THE FOURTH REALM: GREEN — A double promise

One day, she heard a commotion near a stretch of rocky ground. Several young pegasi were peering into a pit. Skyblue watched them from the path and soon understood what had happened: one had fallen in and hurt a wing. His friends were trying to help him, but whenever he managed to climb a little way, the earth gave beneath his hooves.

“Why don’t you find an adult?” she asked as she approached.

The pegasi wheeled around. Some backed away when they saw she was a dragon.

“We can’t,” one answered. “We’re not allowed to play here.”

The sound of snapping branches came from below. The little one had tried to climb again, and a tangle of roots was holding him.

Skyblue leaned over the edge.

“I can go down and get him.”

The pegasi looked at one another. Accepting help from a dragon seemed almost as alarming as the pit itself. They began arguing in low voices while, below them, their friend slipped again.

“If you help us, you can’t tell anyone,” one finally said.

Skyblue looked down.

“I’m not going to use this to shame you. Right now, we need to get him out.”

“You have to make a pegasus promise.”

The dragon made the promise with great solemnity. To reassure the little ones further, she added a dragon promise of her own. That seemed to settle some matter of importance that she couldn’t quite understand.

She went down carefully. The pit wasn’t very deep, but its walls were coated in old resin which, mixed with water and earth, made a slippery mud. The little pegasus was trembling. The harder he tried to get free, the more tangled he became in the roots.

“Hold still for a moment,” Skyblue told him. “I’ll get you free.”

Using her teeth and claws, she eased the roots aside. She worked slowly around his injured wing until there was enough space to lift him. The pegasus clung to her as she took him between her forelegs.

Above them, his friends watched every movement in silence.

Skyblue spread her wings, pushed off, and set him down on firm ground. The little ones crowded around him at once. One looked up at the dragon, opened his mouth to say something, and ended up smiling.

She smiled back.

She made sure the injured one could stand and that his friends were going home with him. Then she moved away, mud still clinging between her claws and that double promise carefully kept.