The Lord of Arra (2/6)
"AAHHH!" the children scream in pure fear.
Within moments, Lord Fheldin is upon them. Once he's in view, several of the young dragons immediately faint. Dragons are especially sensitive to Dravar (Power), so feeling the Dravar circulate so freely in their father's body overloads their brains.
The Felkin, on the other hand, are awake to see their father's face up close.
Instead of scolding the children, Fheldin quickly counts them all, then flicks his left hand. All the boys and girls fly back up to their rooms, like there's an invisible hand gripping them tightly and carrying them away.
Fheldin looks up at where he saw his children had fallen from, and he sees the air vent he had just broken.
"Hmm…," he mutters, "It's a dead end. They couldn't have escaped this way." He nods in satisfaction. "This must've been all the children who had gone up the air shaft." He shakes his head. "Tsk. What bad luck to be caught in a dead end."
(…In a way, Fhulk's act of closing off the exit and selfishly escaping by himself just saved his butt from being beaten by his father…)
Before leaving, Lord Fheldin quickly uses one of his hands to cast a spell. All the rubble from the fallen ceiling floats back up and reassembles itself into its original shape, like a jigsaw puzzle magically putting itself together.
Once all the rubble is in place, the cracks in the ceiling disappear without a trace, and his home is whole once more.
Of course, being able to casually do time reversal magic with a flick of a hand is a ridiculous display of magic that would take all the wizards of the Threshold decades to accomplish. This much is nothing to Lord Fheldin, though.
With his task done in this section of the palace, Fheldin turns around and shoots back over to the east wing again to follow a new trail - this time to the waterway...
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While Fheldin is headed back to find his other children – confident that he missed nothing at the air vents, the traitorous Fhulk is busy running off into the forest like his life depends on it; in a way, it does.
Every so often, Fhulk peeks anxiously behind him and sees that his father isn't chasing after him. 'Heh, heh. The plan must've worked.' He grins and speeds up his pace through the sunset.
After what he feels to be a safe distance away from the dragon den, he screams out, "FREEDOM!"
As quickly as his outburst came, it leaves.
Now that he's calm again, he reminds himself, 'Ok, I'm not out of the woodwork yet. If father catches all the other siblings too soon, he might come after my trail again. Hopefully, my trick stalls him for a long time, since he might not think to check the other end of the 'dead end' shaft. Even still, I need to get as far away as possible."
Fhulk had never exercised very much, nor has he engaged in fights very often either; he's not exactly athletic (in dragon terms). He doesn't even run long before his legs feel like they're burning, and his breathing is heavy and labored.
Every time Fhulk is tempted to slow down and catch his breath, he keeps himself motivated to keep running by thinking of his father's angry face.
... and that gorgeous red hair...
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Once Lord Fheldin confirms that the second largest scent trail went into the sewage system, the dragon folds his arms and snorts – sending a brief puff of black smoke blowing out his nose.
Without hesitation, Fheldin runs outside his palace, then flies into the sky (ignoring flight restrictions outside his gate).
Like a meteor hurling through the sky and leaving a fire in its wake, Fheldin burns a path through the air. Unlike his other children, who must use their bodies' great strength to fly through the sky, Fheldin only has to Will the air elementals to carry him. Being as strong as he is, his grasp over them is far greater than any other dragon on this world.
Because Fheldin himself doesn't have to move or expend any mana to fly through the air, he's still in his human form. With even his wings not being present on his body, he's simply standing upright, with his hands in his pockets, while the Elementals carry him as he is.
As Fheldin flies towards the lake a few miles off from his palace, he frowns in displeasure.
He doesn't bother ripping apart the sewage system like he did for the air vents, since all the sewage (unlike the air vents) converges in the same place – the lake.
"Hmph!" he huffs to himself as he lets the Elementals drop him in the water, "Foolishly naïve!"
Fheldin is naturally so heavy that he sinks to the bottom of the lake like a rock. Once he hits the lake floor, he folds his arms and waits patiently at the large, stone-carved tunnel in front of him.
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Another dozen or so youngsters are swimming along the drainage pipes – patiently wading slowly, so as to not generate ripples of Dravar their father can sense.
If it weren't for evading detection, they'd have swum through the sewage system at supersonic speeds and gotten out in a few minutes.
As for the fact that the mile's worth of drainage pipes are completely submerged in water… both the Drakin and Felkin races can hold their breaths for a really long time, so they didn't go down with any diving equipment with them on their escape journey.
Sure, they had several hours allotted to them to escape through the drainage tunnels, but there's another reason they're still inside when Fheldin had woken up.
Other than the fact that they can't use too much power (lest they wake their father up), there are also some special security measures placed in the underground waterways.
When going into the tunnels, all the siblings knew about there being "security measures" here, though they weren't quite sure what they were.
They knew this because the eldest sister among them had warned them, "One of our siblings have escaped through here before. Father definitely added traps and the like down there."
…And traps there are - plenty of them.
After inching painfully slowly down the waterway, they made sure to keep their eldest sister up in front – as she carefully undoes all the traps by figuring them all out and getting some of her more capable sisters to help dismantle them.
The dragon brothers would have just smashed through the traps, but again, they're afraid of startling their father awake.
While everything seems to be going fine, one of the younger Felkin princesses in the back is absentmindedly thinking about the drainage pipes as they drift through the sewage underwater. About halfway through their journey, she widens her eyes in shock upon realizing a fatal flaw with their escape plan.
What she notices is that whenever they come across an intersection where pipes meet, they only ever see the water flow joining their own stream. It's like all the pipes are converging together.
Knowing this, the intelligent girl makes the deduction that all the sewage deposits in one location.
That's pretty bad, right? That means her Father will know exactly where to go when he comes looking for them.
Still, this little girl is one of the shyest of her sisters, and she's afraid of speaking up about her reservations.
As she's thinking about this, there's a loud rumbling, and all the boys react to their father's anger by shuddering and scrunching up their bodies in an instinctual desire to seem small.
Once the initial shock wears off, the horde of siblings panic and start to swim faster for the exit.