From the Ashes

Who: Jon, Gerard, William
When: Last Wednesday, following this and this
Where: Inside questionably fine art
What: A magical menagerie

William wasn't sure what had happened. One minute he'd been with Pete, and the next he...hadn't. He'd fallen, his legs getting tangled up in something as he passed through the door of the temple ruins they'd discovered, and he'd registered grass and nearby running water before he hit the ground hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs. It could have been worse, he thought, pushing himself up on slightly shaky hands. He could have fallen headfirst into a rock and split his skull open, or into the water itself and drowned.

There was no temple in sight, and no curious rabbit-eared equine, and no Pete. There was, however, a garden gnome, sitting on a nearby rock sunning itself without apparent alarm at his abrupt arrival. And a gargoyle carved out of the rock, William noticed a second later. A bat-winged gargoyle funneling water from the stream, upon whose bank William appeared to be resting. A low growl caused him to spin around, flailing for balance on the ground, where he saw a griffin lounging on the grass between two towering trees, its beak stretched wide in a gaping yawn and leonine tail lashing lazily behind it. There was a pegasus not far from it, and a winged creature the size of a cockatrice that William almost mistook for a dragon until it stretched its wings and he recognized it as a wyvern. A wyvern, so close to a pegasus? With a gnome undistressed by the proximity of a griffin?

He tried to stand up, only to find that his legs weren't cooperating. More than not cooperating; bound and weighted. He struggled in blind panic for a second before looking down to try to free himself from whatever was holding him prisoner, and registered with shock the presence of gleaming green scales and delicate webbed fins.

"Oh bollocks," he said faintly in surprise.