Rain of stone

The noise behind me stopped a while ago. I've stopped too. I'm hungry, and too tired to go on. Also I've started thinking about questions I've been avoiding. First on the list is where am I? Close behind that is how did I get here? Against those, the question of what I do next seems irrelevant.

Where am I? Well, that'll have to wait until I've gone a bit further. As to how I got here ... where to begin? The real beginning - if there is such a thing - happened a very long time ago. But time has always been my ally. We have what you might call a special relationship, time and me. I think that's probably part of how I got here: I think I may have travelled through time.

I've done it before. It's an ability I discovered I had during the Siege of Cylderak, many aeons ago. It happened like this. There was a skirmish just south of the colony. Cylderak, like a lot of dragon colonies in those days, was built inside a troll skull. It had a population of around three thousand charmed dragons. That should give you some idea how big the trolls were.

I was trying to lead a group of dragons to safety. The trolls were breaking each other apart, which meant rocks were raining like meteorites out of the sky. A rain of stone. We tried using charm to clear a path through the rocks, but it was hopeless. I started thinking, what if I could predict exactly where each rock was going to be at any one time? So I closed my eyes and ... threw my thoughts ahead of me. That's what it felt like anyway.

Slowly I began to see lines in the darkness. Trajectories. Some were brighter than others - these were the paths of rock that had just fallen. The darker lines were the ones that were about to fall. Lines from the future.

Eyes closed, I flew out into the rain of boulders.

The others called me back, until they realised I wasn't getting hit. Cautiously they followed me out. I followed the dark lines through the rain, tracking the empty places where the rocks were not destined to fall. It took us one hundred wingbeats to fly to safety. The instant we landed, the warring trolls finally tore each other apart, and their remains crashed like a landslide on to Cylderak, destroying the entire colony - and all the dragons inside - in a single breath. Ten dragons, me included, survived.

You might not think that sounds like time travel. But it was. That's how it works: I close my eyes, and see the future, and in seeing it I see the way to get there. Sometimes I choose to go, other times I don't. That first time, all I did was look, and follow the clues. But later ...

And that's the thing. Since I've been in this cave, I've realised I can't see the future any more. When I close my eyes, there's nothing. Just the dark. It's frightening, like waking up blind. The future is more uncertain than it's ever been. I just hope that, sooner or later, I'll see the light again.