Asher
“Okay, let’s try this again! Asher, you first.”
He nodded mentally, focused instead on the task at hand. The three of them, Asher, Dominick, and Zeke, were flying in wingtip formation. But today they weren’t doing laps. Today, Zander had them doing aerial maneuvers.
Asher was the leftmost of the three dragons as they soared through the sky. His goal was to become the rightmost dragon. The first dozen times that they’d tried this, at least one, if not all three of the dragons had been sent tumbling from the sky, forced to recover from their spins mid-air and work back into position. It had been grueling work, and he was nearing the end of his stamina.
This time though. This time it’s going to work.
He was going to try something new. The instructors had only said he had to become the rightmost dragon. All the attempts so far had involved the dragons trying to slide under the bellies of the two other cadets. They hadn’t been told to do it that way; that’s just the way it had gone. Drop down and slide across before regaining your height. Unfortunately, if they came up too early, wings collided, dragons veered away, and the whole thing went south. Literally, straight toward the ground.
Not this time.
Asher gave a mighty flap of his wings and suddenly rose above the red and blue dragons. He tucked his right wing in and rolled upside down. As he inverted he snapped the wing back out and banked to what was now his left, sliding over top the others. Then he reached his final position, where he snapped the wing back in and completed the roll. At that point he spread both wings wide and made some more precise adjustments to slide perfectly back into formation.
“Well done, Asher,” Zander’s voice came from above, where he was watching everything as it happened. “Now Zeke, mimic the same.”
The red dragon completed his maneuver as well, with just a little bit less finesse than Asher had managed. Dominick, on the other hand, slid right into position, barely needing any correction at all when he spread his wings back out. Asher was a good flier, but it seemed like Dominick was going to be the most graceful of the three of them.
“Now Owens, again!”
Zander pushed them until they were actually moving in a never-ending loop. Two dragons were always moving at once, as if they were being juggled by some massive, unseen hand. After ten minutes of that, Zander told them to stop and head back to ground for a break before they tried something else.
Feeling accomplished, the trio banked back around Forlorn Peak.
Something caught his eye. It was the first red marker for The Course.
You’re tired as shit. Your reflexes are shot, and you have more to do later. You don’t have to do this.
But he did.
“See you back at the Academy, boys,” he said, and tucked in a wing as he banked down and over himself, beginning a swift drop.
Although she was the better part of four miles away, he felt a soft boost of encouragement from Quinn through the link. She couldn’t tell what he was doing, but she seemed to know he was focused on achieving something. Her support was all he needed as Asher whipped through the first part of the course.
He had this down to a science now. It called for speed, not tactics. Flying by reflex instead of calculating thought. As he reached the bank turn where Daxxton had attacked him before, he flipped through the curve and at the last moment, threw his wings out wide, killing his momentum. His talons dug deep into the rock face he’d been swiftly approaching, and Asher backflipped off of it, heading toward the ground and the next set of obstacles.
It had taken him a while to realize that simply dropping out of the previous loop would leave him with too much forward momentum. So he killed it completely. Now he was starting again, but speed was no longer of the essence as he navigated through a pass, having to turn sideways as he went.
Asher twisted up and through three hoops that made a loop like a rollercoaster, and then descended toward the opening of a canyon. He’d never made it this far. It was a new record.
Where did he go next? There were markers on either side of the canyon, and a big circle painted on a hanging rock off to the right. But there was nowhere for him to pass. A large wooden gate blocked the entrance to the next part of the course.
“Am I supposed to crash through it?”
He saw the painted rock sway in the wind, and the gate moved with it, ascending slightly and then dipping back down, in time with the rock. Suddenly it became clear.
I need to blast the rock apart with my breath.
Asher inhaled, but by then it was too late. He was about to smash into the gate, and he had to veer off, winging up and out of the valley and going for higher ground.
“Dammit!” he said as only a cloud of misty fog erupted from this throat.
Asher was still having problems replicating his breath weapon. It only seemed to work whenever he was filled with extreme emotion of some sort. Simply racing through the obstacle course didn’t do it. Frustrated, he came in for a landing, shifting before his feet had even reached the ground.
“That was well done, Asher,” Blaine said as he landed nearby.
“You were watching?” he asked, looking back up into the sky. He hadn’t noticed Blaine anywhere, and after their first lesson at the Academy, all the cadets watched the sky around them religiously.
“Always,” Blaine said imperiously, then smiled. “I was enjoying the sun on Forlorn Peak itself. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss me in the sky.”
Asher sighed with the relief. The instructors tested them from time to time. They usually worked with them one at a time, but sometimes a second, or even third one would appear in the sky and make an attack run. If the cadets didn’t see them in time, they were forced to do extra laps.
Asher hated that part, and was glad he didn’t have to do it now.
“Thank you,” he said, appreciating the comment from Blaine.
“I meant it. That’s the farthest any cadet in stage one has gotten in roughly a hundred and thirty years. Give or take.”
He felt his eyebrows rise. “Really? Who was the one got farther?”
Blaine smiled, but didn’t say anything.
“You?” Asher asked in astonishment.
The green dragon shifter nodded. “My last day of stage one I was able to get the gate open. You’re close, Asher. Keep working hard, and you’ll graduate with high enough scores that people will talk about you as well.”
Asher wasn’t sure what to say, so he just dipped his head in thanks and went to find his fellow cadets. He was starved!