(I am SO sorry I missed the update! Ah well...)

The journey was long. And hard. And monotonous. And that was just the first day. Heather made a mental note not to make another journey this long on the spur of the moment.

The constant worrying about what was happening to the others was not helping at all, and Heather found that the more she thought about all the worrying things, the more worried she became and thus the more compelled to think about the worrying things.

Oh curses. Maybe Brigitta had been right, and this trip had been a bad idea after all.

Ah well, too late to turn back now. They would come back with the Rumblehorns or not come back at all!

After all, most of the time the first day is the worst.

Wrong. Sorry to disappoint.

The second day was worse. Much, much much worse. In fact so much worse that by the end Heather thought she would just give up.

First, they ran into a great big migrating horde of fireworms. The little dragons, typically curious, all diverted and came over to investigate the strange dragons with things on their backs.

This, of course, spooked the dragons and caused them to panic, flying whichever way and generally behaving erratically. It took them about an hour to calm down. Happily, by then the fireworms had moved on. Otherwise they would have ended up with one awful scene.

Then, once they had gotten away from there, a few hours later it was the rag-tag fleet of ships. At first the two riders had thought that they were traded ships, and gone down to look.

Bad idea. They turned out to be ships that had escaped from Drago's armada and had become freelance pirates and dragon trappers.

It took a long time to get out of that one, but eventually they did it with the help of Windshear's thinner tail spines as lock picks.

And then it was the Terrible Terrors.

These small and rather affectionate dragons are normally not a problem. Normally.

This bunch had somehow gotten themselves lost in the middle of the ocean. How they had done this was a mystery, but then again no one quite knows how Terrors think.

Being stranded in the middle of a rather rough and very deep ocean is a bad idea for such small dragons because of the simple fact that there is no food.

Fish, I hear you say. Nope. Rough and deep, remember? Terrors are little and delicate, how do you expect them to do deep sea diving?

They can't. This bunch were starving. And, seeing two dragons and riders passing with saddle bags containing food is too much of a temptation.

They swarmed them.

It took absolutely ages to get them off, and by that time the Terrors had stolen most of the food out of the bags anyway.

This mission was an absolute, total and utter disaster.

🦅—Aquila!