Free From Embers by Aaron Pogue Page A

but desperation guided her. She grabbed young Michael with one hand and retrieved the heavy shield with the other. She lurched to her feet; she turned away; she was ready to rush from the room. But something caught her attention. 
    Inches above the lizard’s shoulders she saw a pair of miniature wings, covered with the nearly transparent membrane that would one day harden into thick skin. The sight of those wings, which had until then been hidden by her son’s knees, nearly crushed the desperate resolve that kept her moving.
    This was no overgrown lizard, no giant mutation from the poisonous swamps down south, but a broodling dragon, a living nightmare lying stunned on her living room floor. Elsa stood there, transfixed by a fear that ran far deeper than the shock of finding her child in danger. This was worse than a monster.
    A sound escaped her, a whimper like she hadn't made since she was Michael's age. Her chest began to ache, and she had to blink tears from her eyes. She wasn't ready for this. Her family— It couldn't be this. Another pathetic little moan escaped her, and she took a faltering step. She managed another.
    She stumbled across her own kitchen as though it were a pitch-black wilderness. Her legs weren't working right. Nothing was working right. She managed to hold a screaming, squirming Michael with one arm while she wrestled with the shield’s shoulder-strap with the other. Just as she reached the kitchen door she managed to duck into the strap and let the shield fall heavy on her shoulders. Its iron grip smashed into her back, bruising her spine, but the broad expanse of the shield wrapped cool and unyielding around her back.
    She threw open the thick wooden door with her free hand. The garden outside looked wrong. It was bright and warm. Sunlight danced on dewy leaves. A friendly breeze stirred the grass, and just down the way she heard Gertrude's three children playing at Elspaur ghosts. It sounded like a lovely spring morning, not the end of the world.
    She made it four paces, and then her sunny garden went dark. A sound like starkest terror split the beautiful morning, and she felt it stabbing at her bones. That was more like it. She couldn't catch her breath, but that seemed appropriate, too. The darkness passed, but the cold, certain fear of that hunting cry still hung in the air. She stumbled on, moving as much from the momentum of the shield driving her forward as under her own volition. The shadow plunged her into darkness again, and again it was gone a moment later. But it was wider this time. The darkness deeper.
    Michael went still against her breast. He stopped wailing, stopped thrashing, and when she glanced down she saw him mute with primal fear. Even he knew the threat in that cry. And staring into her child's eyes, Elsa found her strength again. She placed her feet more surely. She summoned strength and hefted the shield higher on her back, carrying it instead of being driven by it. She raised one arm against the reaching branches, and kept her child securely wrapped within the crook of the other one.
    She rushed into the protection of the forest, her short and rapid steps deftly taking her through the dense trees. Moments after she had abandoned the house she heard the piercing shriek again, close enough it seemed to whip at her clothes, her hair. She stumbled on, pressing heedlessly through knotted undergrowth and desperately clinging to the terrified form of her son.
    Behind her came the great cracking sound of a hundred-year-old house of stone and aged timber being shattered to splinters, and she felt a tremor through the ground from the force of the blow. She did not look back. She did not spare the tears that sprang to her eyes. She fixed her gaze on the forest ahead of her and pressed her child closer to her breast, and she ran.
    Her child. Her precious child. She still couldn't catch her breath. The monster had been a child, too. A young dragon, woken with the spring thaw. They