them back in tight to her body. Anders clenched, flexing every muscle in his body as he braced for impact.

Zahara slammed into a patch of trees on the leeward side of the mountain, snapping the thick conifers in half with their initial impact. The fibers of each individual tree exploded upon the force of Zahara’s body pushing through. The loud popping and whipping branches sounded through Anders’ ears; he knew they were about to hit the ground. Zahara’s body recoiled when it skidded into the mountainside, sending Anders rocketing forward and feeling his body leave the perch on his dragon’s back.

He and Ivan flew into the air, thrown from Zahara’s back as she began to tumble after the initial impact. Anders flailed his arms like a windmill as he tried to keep himself from hitting the ground headfirst. As hard as he tried to avoid it, the angle at which he was thrown off Zahara was such that he toppled headlong over the ground where she collided with the mountain. His head tilted downward while his legs came overhead. He tucked forward trying to protect his head from the eventual impact. Thinking the ground would soon break his trajectory, Anders was surprised to feel himself continuing to tumble through the air. He soared through the air with his legs and feet up over the rest of his body; he tucked his head up to his waist, trying to force himself to rotate to put his feet back under his body. The only things Anders could see while he continued to fly through empty space were his legs and feet and the dark sky behind them.

As he drifted through the openness, he thought to himself, When am I going to hit the ground? I should have hit the ground by now; when am I going to hit the ground? Oh no, I’m going to break my back. If I survive this, my back will be broken.

Suddenly Anders could see the rushing of a rock wall moving past his head. As soon as he’d seen the rushing rock, his feet passed through the edge of a tree’s thinly spread branches.

Oh sh… he thought and slammed into the ground, with his shoulder blades breaking his fall. He tried hard to keep his head tucked on impact, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the whiplash. Flattening out from the force of the crash, he bounced off the ground and rocked forward again. He flipped in the air and hit the slope with the front of his shoulder this time. The steep mountainside where he landed left him tumbling out of control. His forehead grazed the side of a tree. The impact, though not direct, was enough of a blow to knock him unconscious momentarily. Coming to seconds later, he could feel that he’d stopped tumbling and was now sliding down the hillside. Anders slowly came to a stop. He dared not move, worried that his spine had been broken in the fall.

The air had been knocked out of his lungs in the hard landing and the struggle for breath made him sit upright. Straightening his neck and opening his mouth as wide as he could, he tried desperately to get some oxygen back into his lungs. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t get any air. A terrible thought surfaced – he began to wonder if Merglan was near and had created a spell that removed all oxygen from the air. He continued to gasp. Just as he thought he would suffocate, air rushed back into his lungs. The sudden inhalation made him cough violently. He sat on the side of the mountain heaving, relieved there wasn’t a spell corrupting his ability to inhale. At last, he could breathe freely again.

Well, I guess my spine is okay, he thought as he stood up and stretched his battered body.

Looking around at where he’d finally come to a stop, he quickly searched, but couldn’t see Zahara or Ivan.

Maybe I’ll try seeing where they are with my mind, he thought. He quickly dismissed the notion, because though the vice-like grip on his mind had disappeared only moments before, he was hesitant to try again after the mental attack. The initial pain was gone, but his head pounded from both the attack and the impact of the crash. He put his hand on his forehead and squeezed it slightly hoping that the applied pressure would lessen the pain. It didn’t work. When he lowered his hand, he noticed it was covered with his own blood.

Anders looked up the slope he’d just tumbled down. Although it was dark, his eyes had adjusted to the night and he could see farther than he expected. A cliff band stretched the width of the slope above him. Zahara had initially crashed even higher up the mountain above the band of exposed rock. He looked left and slowly out to the right of the cliff. He could see a chute where water and fallen rocks collected on their way downhill. The rock barrier looked unavoidable in all other directions. If he wanted to get back up to their initial crash site, he was going to have to ascend the steep chute.

Anders slogged uphill to the base of the chute and began scrambling up the steep chimney. He hoped Zahara was not too badly hurt from the crash. His deep concern for her kept him moving despite the difficulty of the climb. He wondered what exactly had happened to her when he was thrown from her back. She’d tumbled out of view. He could only see sky until he landed.

Anders felt his muscles straining and hardening while scrambling up the steep chute, but he ignored his body telling him to stop or slow down. With great relief, he reached the top of the draw and found himself back above the cliff band.

Bending over and placing his hands on his knees, he breathed heavily while he began searching the top of the cliff for Ivan and his dragon. He identified the uphill side of the small meadow where he was standing. The trees above the clearing were snapped where they’d broken through. The ground was gnarled and torn where Zahara’s body had crashed. Anders followed this path across the clearing and over a small horizon. He rushed to the edge of the slope where he saw her body. She was lying on the side of the cliff, her tail draped over the edge. She wasn’t moving.

“Zahara!” he shouted and ran as fast as he could to her side. Sliding onto his knees, he grabbed her head and said with worry, “Zahara wake up.”