Last Dragon (eBook)

Polly Ho-Yen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
208 Seiten
Knights Of (Verlag)
978-1-915820-16-7 (ISBN)

Infos

From award-winning author Polly Ho-Yen, comes a beautifully illustrated story for readers aged 7+. Yara has only glimpsed the last dragon on Earth twice. She's got other things to worry about: her sister is in hospital, her parents are panicking, and her new teacher has labelled her a troublemaker and wants her out. But one evening, in the glow of the lights of the shopping centre in Milton Keynes, Yara finds herself being watched by the last dragon and, before it departs, it leaves her a gift: its only egg. Entrusted with the care of the last dragon egg, Yara discovers it is more powerful than she could ever have imagined. But there are others who want it and they'll stop at nothing to steal it for themselves... A moving story about bravery, self-belief and our responsibility to protect the natural world.

Polly Ho-Yen used to be a primary school teacher in London and while she was teaching there, she would get up very early in the morning to write stories. She lives in Bristol with her husband and daughter.

Textauszug

1.

I’ve never had any time for the dragon before.

Some people are obsessed with it. They live for it, travel the world for it, commit every moment to searching for a glimpse of its ragged, grey wings. There are even those, rooted to one place like I am, who still spend their every waking minute dedicated to it. You know the sort; posters-plastered-to-their-walls kind of people. They document its movements, make a study of it and hope that one day, it might come flying past their window.

Right now, I’m hoping that Mr. Lawton is one of those people, because, just as he is about to launch into a major telling off, Bertie yells, ‘Dragon!’ sprinting towards the rectangular windows that line one of the walls. For the first time in my life, I feel a little glad that there actually is one in the world.

Mr. Lawton hesitates, his finger still waggling in the air, and then he too dashes to the window to see if he can spot it.

I’ve only seen it twice before. Once, when we were on holiday and George and I were still at the age when making sandcastles on the beach all day seemed like the best fun in the world. Just as we had placed the last shells on the tower, the dragon appeared. At first it was only a tiny spot, a dot in the distance, but it got bigger and closer until it flew right over our heads. I can only really remember what its belly looked like as it flew over us, kind of speckled and ridged in a way that made me think of things that were ancient – scrolls and old stone artefacts, those kinds of things. I remember that, and the sound of its wings as it flew; it was like a heartbeat, slow and steady and rhythmic. Or maybe I thought that because it felt like the sound reverberated through my chest, through my heart, as it passed over.

When I think back on that moment, I often don’t picture it from my point of view; I see the pair of us, George and I, sitting together on the sand. Two little girls with matching dark brown hair – hers abundant, messy and curly, mine super straight like a curtain – gazing up at the huge, domed belly of the dragon just above our heads.

The second time, I didn’t get quite as close. It was last year when George first got ill, and someone spotted it in the hospital we were in. Some people were excited that it was there and looked out of the window, but it was only a speck in the sky and never came very close.

Most people, though, just stayed where they were and didn’t even try to catch a glance of it. There were more important things to do than dragon-spotting; like getting better, like being well.

But, right here and now, to get out of a telling-off, I’m glad Old Tildy has made an appearance. It’s a bad nickname based on the acronym T.L.D, which stands for ‘The Last Dragon’ because she is the last of them, the last dragon on Earth. With her death, there will be no more.

‘It’s just a plane,’ a boy whose name I’m sure begins with ‘M’ proclaims. Everyone seems to sigh in the classroom at exactly the same moment, and so it feels like the whole room is shrinking in disappointment that the dragon isn’t making an appearance today. It’s a bland, characterless room – white, scuffed walls, desks in rows, nothing to mark it out as exciting – and now it seems even duller.

‘Now where were we?’ Mr. Lawton says. I hunch down, hoping he might forget that he was telling me off for pushing the teetering pile of books on his desk to the floor with a slam.

I hadn’t been able to help myself. He was getting at me about something again, something small; I can’t even remember what it was now, something like my shirt was untucked or I was slouching in a way that he took offence to. Sometimes I think just seeing my face annoys him.

I could hear a kind of roaring in my ears as his twittering voice started off at me and I had a feeling like bubbles inside me, racing around and rushing through me, stretching out to my hands. The next thing I knew, I’d given the books a good hard shove. I pushed them right at him and that was my mistake. He was really angry then, and it was weird because it was like I could see how I was feeling on the inside on Mr. Lawton’s face.

It’s been happening more and more, these feelings of anger that force their way up and spill out of me. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. I didn’t know how to control it, although life would be so much easier if I could. If I hadn’t pushed those books over then I would probably be at my desk right now, tucked away from Mr. Lawton’s beady radar but, as it was, I am still here; trying to make myself smaller, right at the front of the classroom.

‘What are we going to do with you?’ Mr. Lawton fixes me with an appraising look. His eyes have narrowed and his face has turned pink; it always does that when he’s telling me off. The flickering fluorescent light above him reflects on the shiny baldness of his head, which makes me want to laugh but I know that will get me into more trouble. I look out of the window in the direction they thought the dragon was, but there is nothing but empty space, endless sky.

I wish myself out there, in that nothing blue – just like Old Tildy, wherever she is.

But honestly, I couldn’t care less about dragons. I have enough to be dealing with.

‘Tell me what happened,’ George says. She’s sitting up, propped up by lots of pillows, although she looks like she needs to sleep. She’s been in this same hospital room for four months now and, when she first moved in here, we all spent a long time cheerfully talking about how nice the room was. There’s a blue pattern on the wall like waves and a shelf along one side where we placed all of her Get Well cards. But now the blue doesn’t look like waves anymore, just a kind of claustrophobic, swirling pattern, and the cards have become dusty and curled from being up for so long; they keep falling down from the shelf.

‘I–I–don’t know. It was nothing. It was silly, not important,’ I stutter. Mum and Dad had had a phone call home from Mr. Lawton, and they’d told George about it before I arrived for my visit. They’d gone off to talk to the nurses about something, leaving George and I alone, so she’d launched straight into it.

My hand closes around a hairband in my pocket and I pull my hair back into a low ponytail just so I have something to do. I don’t like talking about my run-ins at school with anyone, and especially, for some reason, with George. Instantly the hairband slips a little into a loose ponytail; my hair is so straight that I can’t do anything interesting to it, it always falls out.

‘Yara,’ George says – in that serious kind of way where she really wants me to tell her the truth. ‘I know you’re not this troublemaker but …’

Her dark chocolate brown eyes fix onto mine and, for a moment, I remember the day Mum first brought George back from hospital – although I’ve been told the story so many times I’m not sure if it’s really from my memories or just from the memory of that moment being repeated so often. She seemed like a sleeping bundle of blankets, my little sister, but when Mum and Dad propped me on the sofa with pillows all round me and passed her to me to hold, suddenly her sealed-shut eyes flicked open, and she looked right at me. Large, knowing brown eyes locked onto mine and. even though she was only two days old, it felt like she really saw me.

I have the same feeling as she looks at me now, but I try to brush it off.

‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘How do you know? I might secretly be this big heap of trouble, it’s just a side of me you’ve never seen before. I might, I might … pull on the emergency cord just for the fun of it. Which button is it that will have everyone running in?’

George laughs and shakes her head, her curly hair tumbling by her shoulders, although her eyes stay on me. She’s right though, I’m the goody two-shoes out of the both of us, the stickler for the rules. I’m the eldest sister, the one who’s responsible and careful and cautious, so George can just be George. She never needed to think of the consequences because I’d be there to protect her.

I don’t know if she liked me being like that; George always used to be the one trying to get me to do things I’ve never normally consider. But the spilling-over-angry feeling had been happening more and more since George had become ill, and it makes me do things I’d never come close to before.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand where it’s coming from: I am worried about my sister and I want her to be better and there is nothing, not one thing that I can do to help her. It is simply maddening.

‘Let’s talk about something else. How was your day?’ I ask.

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Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.6.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Jugendbücher ab 12 Jahre
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Sachbücher ► Tiere / Pflanzen / Natur
• Schlagworte: Adventure books for kids • books for 7 year olds • children's book about family • Dragons • Fantasy • Milton Keynes
• ISBN-10: 1-915820-16-2 / 1915820162
• ISBN-13: 978-1-915820-16-7 / 9781915820167