Are you ready to meditate with Cori?
Make sure that you're all comfortable in your room.
Check that the light is just right.
Make sure that you're wearing comfortable pajamas so that your body can relax in bed and you can let go of your busy,
Busy day.
Heidi,
Cherry,
Veya,
Tucker and Leo were in Cherry's bedroom.
Cherry was restless.
I don't know what it is.
I'm Jay.
I don't know what it is.
I just feel like there's something in my stomach.
I feel like butterflies or something.
Feel like I need to go do something.
Feel like I need to get out of this house.
Feel like we've been in this house all day.
Tucker said.
No,
We haven't.
We only just come over,
Didn't we,
Leo?
I know,
Tucker.
I know.
But I'm just saying how I feel.
I feel really restless and prickly and pokey,
Like I just want to get out.
Veya said.
It's been a while since,
You know,
You know.
Cherry said.
That's it.
OMG.
That's it,
Veya.
That's it.
That's what we need to do.
Go get it right now.
Heidi,
Tucker and Leo quickly caught on to the fact that Veya was talking about her dragon scale.
Veya went downstairs.
She digged through the sugar in the cupboard and found her white dragon scale.
She didn't touch it.
Not very much.
She just pinched it with her paw.
She didn't want to activate it too soon.
She wanted to make sure that she was with all the others first.
When she got back upstairs into their room,
Veya looked at everyone as if to say,
Are you ready?
And no one argued with her.
They were ready.
Veya rubbed all the sugar off the white dragon scale that she'd found.
And as she rubbed the sugar away to clean it.
In the next breath,
They were all up in the air,
Flying through the sky in their dragon bodies.
It was raining outside.
It was super,
Super stormy.
There was lightning blaring out in the sky.
Occasionally they heard thunder and it sounded as if it was following them.
The rain just poured and poured and poured.
All the clouds were dark and gray.
The sky felt very,
Very doomy,
Dark.
Almost scary.
None of them seemed to be scared.
In their normal cat and dog bodies,
They would have definitely not been outside in this.
But they weren't cats and dogs right now.
They were dragons.
And these five dragons don't seem to fear anything.
They blazed through the dark black clouds.
At one point,
Cherry was so blinded by everything around her,
The rain,
The clouds.
It felt as if she was flying through the pitch black.
She let out the deepest roar and a stream of fire came out from her mouth,
Guiding the way through the darkest cloud that they were going through.
Cherry was in the lead.
She was leading the pack and everyone else knew that this was Cherry's time.
They naturally fell back,
Following her,
Sensing that she knew exactly where she was going.
It felt like a long time of flying.
None of them were tired.
None of them felt the cold,
The rain.
They just kept flying forward.
And as they flew through the clouds,
It felt more and more evident that this definitely was not Earth.
They welcomed the strikes of lightning.
It allowed them to see where they were going.
The big cracks,
The booms of thunder.
It was like music to the dragons' ears.
The skies started to get a haze of gold and orange and red.
And as they flew more and more towards that color,
They started to see nothing but the brightest of orange,
The fieriest color of all.
And then Cherry started to descend.
She had come to the part of the octagon that was hers.
She knew it,
She felt it.
And that feeling in her stomach that she had earlier seemed to explode.
The first thing that everyone noticed was the sound of the drums.
Boom,
Boom,
Boom.
A deep,
Deep roar,
Repetitive,
Coming over and over and over again.
And the roar of the drums seemed to vibrate through Cherry's body.
As she slowed her descent,
Getting closer to the ground,
She turned and peered at the four dragons behind her.
Her brilliant,
Orange,
Fiery eyes set alight as if her eyes themselves were on fire.
Her carnelian crystal eyes blazed in the dark sky.
She didn't say a word.
She spoke to them all in their minds.
Follow me.
They all sensed it.
The ground beneath them was a roaring,
Rolling,
Tumbling escapade of volcano lava.
The whole ground was bubbling and burning everything that it came into contact with.
Cherry's part of the octagon was called Fire Island.
In the centre of her section was a giant volcano,
Erupting,
Bubbling over with active,
Vibrant,
Fiery lava,
Pulsing out of its centre.
The pulse of the volcano seemed to time with the drum.
Boom,
Boom,
Boom.
No one said a word.
They landed down on the ground,
A part of the lava that had already cooled slightly,
But it would still have burnt their paws if they were animals.
But they seemed to be immune to the heat.
It didn't hurt their feet at all as dragons.
Cherry landed very,
Very close to the lava.
And that's when everyone else noticed the activity,
The buzz of what was happening here in this place,
In Fire Island.
They were surrounded by tall,
Eight foot at least,
Robots.
They looked like iron men.
They had solid metal uniforms.
You couldn't see their faces.
They didn't look real.
They looked boxy and square and giant.
There wasn't even a space for their eyes.
There was no questions asked.
It seemed that these robots were the inhibitants of Cherry's part of the Octagon.
They worked here.
They lived here.
Tucker thought at one point that if he was a dog right now,
He would have been so scared and intimidated by the size of these things.
But he wasn't a dog.
He was a dragon.
And Cherry was magnificent.
She was bright orange and she fired and shimmered just like the lava all around them.
And her eyes were brilliant,
Brilliant flames of bright orange carnelian.
Like they had a mind and life of their own.
Cherry turned around and said,
This is my land.
Cherry no longer sounded like her silly,
Crazy cat self.
Not here.
Not in her space.
She was the queen of this place.
She was the boss.
When the robots finally detected Cherry's presence,
They stopped.
They bowed.
And then very quickly,
They got back to work.
They were collecting the lava in its hot,
Runny,
Pliable form.
The rest of the dragons watched as their robots carried the lava to different molds.
Some of the molds were shaped like bricks.
Some of the molds were shaped like tools.
Some of the molds were shaped like vehicles.
This part of the octagon was about creativity.
It was also about motivation.
Hence,
The giant twelve-foot robot at the top of the volcano,
Banging on a steel drum,
Motivating everyone to work.
Everyone seemed to move in the beat of the drum.
It was like a timer,
A sound that they could follow.
It navigated their movements,
Their actions,
The speed that they moved at.
Boom,
Boom,
Boom.
It banded over and over and over again,
A constant.
Fire Island created everything that was made from lava.
It supplied it to the rest of the octagon sections.
Anything that was needed that was brick was used from here.
The vehicles that were created for land and sea were used from this part of the octagon.
They created castles,
Cities,
From these blocks that were being formed and built from the fiery,
Fiery,
Red-hot lava coming from Cherry's volcano.
The smell here was so pungent.
Sulfur.
It smelled like eggs.
And the dragon's keen senses of smell weren't put off by the smell at all.
In fact,
It seemed to energize Cherry to the point where her whole dragon body started to illuminate and vibrate.
It was waking her up.
The heat,
The drums,
The smell.
It was bringing her whole body alive and her scales seemed to ripple like the lava around her.
The dragons watched as Cherry walked on the fire.
She walked through the lava.
Heading towards the center where the volcano was.
Pouring over.
Bubbling out and over the contents of its center.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The sound kept repeating.
The other four dragons stayed still and quiet and watched as Cherry almost reached the top of the volcano.
When she got there,
She towered over the tall robot banging on the drums.
Everyone watched as Cherry's head leaned closer down to the robot's head.
No one could hear a thing,
But they all sensed exactly what she said.
When the robot started to pace,
His drum beats quicker.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
They went.
Automatically,
Everything shifted below.
The timing of the movement of the robots working below shifted.
Faster.
They all started to move faster.
In time,
With the motivational beat of the drum keeping them going.
Carnelian,
After all,
Is about motivation.
The crystal itself,
Cherry's eyes,
Cherry's energy,
Cherry's whole being was all about creativity and motivation.
And this part of the octagon was exactly that.
They were constantly creating.
Creating from the lava.
Creating shapes.
Tools.
Buildings.
Crafts.
Everything.
Everything they could possibly make from the lava once it had cooled and formed a shape.
That's the definition of creation.
And Cherry knew how to speed things up.
She knew how to motivate her section even more.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The drum was endless.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
It was beautiful to watch.
It was like a well-oiled machine.
And Cherry being there seemed to make it work even better.
Cherry started to walk back down the volcano's side.
At some points,
The lava was so deep it seemed to come up to her chest.
It didn't phase her in the slightest.
She just glowed brighter.
And then when she reached her friends,
She didn't say a word.
She flew up into the sky and they followed her.
The sky had not changed.
The storm had not lightened up.
They flew all the way back home in that darkness,
Taking turns to blast out a stream of fire to light their way.
Cherry peered down as her quarter of the octagon started to fade away in the background.
That weird,
Uncomfortable,
Prickly feeling in her stomach disappeared.
She felt content,
Relaxed and at peace.
The end.
