Whether he understood me or not, he spread his wings silently, taking the form of the night as the low shine of street lights seems to dim in his presence. Without a backwards glance he beat his wings twice and took off into the sky.

For me, it wasn't quite that simple. Being a human with nothing that could qualify as wings, I was stuck doing the dangerous teenager thing since sneaking out of a second story window – even though my sister was fast asleep and my parents weren't even home – was the best idea I could think of at the time. Luckily there as a convenient tree growing against the opposite side of the house – so convenient in fact, that if this were a story, some would probably say it was only planted for the reason to further the plot along.

I quickly light stepped across my roof's steep incline, and prayed to God that my sister didn't wake up and think we were being robbed (not my first time on the roof, and wouldn't be the first time she called the cops on me). I peered over the edge of my roof and had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up. If I was the sort of person who was afraid of heights, I would have certainly emptied my stomach over the edge, but as it stood, my entire body wasn't feeling too good either way I stepped over the gap between the roof and the tree and started making my way back to solid earth.

And to further prove that I hadn't really thought my plan through, I found that I had to make a ten-foot jump from the lowest branch to the ground. To put things simply, after finally making it to the lawn I found that I wasn't dead, but my ankles weren't exactly singing my toons either.

I found Slephon waiting impatiently at the base of the tree. He nudged at my ankles when I didn't get up and I hissed under my breath making him scamper back a few steps in the surprise.

"Don't worry about it," I told him as I rose to my feet. "I just learned that there's a reason we installed a front door, that's all." He offered my hand a soft nip in consolation then bounded around the yard, waiting for me to lead the way. I smiled despite the dark and limped across the yard toward the main street.

"Follow me," I reminded him even though there was no need. Since the moment, he had pushed away from that car, he hadn't left my side – maybe once or twice to try and catch the neighbor's cat or inspect the falling leaves – but he always came back. There were a thousand things to fear when taking care of a dragon, but with Selphon, running away was not one of them.

Together, Selphon and I took to the night. We stayed away from the main roads, and Selphon walked as much of the way as possible so not to attract any unwanted attention (I mean, come on, what would you do if you saw something the size of a dog flying around your neighborhood at night?) A few times we had to cut into people's yards when cars came just a little too close, but with the hours and the misty weather, there weren't too many traversing the night for leisure.

There was a small children's park on the other end of a nature walking path on the other side of my house. But the woodlands one had to walk through to get to the park were too eerie to make the place a high destination for children (if anything it was the nature trail itself that got the most attention since it was a highly recommended hot spot for the city's writing community – they even set up picnic tables with charging port just off the path), and resulted in the place not receiving the proper maintenance it needed. For the most part, especially in the wee hours of the night, it was abandoned.

Selphon was able to ditch the shadows once we came to the nature trail. The half naked branches allowed for little light to see by, but a greater paranoia restrained me from flicking on my phone light. I shivered against my jacket and played with the drawstring of my bag nervously, trying to ignore the fact that it was digging into my shoulders. My dragon bounded up ahead until I couldn't see him in the thick darkness, only hear the snaps of twigs he stepped on and his chirps of surprise as his wings got caught in something they shouldn't have.

I craned my head upward to peer at the covered sky. The stars were hiding this night, watching with blind eyes as we traversed through the dark. I paused and turned my gaze over my shoulder before hurrying to catch up with Selphon. Something in me desperately wanted to turn back, go home, and hide under my spare comforter for the rest of the night, but Selphon's excitement cut through that.

He had been cooped up in my room for more than a week, stuck watching life move past from my bedroom window and looking for something more interesting than old textbooks under my bed. He needed this – marching band season was killer on us both. And I wasn't sure how we were going to handle things when the snow came down.

Without thinking, I broke into a jog, praying that my memory of the mountain path was enough to keep me from tripping over something and falling flat on my face. The odds were against me since that still seemed to happen when there was perfect lighting and no reason to be stressed.

It's a good neighborhood, I found myself reasoning. Even though I am alone in the woods after dark, no one knows where I am except my best friend who won't suspect anything's up until morning, and I have a small dragon to take care of.

Nothing to worry about at.

Five minutes dragged on, but it seemed like an hour. Selphon's constant chirping was the only thing that kept me from turning back. He always could tell when there was danger around – even though in his case danger usually qualified as passing cars. Even so, I found myself trusting his judgment and pushing on through the night. We emerged several minutes later into the clearing. Dark shadows grew up from the ground, forming the silhouettes of swing sets, and slides. The playground was placed in the center of an overgrown grassy field that looked like nobody had bother mowing for a solid season and beyond the field grew the woods that cornered the playscape from all sides and made parents paranoid about their children's safety.

Still, the place was big enough to run around in and I was a little bit shorter the place would have seemed huge.

That being said, Selphon, was smaller than me so the place must have been mammoth to him especially considering the size of the room he currently had to live in. The first time we came out here after a prolonged stay in the room, he just sat on top of the slide with his head tilted up like he had completely forgotten what the sky looked like.

"Go on," I told him and motioned to the clouds above. "Spread those wings of yours."

His oversized orange eyes seemed to gather up what little light there was and reflect it back out at me. He looked at me expectantly and nudged gently at the bag with his snout before letting a low growl rumble up from his throat. He was only going to ask nicely once.

"Alright, alright." I laughed and shrugged the bag from my shoulders. I hurriedly reached inside and pulled out a mango. Even in the dark it was obvious that I had his attention, his spine snapped to attention and his jaws snapped dangerously close to my hands.

I tossed the tropical fruit once in my hand then hefted it over my shoulder into the air, as hard as I could. Selphon wasted no time, quickly beating his wings and catching the mango in midair. I watched in amusement as gravity took over and dragged the small dragon toward the ground.

But Selphon wasn't having any of that. He let out a high pitched howl and snapped his wings out to their full span. You could almost hear the wind yelling in surprise as the folds of skin and bone drew outward and caught their gust sending him up into the sky with a few simple beats. Selphon circled overhead several times with the mango clutched in his forearms before he dived low over the tree line and disappeared from plain sight.

I laughed softly and took a seat on a bench to wait for him to come back for seconds. The night was getting mistier, but my eyes had finally adjusted somewhat to the dark. I could make out the shadows of trees and grasses shooting up from the ground. And other than the sound of Selphon sticking his landings, the playground was unusually quiet for a woodland area at night.

I suppressed a deep shiver and pulled my hood up over my head. As I waited my ducked my fingers into my sleeves and hid them under my arms to try and keep from freezing over. I turned my gaze upward; the midnight sky was water colored with the grey of what would have been white clouds had it not been the middle of the night. Somewhere high above, a plane passed – much too high to see Selphon even if they were looking, but still the idea that others could find him had me worried.

I couldn't possibly be the only one in the world who knew about dragons – maybe I phrased that wrong because when you really think about it, everyone, knew about dragons. It was in every storybook, every accounted history, over every culture in the world. There was no documentation of humans without the documentation of dragons, yet there was no proof other than that dragons ever actually existed beyond the forms of the mind.

It couldn't be possible that humanity was fooled by one giant hallucination. Not that many people, not over such a long distance. There was no way it was possible – but where were the dragons? If they did exist at one point, where did they go?

Selphon's happy clicks sounded from somewhere above me and I turned in surprise to find him diving in a stoop toward my back. I spun around and at the last moment he collided with my chest – the momentum was enough to send us both crashing to the ground. I let out a winded laugh as he nuzzled my cheek with his snout and blew hot air into my face.

"Why come back now?" I whispered and ran my fingers over his smooth neck spikes.

The dragon chirped and bobbed his head to one side, his eyes brighter than everything around us. I pushed the beast off away and reached for the drawstring bag which had fallen to the side during the collision. I fished around for a moment before producing one of the last two mangos in the pouch. I offered it to Selphon and he slowly opened his mouth to pick it from my hand – careful to avoid grazing my skin with his sharp teeth.

"Another thing," I noted out loud and watched as he seemed to knaw on the fruit with the side of his jaw. "Your teeth are too sharp for you to be an herbivore. Omnivore then, right?"

Selphon paused and blinked at me like he didn't have time for my midnight biology observations. But then he stopped, his frills raising in alert as he rose to his feet, the mango completely forgotten.

"What is it?" I asked also rising to feet, with the bag in hand.

Selphon didn't respond and instead dove down onto all fours to flee into the woods.

"Selphon!" I snapped but he didn't turn back.

A/N Expect another update tomorrow too (you can comment and annoy me on my board if I don't) I find that I am only capable of writing at the darkest hours of night so I should probably stay up more. This was one of my longer chapters so I had to split it again.

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