Warm-colored leaves drifted down on the light blue water dragoness and her eight-month-old adoptive son as the latter–a striped green hybrid between an earth dragon and possibly a seer–bounded excitedly ahead toward the outskirts of the forest, leading the way to the plains where her lake resided.

“Come on, Glacia!” he beckoned her with a playful glance over his shoulder. “Don’t you want to live?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm comin’,” she laughed with mock annoyance. “You know I won't have the strength to keep up with you until after I recover in the water. If I didn't know better, Gadalik, I’d assume you're only in a rush for us to get there so you can swim!”

He smirked and rolled his striped blue eyes to dismiss such a ridiculous motive, but he slowed to a stop for her to catch up. Gadalik had grown considerably since the start of the previous season, but he was still clearly juvenile both in size and spirit. Despite his bigger body, though, his wings remained too small for him to fly with–a fact he seemed to have accepted long ago.

Still, Gadalik made use of his wings to help him stay afloat in water–a task otherwise impossible for pure earth dragons, both since they had none, and because their natural muscles weighed them down. The young male had taken Glacia's swimming lessons seriously, and although it ended up requiring precise, nonstop, powerful movement for him to avoid sinking, he took pride in his success.

The water dragoness finally reached his side, and the two continued through the plains toward the lake at a leisurely pace together. Halfway there, a large, dark purple serpentine dragon with a red striated belly and matching, clawed wings flew over them from behind. Glacia became visibly upset by the sight, and her mouth moved as if she were speaking a warning, but Gadalik couldn't hear anything. For some reason, his lack of senses other than sight and touch didn't feel unnatural, so he didn't think to question it.

The large dragon circled around to land before them. Even on all fours, his long, snake-like body stood at least twice the height of Glacia–which was quadruple that of Gadalik’s. His golden eyes flicked briefly to the dragoness, before focusing on her adoptive son.

Gadalik recognized him as a seer, based solely on the description Glacia had given him of the deceased green dragoness she had assumed was his biological mother. In his short life, the hybrid had only seen other dragons passing through the skies. He had never encountered one aside from Glacia. His striped blue gaze was drawn to the seer’s long wings; for some reason, he felt a pang of envy.

Despite his mother's apparent warning, Gadalik stepped toward the other male, speaking the polite greeting he had rehearsed as a hatchling in the case of his first meeting with another dragon.

The seer seemed to laugh, but his eyes held contempt, remaining focused on him as though the younger dragon were prey he refused to lose sight of.

Glacia shouted something inaudible, and when the seer ignored her yet again, she shot a jet of water from her mouth, the pressurized stream aimed at his glabella. He turned his head away at the last second in an attempt to dodge, but that caused the water to hit one of his eyes instead. He recoiled, having shut his eye too late to block the attack; blood dripped out from between his eyelids.

The seer roared at her in a fit of rage, extending his powerful red wing to swat her away as though she were nothing more than a nuisance to him. Then he rounded on Gadalik, forcing his eye open to reveal the golden iris was now flecked with red, making him all the more intimidating as he stalked toward the hybrid, who was distracted by the assault on his adoptive mother. She had been knocked almost twenty feet away, and was lying motionless.

Fearing for her life, the young dragon rushed to her side to ensure she survived when he felt a sharp, immense pain in his neck from the seer's claws.

Everything went red.

Gadalik’s sight cleared, and he was confused to see the seer recoiled, having shut his eye too late to block Glacia’s attack; blood dripped out from between his eyelids. Somehow, this repeat of the event also didn't seem unnatural to him, and he quickly made use of this second chance during the time the bleeding dragon needed to recover by pulling his mother's back fin and fleeing toward the forest; she followed suit, although she was falling behind due to her prolonged stay on land.

The seer’s shadow loomed over them, and Gadalik looked skyward with horror to see he was right above him and moving in for the kill.

In that moment, a bipedal black dragon with a thin white stripe down his sides and limbs, who was roughly the same size as the seer, knocked the amphithere off course, hovering on white-and-maroon stinger-tipped wings and glancing down at Gadalik with his blue- and red- violet eyes that held a hint of curiosity. He called out to the younger male, but it was silent. Then he focused on the seer, who was angrily retaliating. The black dragon kept a level head, dodging smoothly before whipping his long tail to impale the seer with the stinger on the tip of it. As the winged serpent drew back from the sting, purple venom oozing from the puncture, the potential hero once again noticed that the terrified young hybrid hadn't moved, and gestured urgently with his hand for Gadalik to run.

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In the brief time he was distracted, the seer caught him off-guard by slashing long, gaping tears in the webbing of his stinger-tipped wing. While the black dragon struggled to stay airborne as this injury disallowed him to catch wind, he was losing altitude fast, and the seer didn't wait for him to recover before delivering the precise final strike with the claw of his wing's thumb into his opponent's back, immediately tearing it out.

As the black dragon fell from the sky, a spray of blood raining down in his wake, his killer's golden eyes trained on Gadalik next. The young hybrid paralyzed by fear and grief was in too much shock to even reflexively wince from the warm red droplets that landed on and around him. He felt Glacia try to pull him out of the seer's path when the latter charged with the corners of his gaping mouth rising into a twisted grin, but she was all too late.

The world was engulfed in red once more.

The gentle breeze swirled colorful leaves around the water dragoness as she finally reached her adoptive son’s side, but by that point, he suddenly seemed distraught, staring straight ahead at nothing. “Gadalik?” she prompted, getting worried when the green earth-seer hybrid didn't respond.

After twenty seconds of her desperate and unsuccessful attempts to get his attention, he snapped out of it, hyperventilating as his heart still pounded with adrenaline and his muscles ached from the chase. There was a searing pain in his neck where the seer had fatally wounded him, but after frantically looking around, Gadalik discovered that Glacia and himself were alone in the outskirts of the forest. Wasn't I killed? he thought. How did we get back here?

“Calm down...! Tell me what's wrong," Glacia had been pleading.

His lifted his forepaw to his pained neck as his answer, only to find out that he was uninjured. A moment passed for him to piece together exactly what took place: they hadn't suddenly reappeared in the forest; instead, they had not left it yet.

The young male turned back to cast his gaze over the trees, spotting the silhouette of a distant serpentine dragon flying toward them from the ocean far beyond the forest: the same seer as was in what the hybrid now realized were visions. If Gadalik wanted to survive, and prevent the death of the black dragon who had tried to save him, the green juvenile needed to hide…but where?

That's when a new vision graced him, as if the universe were guiding him to safety.

After another ten seconds of Glacia calling his name again, he came to and spoke, although his voice was quiet and serious as he explained, “I had a vision… We have to get to the lake as fast as we can."

“Vision?!" she exclaimed. "You mean–you really are a seer–”

“There's no time...! We have to leave now,” he interrupted, only slightly louder to emphasize the urgency.

Gadalik waited to make sure his adoptive mother ran first, before he followed close behind her. Glacia had been upfront with him about his heritage from the start, but given his lack of resemblance to the green seer dragoness found dead near himself a month before he hatched–as well as the fact that he had never had a vision until now–Gadalik and Glacia both had doubts as to whether or not the seer was his biological mother.

This confirmed she was, but he had no time to process that information. After what felt like forever, they reached the lake–Glacia had overexerted herself, teetering on the verge of collapse, but she jolted when the winged earth dragon confidently leapt into the depths, instantly sinking.

"Gadalik!" she cried, panic over his safety allowing her to power through her exhaustion to dive in and save him. Her red, veiled eyes spotted him instantly, and to her relief, he was fully awake, trying his best to swim underwater despite their lessons never having advanced that far. His strategic movements quickly became erratic until he was floundering and bubbles were escaping his mouth.

Her instinct was to pull him ashore, but she realized that he had been swimming toward the underwater cavern. Given how desperate he'd been for them to leave the area, Glacia trusted his judgment. She hugged him firmly in her arms, then used her webbed feet, back fins, and tail fin to propel them swiftly through the entrance, making one right turn, then one left, before the sandy ground eventually sloped up into a patch of land before a cenote.

Gadalik coughed out water as she placed him down on it, then she collapsed beside him. “Are you okay…?” the water dragoness asked the seer-hybrid.

“Yeah… I am now,” he panted.

“What did you see…?”

“...A lot.” They caught their breath before he explained his first two visions in depth.

“An evil seer, and a bipedal savior?” she summarized.

“Yeah. Do you know who they might be?”

“No… Not a clue. You mentioned the black dragon had stingers, so he must be a poison elemental from the desert region. Seers live in the tropics on an island to the north, and aren't fit for this climate. So the two could either be travelers who stopped to rest here, or rogues looking for a territory to claim–if they were desperate enough to adapt here, that is–but that's really all I can think of.”

“I don't know... They both acted so purposefully, like they had a reason for being here. I think the seer’s reason was…me,” he murmured. “He killed me in both visions… But the black dragon would have won against him if I hadn't been there. So when I came back to real time, the only thing I could think of to do was hide before either of them found me.”

“And you decided to hide underwater?” Glacia suddenly chided him, as if trying to lighten the mood despite her honesty. “I understand your intention, but we both know that's a death sentence for you!”

“True,” he chuckled, somewhat embarrassed. “But I had a third vision.”

That got her attention. “What was it?”

“This," he answered simply. "I knew you'd bring me here." His soft gaze met her eyes, which widened slightly with a mix of surprise and honor at that revelation.

She lowered her back fin to blanket her son, and he leaned his body into the embrace. There was a moment of silence while they processed these events. The evening sun shone onto the calm waters in front of them. The family watched the dust particles and small insects dancing in the spotlight as it slowly faded with the day’s end.