Kingdom of Dragons

by Melody Rose

  “I’m sorry,” I said bashfully, “it’s the only comfort I’ve got.”

  “I appreciate your attempt,” Monte said with a slow bob of his head. “I think the best comfort right now would be silence. Just a comfortable silence.”

  “I can do that,” I said with confidence. Before we dissolved into the requested quiet, I leaned forward and rested my cheek against Monte’s scales. I wrapped my arms as far as they would go around his neck and squeezed a little.

  Monte’s throat grumbled, something resembling a purr, in appreciation.

  I straightened up. After our hug, we rode through the skies together. The dragon skidded across the blue until the sun dipped down the horizon. We reached the ocean right at sunset, and the sight stole the breath from my lungs.

  It shimmered dark blue under the rainbow-colored sky. The sun sucked the color back behind the edge of the world. It looked as though it could go on forever. I had only ever seen the ocean once on Earth, on a vacation with my parents. We always lived in a land-locked state, and when you’re homeless, you tend to stay in your own neck of the woods.

  It was one of the most familiar and foreign scenes for me. It sang to me, that sort of endlessness the sky and the ocean represented. It was a sense of freedom that I never experienced in my old life. Or if I had, I didn’t remember it and knew it hadn’t been present since my parents passed.

  “It will not remain this beautiful in a moment,” Monte warned. “Brace yourself.”

  Immediately as he said the words, the blackness appeared. It seeped through the blue, stretching out like octopus tentacles. The darkness deepened as we approached a small island, popping up from the vast water. It looked like a black blemish on the ocean, infected and swollen. Burnt tops of trees and charred hills came into focus as we neared the Coast of Teine. It looked exactly as Monte described to me in the white space when we first met. The whole atmosphere was devastating and full of misery.

  Out of nowhere, Monte groaned and swerved to the right. The jerk was so sudden, I had to tighten my legs and latch onto Monte’s hair in order to stay upright. The dragon groaned again, but this time from my tug on his hair rather than some outside force.

  Monte tucked his head low, and his jaw tightened. His eyes closed, though he kept flying.

  “Monte?” I said through our mental link.

  The dragon winced as my message reached him. So I tried again, but this time out loud.

  “Monte?” I asked him using a full voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something’s wrong,” the dragon grunted through clenched teeth. “My head… there is something wrong with my head. It feels… crowded.”

  “Crowded?” I pondered. I took a second to consider his word choice before responding. “Is there someone with like a telepathic gift nearby or something?”

  “It is not threatening,” Monte said, his voice still strained and injured. “It feels familiar but uncomfortable.”

  “Do we need to stop?” I asked, worried about my djer. “Is it the island? The contamination?”

  “I do not know what it is,” Monte responded. He was slightly calmer, but I could still hear the discomfort in his voice.

  “We could let the others scout it out,” I offered. “Let’s fly back so you can rest, get away from whatever this is.”

  “No,” he replied sharply, “we need to find the key.”

  “How are we supposed to find anything down there?” I commented in a whisper, my doubt apparent.

  “I do not know,” Monte admitted, his tone matching my own.

  The rest of our party hovered overhead, waiting for our instruction. We approached them, and I stood up straighter on Monte’s back.

  “I do not know if there is anywhere safe to land,” Gideonia reported. “We surveyed most of the island, and everything has been touched by the contamination.”

  “We are sure this is where the riddle leads?” Freja checked with a doubtful eyebrow raised up into her hair.

  “I trust Monte’s interpretation,” I answered.

  “Did you check inside the volcano?” Monte said suddenly.

  “What?” I leaned forward to address my djer, baffled. “Inside the what?”

  “The largest mountain there.” Monte stretched his wing out farther to point. “It was a volcano. It is since dormant, but it was the one thing untouched by the contamination, as I remember it.”

  “We can certainly try,” I said with more enthusiasm than was necessary. “Let’s head down there.”

  Monte dived. I tightened my legs and held on for dear life as the dragon hurried to the ground, like a magnet attracted to a piece of metal. We narrowed in on the center of the tallest mountain, which I then noticed, had an open and circular top. Monte leveled himself out with the ground and slowed his wings, balancing out on his feet as his back claws landed gracefully on the dewy ground.

  The inside of the volcano was filled with mist. It had an eerie feel to it, and it was difficult to see anything further than five feet in front of you. It rolled up the walls and dissolved before it reached the topmost edge of the volcano. The ground beneath our feet was rubbery, coated with a dewy grass. But the grass was green, not black, which was a good sign.

  Right when he hit the ground, my djer groaned again and shook his head. Before I could open my mouth to check on him, Monte stopped me.

  “Do not worry,” he assured me. “I am fine.”

  “You don’t look fine,” I commented doubtfully.

  “It is probably the contamination,” Monte reasoned. “I have not been around so much of it in so long.”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly, “but no one else is having that reaction.”

  I gestured around to the other dragons as they each landed. Monte simply clenched his jaw and shook his head.

  “Do not say anything,” my djer begged me. “I can bear it.”

  I didn’t believe him, but I trusted him. So I hopped off Monte’s back and sniffed the air. The atmosphere smelled surprisingly mildewy and wet.

  “I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for this, but I never would have thought this is what the inside of a volcano looked like,” I observed with a downturned mouth. “Interesting.”

  “Halt!” a voice shouted out of the mist.

  I whirled to face the sound of the voice but couldn’t quite place it. Instinctually, I forced my hands to glow and readied a blast of light.

  “Show yourself,” I called back, braver than I felt.

  In the distance, a soft growing light approached us. When the image cleared, I could see a tall woman with cropped black hair. She was unhealthily lean and wore make-shift clothes from fragments of cloth, leaves, and bark. Mud coated parts of her skin in long and deliberate streaks. Through it all, however, crystal blue eyes popped through with a stunned gaze.

  “Montgomery?” the woman said, her mouth defaulting to an astonished o shape.

  Monte’s own jaw fell open, hanging like it was detached. “Arabella?”

  “I thought you said everyone had died?” I said to Monte through our mental link.

  However, it was a foreign voice that responded. “Not all of us.”

  My eyes grew wide, and my light brightened at the threat. “Get out of my head!”

  “She is of no threat to us, Eva,” Monte said aloud, addressing both the young woman and me. “Except if she continues to speak through our minds.”

  “Oh, Montgomery,” the woman gasped as she put a hand up to her mouth. “I did not realize it would hurt you too.”

  “Who is she?” I asked with a snarl. “Why is she hurting you? How does she even know you?”

  “This is Arabella,” Monte said, his voice full of wonder. “She is contaminated, and she was my former djer.”

  20

  Kehn

  “It would seem we have a mischievous group of adventurers out to steal our prize, if I understand you all correctly.” Gurtni snickered as she rubbed her hands together.

  “You sho
uld,” Uri growled. “Since you gave us a truth-telling potion, it is not as though we can do any differently.”

  “You could stop talking,” I said to Uri through our mental link for the tenth time. “You do not have to answer every question they ask you.”

  “It goes against my nature,” Uri snapped back to me.

  “Just bite your tongue or something,” I suggested.

  “Then that would hurt,” Uri complained.

  I closed my eyes and fought the urge to roll over and smack the sphinx. Though that would still be really difficult to do, considering I was tied up. All of us were, including Uri. She was strung up like a pig ready for the roast, hanging upside down with her paws connected to a stiff stick.

  They captured Xavier in a cage, and he flitted about, clearly irritated. He sat at the center of the dining table across the room from us. Heloise, Stella, Troylan, and I were stuck in chairs, backs to each other, in a circle. Our hands were tied behind the chairs with rough rope that scratched painfully at my skin every time I tried to wiggle out of it. Mine and Heloise’s hands were close enough to touch, and we’d been fiddling with each other’s ropes for a while now to no avail. The only thing we gained was red and inflamed wrists.

  The truth-telling potion was more of a compelling potion as it weakened our ability to resist Gurtni. Her voice sounded like a siren’s song, nearly impossible to resist. It made our limbs move of their own accord, bending and crouching to tie one another up. Tears leaked out of Stella’s eyes when she had bound Heloise’s wrists together. All the while, her girlfriend murmured words of encouragement. That was until Gurtni caught them and forced Heloise to stop talking until Gurtni told her to.

  It was a unique kind of torture, something I had never experienced in all my years of training with the king’s guard. But it reminded me of Gideonia’s gift to Eva. It was the same style, forcing someone to do things. However, unlike Eva’s gift as she had explained it to me, we were all aware of the movements our bodies unwillingly made. We knew the words coming out of our mouths, spilling everything from our mission to defeat Reon to our parents’ names, were secrets meant to be held within. Yet there was nothing we could do about it. Weirdly, Eva’s method of completely clearing their mind of conscious choice was more humane than this unstoppable torture.

  The only choice we did have in the matter was to keep our mouths physically shut. Gurtni could compel us to open them and speak, but she seemed too impatient to do all that.

  “Deedren,” Gurtni called to her husband, who disappeared into the other room, “have you sent a message to the king?”

  “Yes, dear,” Deedren replied in a gruff and dull tone.

  “Good.” Gurtni clapped her hands together once. “Then he should be here soon. However, we can have a little fun until then.”

  “I am sure we have different definitions of that word,” Troylan said sardonically.

  The older woman whirled on my fellow guard with a stern look, as if she caught him stealing a sweet. “That was rather rude.”

  “I do not believe so,” Troylan replied, keeping his voice neutral. “It was a standard observation.”

  “Do not provoke her,” I warned, daring to open my mouth for that sentence alone.

  “Please provoke me, dear. I would love it,” Gurtni countered me. “All the more reason for me to start with you.”

  “Start with me how?” Troylan asked. He cocked his head to one side. “What do you plan to do?”

  “How about I torture you and your friends?” Gurtni threatened.

  “Why do you need to do that?” Troylan wondered. “You already have all the information you could possibly want from us.”

  “Because we have some time to kill before the king comes to pick you up,” the old woman said as she licked her lips. “And I can do whatever I want to you until he arrives.”

  I could hardly believe that she meant King Elroy when she referenced the king. There was no way he would come and pick us up. It seemed highly unlikely that she would work for him. I reasoned that she had to be referencing Reon. Knowing that the pair of these creepy, old humans were working for him all the way out here, in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, worried me. It meant Reon’s influence and his reach spread farther than I thought.

  “If the king is coming, you need to make sure that it is hidden well,” the husband warned his wife.

  “You do not believe that I hid it well?” the woman cackled. “Even you cannot find it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Troylan asked.

  Seriously, I thought that soldier spoke more in the last five minutes than he ever had in his time in the guard.

  “Oh, nothing of your concern, dear,” Gurtni sneered. “It is a precious thing we found, did we not, Deedren?”

  “We did, we did,” the man chided from his corner room. “Solved a riddle for it, we did.”

  “Shut up, Deedren!” Gurtni snapped, her voice deafening.

  Deedren mumbled something and then fell silent.

  “And we think the king will pay a pretty penny for it.” The woman approached Troylan and scraped a broken fingernail along the bottom of his chin. “But we think the king will pay a prettier penny for the lot of you.”

  “We are not that important,” Troylan said, and it hurt my heart to think that Troylan thought so little of himself.

  “I disagree, dear. Deedren!” the woman hollered back to her husband. “Is it ready yet?”

  “Almost,” Deedren replied, sounding almost bored.

  “Alright,” Gurtni said as she circled us. “Whom shall I start with?”

  Thankfully, none of us spoke. Heloise was still obeying Gurtni’s original command, and Stella silently and stoically held her head high as tears streamed down her face. I could not see Troylan as he was directly behind me, but he stopped asking probing questions. I mentally applauded him for trying to assess the situation and get more information out of this evil woman, even while risking speaking. It was exactly what we had been trained to do.

  All that we knew was that Reon was coming for us, and Gurtni planned to torture us before then. I did hope she started with Troylan or me, considering this was something we had been trained for. My heart pounded at the thought of Heloise or Stella undergoing whatever torture the old woman had in store. I did not want them any more scared or injured than they already were.

  My brain searched for a way out, but under Gurtni’s influence, it was damn near impossible. I could not even get myself to reach for my sword when she first started commanding us about the house. It was as though my limbs were detached from my body. No matter how many times I would tell my arm to grab the hilt, it would not respond.

  How were we supposed to escape if our own bodies would not listen to us? If our actions were not our own, how could we possibly get out of here?

  The only conclusion I could come to was killing Gurtni. We had to get rid of the woman telling us what to do, and then we could move about freely. But then again, I was back at the problem of how to attack her when she controlled our every movement.

  “Now, let me see.” Gurtni tapped her pointer finger to her chin, right into the prominent cleft. “Who would inflict the most damage? It is obvious the girls care for each other on a deeply emotional level, but this boy does not seem to have any attachments to either of them. He respects the other boy, this much is true, but the girls care for you.”

  The old woman landed in front of me. She bent down and looked into my face, our noses only inches apart, and I got a good whiff of her. She smelled of soiled fruit and decay. My stomach curled at the sight of her wrinkles and hollow, devious eyes.

  “Deedren!” Gurtni shouted once more, not moving away from me. Her voice burned my eyes with the sheer shrillness and the volume. “Tell me it is ready. I am tired of waiting.”

  The lean older man emerged from the other room, cupping something in his hands. He shuffled across the floor towards me and Gurtni, careful not to drop whatever he was carryi
ng. They came close together, squishing their faces up against one another as Deedren stretched out his cupped hands as if he were making an offering.

  Therein was a collection of silver powder. It looked like crushed stone and glimmered in the firelight. The specks of dust seemed harmless, though they smelled like sulfur. I recoiled from his wrinkly hands and the obnoxious scent.

  “Do you feel sleepy?” Gurtni taunted. “Are you in the mood for some nightmares?”

  “No and no,” I responded, feeling the words crawl up my throat like a bug.

  “Well, we would like to watch you squirm,” Deedren said through his teeth, almost like a whistle.

  “It will be such fun,” Gurtni added.

  As if she knew what was going to happen, Heloise gripped my fingers with hers. She squeezed as tight as she could under the restraints, reminding me that she was there.

  Together, the older couple inhaled big and loud. They pursed their lips and exhaled as one.

  I closed my eyes automatically, but the dust still sprinkled all over my face. It pricked my skin like dozens of tiny needles, then it came up my nose and sliced my nostrils. As I involuntarily pulled in a breath, the dust crinkled across my tongue like chewing on sand. I coughed once, twice, and then the world spun.

  My vision swirled, and the colors blurred together. I felt like I was spinning around in circles over and over. When the motion stopped, I was no longer in the small cabin with my comrades and the evil duo. I was in a familiar section of the Cross Woods.

  Before me stood a gangly young boy of about ten. He had long brown curls that hung around his face, unruly and disruptive. He wore simple clothes, a dirtied white shirt, and brown trousers that were a bit too short for his growing frame. His nose poked out from his face, and on it rested a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, which he pushed up the bridge of his nose with one finger.

  “I think this is where Harper said they were,” a young Hannan said as he turned his head back and forth.

  It was not as though I looked much better than the boy version of Hannan. I knew I was short, stocky with uneven hair that I recently tried to cut myself with a hunting knife. My face had patches of dirt on it. A dented wooden sword swung from my belt.