The door was closing. The wide rectangular opening at the aircraft’s rear was shrinking, the heavy tal panel descending from above in a slow, inexorable arc. Through the narrowing gap, Raizen could see the platform - the warm yellow light from the hall, the unconscious guards, the night sky beyond.
The gap was a ter wide. Then half a ter. Then -
The lizard jumped.
Raizen felt it leave - the small weight in his pocket managing to finally escape, after all the minutes of struggle, the tiny body launching itself from the fabric with a force that sothing that size shouldn’t have been able to produce. It cleared his chest, hit the floor, and scrambled toward the closing door with a speed that turned its small legs into a blur of black motion.
It reached the door’s edge with centiters to spare.
And then it did sothing Raizen had never seen it do.
It stood up.
The tiny back legs planted on the aircraft’s floor, the front legs reaching for the door’s descending edge, and the lizard rose to its full height – a few good centiters of creature standing upright for the first ti since it was born, its body forming a vertical line between the floor and the tal panel that was grinding downward with the slow, unstoppable force of a hidraulic machine that didn’t know or care what was in its path.
Its scales changed.
The smooth black skin rippled from head to tail, each individual scale thickening and restructuring, the edges rising and overlapping the next in a cascade that transford the lizard’s skin from sothing soft and flexible into sothing hard and interlocking. Armour. Miniature plates of reinforced scale, each one clicking into place against its neighbour, the pattern precise and familiar in a way that hit Raizen with a shock of recognition - he’d seen this before. On sothing much, much larger. The sa overlapping geotry, the sa structural logic, the sa design that covered the body of a creature with four wings enough speed to obliterate a Nyx in a single pass.
Elin’s dragon. The lizard’s scales looked like Elin’s dragon’s scales.
The door hit the lizard and stopped.
The hydraulic chanism ground against the resistance - a deep, straining screech that vibrated through the aircraft’s floor and walls, the machine pushing its full force against an obstacle that weighed almost nothing and should have been crushed instantly. The lizard’s armoured body compressed between the door’s edge and the floor, and a sound ca from it that Raizen had never heard - not a shriek, not a complaint, not a word. A grunt. Low, physical, raw, the sound of sothing bearing weight that was orders of magnitude beyond what its body was designed for and refusing, through sheer will or stubbornness or whatever force lived inside a fragnt of scattered Eon and mories, to let that weight win.
The gap was maybe thirty centiters. The door had stopped its descent, pinned by a small armoured lizard that trembled visibly under the load, its reinforced scales pressing into the tal floor hard enough to leave marks.
"GO!" the lizard scread. The word ca out compressed and strained, squeezed between the pressure above and the floor below, but it carried - loud, desperate, carrying a command that left no room for hesitation or heroics or the instinct to help.
Raizen dove. Hit the floor back-first and slid on the smooth tal surface, his body passing through the gap between the door’s bottom edge and the floor with centiters of clearance. His shirt caught on sothing - a rivet, a seam - and tore, and then he was through, the lizard’s armoured back scraping against his side as he passed under it. Hard, rigid, hot from the effort of holding against the hydraulic press. He felt the individual scales against his skin through the torn shirt, each one distinct and desperately solid.
Just as he passed the door, Raizen looked down.
The platform was gone.
Below him, where solid stone had been thirty seconds ago, there was nothing. Open air. The dark shapes of Ukai’s trunks falling away beneath him, the amber dots of lanterns shrinking as the aircraft climbed in the air, the forest floor invisible sowhere far, far below in the darkness.
And he was now in the air, right above everything.
The aircraft had lifted off. While he was inside, while the alarm scread and the door closed and the lizard held, the vehicle had risen from the platform and begun its ascent. Silently, smoothly, the autopilot engaging without warning or hesitation.
Raizen’s hands found a ledge - a narrow rail that ran along the aircraft’s outer hull, barely wider than his fingers. He grabbed it. His body swung outward into the open air, legs dangling, the full weight of him hanging from a grip that his fingers maintained through pure reflex and residual reinforcent still sitting in his forearms.
The wind hit him. Cold, fast, carrying the sll of wet wood and becoming colder with altitude. Below, the distance grew. Twenty ters. Thirty. Forty.
He twisted his head back toward the door. The gap was still there - the lizard still holding, its tiny armoured body compressed to its absolute limit, the scales cracking at the edges, the hydraulic chanism screaming against the resistance.
Raizen hung from the ledge and couldn’t do anything but watch. The gap was shrinking. Not fast - milliter by milliter, the hydraulic door winning its slow war against the creature holding it open. The lizard’s armoured scales were fracturing at the edges, tiny pieces breaking away and dissolving into golden particles that the wind caught and carried upward into the dark sky.
The lizard’s eyes found his through the gap. Pale gold, enormous, the pupils fully dilated. Its small body was shaking - a visible, full-body tremor that traveled through the armoured scales and into the door and into the aircraft’s hull, the vibration of sothing that was giving everything it had and running out of everything to give.
"I can’t -" the lizard said. The voice was strained, compressed, the words squeezed out between clenched lizard jaws and the grinding pressure of the door against its body. "- hold - much longer -"
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