The sudden change left Gawain standing there in a daze.
The vast, vivid scenery had stabilized in his view. The brief dizziness and disorientation had faded, and all his senses and faculties had returned to normal. The evening seascape, the low-hanging sky in the distance, and the clouds overhead all shifted slowly with Melita's flight. Then the dragon suddenly dropped a little lower, and the sound of beating wings rose from both sides, jolting Gawain awake from his astonishment.
He abruptly turned his head and saw Amber's amber-colored eyes sparkling in the fading twilight. She was excitedly gazing at the distant sky and sea, her face full of delight, as though she had never experienced that terrifying upheaval at all.
Veronica was also sitting quietly nearby, seemingly resting with her eyes closed, as though she had been in that posture from the beginning and had never moved.
Gawain raised his gaze and looked into the distance along the direction of Melita's tail. He saw the magnificent Cloud Wall—the barrier of the Eternal Storm had already been left behind by the dragon. Though it still looked spectacular from this distance, it no longer carried the suffocating pressure it had when it bore down upon them head-on. It slowly receded from Gawain's line of sight, and the many details on the Cloud Wall's surface gradually blurred in the dimming light.
"Hey, what's wrong with you? Why did you suddenly stop talking?" Amber's voice suddenly came from beside him, filled with confusion. "Still looking at that storm? Didn't we just fly through it?"
Gawain looked into Amber's eyes, wanting to find even the slightest hint of something out of place on her face, but he found nothing. Before the confusion on Amber's face became any more obvious, he withdrew his gaze and asked