Flower Crowns
“Close your eyes,” Odyssey teased, holding the three ringlets tightly behind her back. She wrapped her wings, with their long pair of tails like the ones on the swallowtail butterflies, around them, shielding them from view.
Gargoyle grumbled, furrowing his eyebrows. “Just show me.”
“C’mon, Gargoyle,” Floret said, calling from where she lay sprawled in the tussocks of bright, green grass. Her scales, a slightly lighter minty color, blended in and out in the whirls of grass pulsing in the breeze. “It’ll give you a chance to feel what life is like on her side of the moon.”
Gargoyle sighed softly, twisting a green-grey talon in the wildflowers at his feet. Odyssey could tell he hated it when dragons mentioned her blindness. Her vision had been terrible at hatching and was progressively getting worse. Now, at five, everything was smudgy and blurred. She couldn’t see her own scales at inches away. Everything was varying shades and tones of grey, even her own salmon-pink tail with its russet brown stinger. She faintly remembered those colors, from before her vision had lapsed into monotony. She couldn’t watch her friends grow and play, or see the expressions on their faces, and that saddened her and angered Gargoyle. He wanted life to be fair for her.
“Fine,” he muttered, shifting around. “They’re closed.”
Odyssey squinted, but she couldn’t make out a difference. Actually, she couldn’t make out a dragon at all.
“They are,” Floret supplemented, her lilting voice soft like the breeze.
Odyssey folded back her wings and slowly revealed the three flower crowns hiding in her talons. She had braided the bouquets together the day before, after she had finished school. She tossed one of them in Floret’s direction, though she gave Floret the crowns all the time. This was only really special for Gargoyle. He’d finally been her friend long enough to earn her trust, and a crown.
She slipped it into his waiting talons and pulled hers all the way over her head, onto her neck. They never sat quite right on her antennae, so she had built this one a little bigger for a change.
She cleared her throat. “All right, you can open ‘em!” Odyssey waited patiently for what he was going to say. She could hear him rustling as he flipped the crown around in his talons.
“What’s this? It’s gorgeous,” he whispered, fingering a carnation.
“A flower crown! You can wear it. I make them all the time. I’ll give you a new one after this one eventually wilts. I haven’t figured out how to make them last for more than a month. Spring water coating is helping, but I want to make one that’ll last forever. What do you think?”
Gargoyle chuckled, a broad smile on his face. “What an incredible gi…g…” he stopped, stuttering away.
“Gargoyle?” Odyssey started, but she was cut off by his violent sneeze. And another, and another. He coughed and growled, falling to the ground and twitching. The crown tumbled out of his talons, which flexed and extended compulsively.
Odyssey couldn’t see it, but Floret watched in concern as Gargoyle’s eyes widened and the pupils flashed down to pinpricks. He staggered to his feet and snarled, nostrils flaring as he inhaled heavily. His chest heaving, he twitched his head aggressively to the side like the flickering motion of a bird. His talons churned up the dirt beneath them.
“Floret? What’s wrong with him?” Odyssey whispered, flinching back a little.
“I don’t know,” Floret said, her tone level. “I think he—”
Gargoyle whipped around to face her, and he took a few heavy steps her direction. Floret fluttered back, toward the little gully and its burbling river she had been lying beside. Gargoyle tensed at the motion and roared, a guttural sound scaring a skein of ducks into flight. Floret yelped and stumbled away, and Gargoyle charged.
Odyssey jumped back. What’s happened to him?! she thought, shrinking down into herself as she listened to the sounds of Floret running from and dodging Gargoyle’s reckless, blind charges. He sneezed…the flowers? Faintly, she recalled a memory, a line, from a few months prior, where Gargoyle had gently nudged her away from one of the wildflower fields they were nearing, pointing her toward a near-identical field to the east. ‘I’m not a fan of that field,’ he had said gently, but she hadn’t seen the fear in his expression. ‘Too many…bugs. Spiders. I think they’re gross, when they get under my scales. Let’s go chase some swallows instead, all right?’
Odyssey racked her brain desperately. Had she gone there, to make the crowns?
That field had hemlock in it, she thought. It was the only field within a hundred leagues to have a sprinkling of the plant around it. She knew that sometimes cattle would be found dead after ingesting it, but dragons were resistant. She didn’t think she had put any hemlock in the crown, but she couldn’t see it to check. And it would be crazy if Gargoyle was acting this way because of some little white flower, especially without getting it into his system.
Floret’s scream cut through her thoughts, and Odyssey shot her head out of her quivering protective ball in a futile attempt to locate her friend. “Floret!”
“Odyssey! Run, get out of here! Get as far away from this place as you can!” Floret cried, her claws tearing desperately at Gargoyle’s underbelly scales. His talons were tearing at her arms, legs, antennae, wings. She could feel her blood seeping through her scales, trickling across the turf, running into the river. “Run! Don’t look—”
The clearing rang with an ugly snap.
Odyssey couldn’t stop the sob escaping her lips. “Floret,” she whimpered. Her antennae curled up in fear and disgust.
Gargoyle huffed, the breath turning into a bloodcurdling growl. Odyssey heard his talons crunch as he launched himself into the air. Odyssey scrambled out of the ball she was in, her salmon scales blaring against the chartreuse of the grass. She ran as hard as she could, feeling the rush of wind as he stopped his ascent and tucked his wings in for a dive.
She waited until she guessed he would be close to catching her and put on a final burst of speed. Gargoyle roared in frustration as his dive fell short, clipping the soft tail on the edge of her wing and tearing a set of holes in it with his claws. He plowed down to the ground, and Odyssey heard his arm shatter as he landed on hard earth, not the expected squish of dragonet.
Odyssey awkwardly launched herself into the air, flailing her wings until she found a steady rhythm, high up in the sky. The sounds of the clearing had faded away, leaving only the swish of wind around her soft ears. She could feel the slight imbalance from the missing section of her wing’s tail, but she could still fly. And when she was flying, she would always be faster and more agile than Gargoyle. She could escape him.
She jerked the flower crown off her throat, feeling the blooms on the edges fall away in the breeze. She had just secured a friend, which had secured Gargoyle a crown, which had secured Floret a halo. Crumpling the petals on the crown in her tightly clenched talon, she flew onward, as far away from her village as she could get, as far away from her past friends as she could get. She felt the tears streak down from her sightless eyes, tracing the scales on her face. The hemlock gracing her crown with its gorgeous, delicate flowers fell away to the whip of the wind.
Odyssey didn’t look back.