Dragon Dawn (Dinosaurian Time Travel) Read Free Page A

from green-tinged marble, the fine tracings of muscle, arteries, and sinew giving it the appearance of living tissue. 
    Dawann searched the Great Hall. Confident she was alone, she studied the lifelike statue.  The feathers on the mother’s head were superbly rendered, as was the downy covering on the baby’s skin. The mother was bent over, her lips lovingly pressed against the hatchling’s tiny mouth. For the saurian race, it was a daring rendition of a startling idea; that a mother would actually care for and nurture her child.
    Dawann stared at the statue, at the beauty and wonder of it. She closed her eyes and hugged herself, imagining a downy hatchling in her arms. Now, she regurgitated into its little mouth. And then, she watched it swallow the food.
    She paused, reeling, for a feeling of utter emptiness overwhelmed her. She wanted to hold and feed a child – her own child – more than anything in the world.
    Touching herself on the belly, she looked down at her chest, suddenly possessed by the vision of an infant suckling at her swollen, pink breast.
    Stunned, Dawann reached up and felt her flat chest. She extended her arm and stared at her naked, green, snakelike skin. Breasts? Pink skin? In the name of the She-Goddess, what was she thinking? What did her visions mean?
    But Dawn had possessed two soft, rounded breasts on her chest, hadn’t she? 
    Dawn ? Dawann-dracon stood rooted, not even daring to breathe, as a distant voice rose in her thoughts. Dawn. So there it was, the name of her twin soul. She had once been someone called Dawn.
    “Dawn? Dawann?” she whispered. The similarity between her name and that of her vision startled her, made her feel more fearful than ever. 
    Turning, she stared at a full-length mirror hanging on the wall. Slowly, with tentative steps, she inched toward the looking glass. Uncontrollably shivering, she dropped her gaze as she halted before it, her eyes tightly shut, afraid of what she might see.
    Inexplicably, Dawann sensed the presence of someone else, a watcher, and she forced herself to look up. But there was nothing unusual in the reflection, nothing strange. Swallowing, she couldn’t shake the feeling someone was there, yet her mind railed against it and she turned to go. Suddenly, she heard something faint, like the soft tinkling of Shurrrian shells on a wind chime. She whirled around just as the mirror shimmered and cracked, shattering into a thousand fragments. 
    Dawann leapt away, but to her surprise no shards of glass fell, her side of the mirror still intact, the floor spotless. Incredible as it seemed, the mirror appeared to have broken from the inside, the pieces falling back into the looking glass, revealing another world. 
    Staring back from the depths, an unfeathered biped had replaced her own reflection, a creature with distinctively mammalian features, including dark brown hair on its head and five fingers on each hand. 
    Dawn? Human Dawn? The nictating membranes rolled over Dawann’s irises, and she feared she would lose consciousness. She breathed deeply and forced her eyes to clear. The vision of Human Dawn had vanished, the mirror now whole, and her saurian reflection stood there, as it had always been.
    Hissing aloud, Dawann wheeled about and stumbled blindly, frantically, out of the hall. 
    She raced down the corridor. For the barest moment, she wanted to escape this universe. Her world was now upside down. Reality turned inside out. What had happened? Was she actually losing her mind? 
    Dear Goddess , she prayed, please, help me, save me ––
    Without warning, she ran headlong into someone tall and strong, the shock of contact forcing her to focus her gaze once more. The Keeper. The Exalted One. The most dreaded and mighty Lord of the Solar System.
    “What is it, my pet?” The Keeper’s hawklike face expressed concern as he held Dawann at arm’s length. He was naked except for an imperial sash of blue silk, which exactly matched his