Ondir

The little creature in the water was drowning. The boat above had capsized. The sea serpent did not know what had happened. It surveyed from the watery depths of the abyss the aftermath of what must have been an explosion. There was fire in the water and screams. Terror on the surface and then wreckage. Humans were swimming and flailing in the water. Legs and arms and flurries of motion as they panicked. They did not seem to notice the little one yet.

He had been thrown into the water with a soft splash to the left of the wreckage. His hair was brown and waved about his shocked face. His eyes were open. He was so little. The serpent knew he couldn't breathe beneath.

Not like they could.

But the boy was a human and they avoided the humans at all costs. That is how they survived for centuries past the age of the hunters and foragers, the Native Americans he knew to be called the Abenaki, past the days of settlers.

The boy had trousers and a white shirt with a plaid button coat. He sunk deeper into the darkness in which only the eyes of the serpents glowed below.

The others watched too but none moved.

Ondir encircled the child, his black scales gleamed as he rapidly circled round and round. He tightened his hold. The boy's eyes were shut now. His face turning blue. Ondir tugged on the little body and gently moved, rising quietly from beneath. He propelled in one swift movement towards the beach and his family of sea serpents followed silently behind cautiously.

"Too far, too risky," he thought to himself but he had to get the child out of the water. He bumped the encircled mass behind him to the surface and in the fading dusk, the sea serpent could be seen momentarily breaking the surface, dark and large and exceedingly frightening.

The child gasped air at the surface. Ondir turned to look behind at the boat.

The humans were busy with the aftermath of the explosion. He silently moved across the black waters to the beach. Looking left and right, he paused close to the shore of Lake Willoughby where the tourists often played in the sun of August days.

There were onlookers from the shore. A woman was pointing and shouting. She had noticed him. He had no other choice but to submerge again. He tightened further around the child and darted down beneath the waves, searching, scrambling for somewhere to deposit him out of harm's way.

The boy struggled and glugged and gurgled several times.

Ondir's brothers, swam forward to guard his left and right flank. Three black and deadly serpents slithered in masse.

He made it to a nearby dock in a small cove beyond the beach. Ondir lifted the cold and freezing boy to the dock, unraveling the length of his body quickly before plunging again into the water to remain undetected.

They called them the Lochness Monsters of the mountain lake. It was no secret to the locals. Everyone knew the tales. In the 1800s, a wagon was crossing the icy lake. A wagon wheel buckled and broke the ice and the wagon along with unfortunate participants fell below into the freezing water. The wagon disappeared only to reappear on the other side of the mountain in Crystal Lake.

From then on, people knew.

There were monsters in those glacial waters. There was a large secret cavern, another world, where they lived beneath the mountain between the 2 lakes. The wagon had reappeared on the other side to confirm this. The Abenaki had called them the ancients. The settlers only knew them as the terrors beneath. Scientists called them Plesiosaurs. They called them dinosaurs. But they were more than that.

They were dragons.