The captain had said there were no mountains in this ocean. Rav ran to the deck after the others. He nearly crashed into Sanjay as the crew stopped dead.

Ahead was land. It was not a mountain.

Like a mountaintop severed and cast to the sky, a peaked hill held itself serenely in the clouds. Roots feathered its fringe and dangled into open space beneath it. Its beaches were made of more roots, these ones inflated like airship envelopes with tapered ends. They gave way to vegetation further up the hill, which stood taller than Dreamcatcher was long.

Rav had seen floating plants before, but nothing on this scale. Nothing close to this scale. Next to those beaches, the airborne green clots that formed in mainland forests looked like a breeze-skipper next to March of the Elephants.

A prod from Indra woke Rav to reality again. He and the crew eased out the new sails. Clouds haunted the island's slopes, and the breeze died as Dreamcatcher steered towards those soft shores. When the two came abreast of each other, Sanjay tossed a grappling hook and snared a thick, woody root eight feet out.

"You're lightest, cabin boy," said Indra. "Go down and moor us."

Rav hastily knotted himself a safety line. With a deep breath, he swung himself over the railing and jumped to the ground.

The whole side of the island dipped slightly. Rav dropped flat and gripped a root for dear life. The ground was not soil, as it had first appeared. Beneath the living plants, a sponge of thick, leathery, dead bubbles continued into the island's depths. Was this whole hill nothing but an accumulated mass of floating plants?

A coil of rope landed with a thump beside him. A dozen feet away was a small tree with a root system that looked big enough to fill a room. If that wasn't solid enough to moor an airship to, nothing here would be. Careful to move gently, Rav crawled to it and secured the rope. Sanjay tossed another from the back of the ship. The trees dotted the hillside, and Dreamcatcher was soon tethered. Rav breathed a sigh of relief. Now they could make repairs. It might not be solid ground below them, but it was solid enough to stand on.

The captain was on deck when Rav scrambled back up the rope ladder Manish dropped for him. Dreamcatcher's owner was watching the island. The keen interest in his smile made Rav shiver.

"Now this is something I've never seen before," he said softly. "What's it like down there, cabin boy?"

Rav was struck by a sudden and intense desire not to tell. This was a man who commissioned poachers just to spangle his own airship. The plants on this island were not in the book Rav had brought, nor in any of the others hidden beneath his bed at home. He doubted they were in any book in the world. What the captain might do with that fact, he did not want to know.

"Answer me, cabin boy. I asked you a question."

Those hooded eyes pinned Rav like a butterfly in a collector's shadow box. The captain was still smiling, but there was no warmth in it now.

'Answer me, boy,' said Father.

"It—it's plants," said Rav. He grappled around the large knot that had filled his chest and throat. "Floating plants."

The captain snorted. "I can see that much myself, boy. Did you see anything interesting?"

"Just the plants."

"Go back and look."

Rav's head jerked up. What? No. He couldn't. Not for this man.

The captain pointed to the rope ladder. "Go. Come back when you've found something interesting."

Rav's heart beat a crescendo against his ribs. He swallowed hard and nodded. Manish shot him a sympathetic look.

He had just set foot on the ground when the captain leaned on the railing above. "Oh, and Rav?"

Rav froze.

The captain tipped his chin at the island. "When you come back, bring me one of those plants."

Rav moved quickly around the hill and out of the captain's sight, making use of any handholds he could reach. His legs were jelly, so he collapsed against a large root-bubble and leaned back on the cushy ground. It was wet with mist and slime. The sky above was a murky white, the colour of dozens of meters of clouds between them and the sun. If the island moved within this vast blanket, it moved slowly. Ephemeral billows drifted into it and stuck to its cloudward side, to crawl around and cast off again just shy of where Rav lay. They left offerings of moisture behind.

What could he possibly find here that wouldn't endanger this place at the captain's hands?

The first and most prominent feature of the island, now that he was on it, was its silence. There was little wind and no sign of insects, which struck Rav as unusual for such a large concentration of plants. Even the floating plant-clumps back home had chirped and trilled with populations of bugs. Rav rolled onto his side, heedless of the green smears the ground left on his clothing and skin.

Here, higher up the hill, the bubble-roots were masked by a tapestry of other vegetation. Grass so fine it looked like spun thread gathered in pockets, where dainty white flowers nodded beneath the weight of droplets on their petals. There were lacy groundcovers and the delicate fingers of air plants, and a bush with fabric-soft leaves. Their tips were elongated to shed the water that gathered on them, and everything in their shadow enjoyed its own manufactured rain.

On the ground, growth and decay balanced each other. For every living bubble-root, there was a dead one with all but its roots dissolved into sludge. A slime mold dripped through curling mounds of lichen and liverwort in a splash of sulfur-yellow. Rav would have expected moss in such a damp habitat, but there did not seem to be enough for it to grip: it was relegated to the branches of the trees, where it dangled like sheep's wool hung out to dry. Nothing here was dry.

A scuttle of movement made Rav hold his breath. A grass clump uttered the faintest chirp into the stillness, and a pale green cricket tiptoed from shelter. As Rav watched, it kicked into a mad scramble towards the next tuft of grass. A plant trembled. Before Rav could blink, a small muzzle snapped the cricket up like popcorn.

Rav lay absolutely still. Bright eyes surveyed him from between the leaves, curious and far less wary than they should have been. With a hand as slow as his breathing, Rav reached for a jewel-hued beetle. The bug did not see him until it was too late. He offered it to the eyes in the plant.

A slitted nose roved across his hand, and the snout of a baby dragon plucked the beetle from his fingers. The creature was small. The rest of its head emerged, no longer than his palm. Its face was slender and streamlined, with delicate ridges running back over its eyes to meet backswept horns. A long neck pursued Rav's hand in hope of more treats. He found and caught another cricket.

This time, the dragonette slid from hiding like a piece of wet rope. It was as long as Rav's arm but no thicker than his wrist, which was saying something. It had no rear limbs. Two arms propped it up, and two broad, silky wings braced against the ground as it probed Rav's hand. Finding no more bugs, it studied its visitor with a sparkle of dog-like intelligence. Its eyes were jet black, but the rest of it, from tip to broadly finned tail, was the same pearlescent white as Dreamcatcher.

A/N: Now that the risk of spoilers is over, congrats to 11BlueSky  for being the winner of last chapter's mini-contest: the first to guess the third and final ONC prompt that inspired this work. I didn't claim it as one of my core prompts for various reasons, but without it, Dreamcatcher would have been a very different book.

And by that I mean it would probably have been set on the ground. That's a thought now, isn't it...