Dutch's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

By morning, the bonded pairs were everywhere. The quiet boy who helped Dutch on her first day walked beside a pale dragon with translucent scales, its purple-black maw dripping. Her roommate trailed a dark, quilled wyrm with milky eyes. Dutch counted the days again. Five weeks, six. She felt the cold room pulling at her from below. She heard two upper students whisper about subterranean levels and curfew sweeps. One mentioned poppies outside an old miners' door — flowers that swayed when no wind moved, warning of patrols inside. Dutch slipped out before the next bell and found the wooden frame at the edge of the grounds, its timbers gray and splintered, ivy crawling the stones. The poppies stood perfectly still. She stepped past the frame into the dark. Without a map, she knew she'd be lost in minutes and caught past curfew. She pressed her palm to the cold wall and asked, quietly, for help. A small glowing eye bloomed in the air beside her, shimmering, fixed on her like it already knew where she wanted to go. The eye drifted ahead, lighting the tunnel in soft amber. Dutch followed. It turned where she would have guessed wrong. It paused when the stone grew colder, then chose the colder path every time. She counted her steps and marked each split in her head. The eye was making her a map as it moved. Near what felt like the lowest fork, the eye stopped and hovered. Behind her, far back toward the entrance, she felt the faint thud of boots. Patrol. She turned and ran, the eye streaking ahead, retracing each turn exactly. She burst back through the wooden frame as the poppies began to sway hard in still air. She made it to her dorm three minutes before curfew, breath shaking. In her room, she sat on the floor and wrote down every turn the eye had shown her. A rough map, hers now. The cold room was no longer a place she wandered toward. It was a place she could reach on purpose — and tomorrow, she would.