Pumpkins

       The wizard loved growing pumpkins. Every year, he would grow at least a few pumpkin plants. Sometimes they would be mostly the traditional, orange kind. Other years, he would grow dozens of pumpkins in every variety available: orange, yellow, white, red, even the Australian blue kind. He even discovered his own varieties and would grow turquoise, hot pink, purple, bright yellow, or even multicolored pumpkins. One year, when his niece was younger, he grew a magnificent gold and silver pumpkin, which he made into a carriage for her.

       This year, the crop was mostly orange with a few other colors dotted in amongst them for some extra fun. The wizard spent many hours tending the plants and teaching the dragons and local children about them. The pumpkin patch was a famous site in the autumn.

       One day, the wizard was out in the patch, occasionally being buzzed by chirping and chattering dragons, and humming contentedly. Thanksgiving was coming soon, and that was always a special holiday. He was looking forward to seeing everyone again, and his wife knew some very good pumpkin recipes.

        Around one corner of the patch, near one pumpkin that looked like it would be turning out particularly splendidly, he came across some shimmery pieces of eggshell. “That’s odd, looks like these are a couple of days old. Strange no one’s seen him or her yet.” As he stood there, thoughtfully turning a piece of eggshell over in his hand and looking about, he noticed that a pair of leaves on one of the nearby pumpkins that didn’t exactly look like leaves. Looking closer, sure enough, there was a little dragon there, blending in quite well with his chosen pumpkin. The dragon turned his head and looked back at the wizard.

        “Hi there,” said the wizard.

        “Hello,” replied the dragon. “Is this your pumpkin?”

        “Well, the whole patch of pumpkins is mine, but you can have that one if you like. Most of the land in this area is mine, and that’s my house over there. There are quite a few dragons like yourself who live there, or use it as a home base. You can come join us anytime you want. Have you met any of the other dragons yet?”

        “I met one of them, I think he said his name was Forager, but I’ve been happy here for now.”

        “Can’t say I blame you. I quite like it out here myself. You’re welcome over at the house any time you want, though. It’ll be nice and warm there if it starts getting too cold at night over the next few days.”

        “Okay, thanks.”

        They continued chatting for a little while, and the wizard taught the little dragon a bit about pumpkins and gardening. Soon, the sun started getting low, and the wizard had other things to attend to. He said goodnight to the dragon and went back toward the house.

        The dragon remained in the pumpkin patch, settling down to watch the night. He watched the sun set, and then watched as the stars came out. He watched the pumpkin leaves stirring in the night breeze and walked around the patch seeing what the pumpkins looked like in the starlight. As the night drew on, he curled up on top of another pumpkin and settled down to wait for the dawn. Suddenly, he woke with a start, thinking one of the pumpkins had lifted off the ground. Shaking his head, he saw that it was the orange sun rising again and it was starting to warm his face and tail. He stretched into the sunlight, shook himself again, and decided it was time to fly over to the house and explore something new.

 

Bear With Me: The Adventures of Blueberry and Aeglos, Part One: Homecoming

     Late one night, most of the wizard’s household was awakened by sudden cries of

    “Hey! Wait! Slow down! Brake!! No!!! AAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”
    *plop*

    “AEGLOS!”

    *chuckles* “Oh, c’mon Blueb, you know that's fun.”

    “If you warn me first!”

    “But what would be the fun in that? Besides, considering you do handstands on my back while I’m flying, you’d think you wouldn’t mind a little dive-bomb every now and then.”

    “Yeah, but it’s dark!”

    "You know dragons have excellent night vision.”
    “But teddy bears don’t!”
    “Oh, right, sorry about that.”
    “Oh, never mind, but do you really have to call me Blueb?”

    “Yes. Blueberry Ice takes entirely too long to say. My mouth just gets tired before I even get halfway through it.”

    *sigh* “Fine, where’s Flicker?”

    “Right here,” said another voice, which sounded as though it was trying not to laugh.

    “Good, so you survived the flight too, then? Can we go inside now?”

    “Sure, I wonder if they all still sleep in the same place as before.”

    A light suddenly flickered in the window of the wizard’s workshop.

    “Yup, looks like one of them just lit a candle for us. C’mon Flicker, time to meet everyone!”

    “...and time for bed,” muttered Blueberry.

    On coming inside, the three travelers were greeted with cries of:

   “Blueberry!”
   “Aeglos!”
   “Haven’t seen you in forever, how are you!”
   “Hi! I’m Lucas. We’ve heard all about you; it’s great to meet you!”
   “How was the trip?”
   “Who’s your friend?”  
    Eventually, the general hubbub subsided, after the travelers had met those who had hatched after they left and caught up a little with the ones they’d known before. Eustace was finally able to ask, “So, where exactly did you two go when you went off exploring?”
     Aeglos yawned and said, “Well, I’m tired, so we should tell you the whole story later, but the basic gist is that we flew straight down to Antarctica and-“
     Blueberry muttered, “Sure, let’s just leave out all the times we almost died...or that incident with the water buffalo, or the-“
     “Right, like I was saying, we’ll tell you all that later. Mainly, we wanted to see Antarctica, so we flew more or less straight down, all the way over Africa”
      “Remember meeting the crocodile?”
      “I still say it’s too bad he didn’t eat your guitar. Anyway, Africa was way too hot, so we tried to get over it as quickly as possible, and we did fairly well. Antarctica was awesome. We’ll really have to tell you about that one later – it really needs a long time to tell you how cool it really was, and I want to tell you guys where Hobbes came from. We met him on the way back. We decided to tour around some other parts of the world before coming back here, so we went up the coast of Africa and over to Asia. We were debating whether or not to go all the way up north through the Arctic Circle before coming home when Flicker just appeared out of nowhere.”
      “In other words, I came and sat down and watched them because I’d heard a lot of sudden noise, and I was wondering why there was a blue and white ball of fur and skin rolling around the jungle floor and shouting at itself.”
      “Okay, so the debate might’ve been more of a wrestling match...you’d think a teddy bear would be easier to beat. You want to finish the story, Flicker?”
      “Sure. When they finally noticed me, they stopped fighting and we all just sort of stared at each other. I’d never seen anything like them, especially Aeglos, and all of you guys here are different to me, too. My tribe of dragons all look more or less like me – we’re tiger dragons, mostly orange with black stripes, and we have ears. I’ve heard tiger dragons are sometimes white with black stripes, but that’s usually not good because it makes it harder for them to hide. I guess we look like this because we all hatch near tiger dens, but I never knew that until Aeglos told me about how you guys get your colors. These two really stood out in the jungle. If Aeglos had been bigger, I might have been afraid of him. But we’ll have to tell you the whole story later. Pretty soon, curiosity got the better of us, and I wound up inviting them back to stay with my family. We usually all live together in a big cave network. When Blueberry and Aeglos decided they wanted to come back here, I asked if I could come with them. I wanted to see what your land is like, and I’ve never seen so many different dragons!”
      Soon, as it was quite late at night by this point, the questions and stories were saved for the coming days and everyone got some well-needed sleep.

(Author’s note: Stay tuned for more short stories detailing The Adventures of Blueberry and Aeglos (aka Bear With Me))