by A. Lawrence
He stood up, yanking his shirt out from under his jacket at the bottom in a near fruitless attempt to clean his glasses. They had been enchanted to stay clean. He'd never realized that there was an upper threshold to that particular script, so of course that meant he discovered it when he needed to see to run away from an immense fire breathing undead dragon. They were clean enough when he put them back on that he could at least make out what had happened.
The pillar had dismantled any script the wall had to keep it intact. Large cracks ran up the side of the wall and the door had been slammed. The pillar had broken into two pieces, one of them so close that he just had to reach out a hand to touch it, angled up against the hole in the wall. When the dust settled slightly he saw the other had landed a few feet away on his other side. The chain had landed in front of him, leaving him in a small empty triangle of floor space. Pieces of pillar and wall fanned out across the floor in front of him.
Which would explain all of the screaming on the other side of the pillar, tinny and odd after all of the noise.
"I'm okay!" Heln managed before he started coughing. He had no idea how much dust he had inhaled. "I'm… I'm less okay."
The dragon had loomed out of the dust, unperturbed by a piece of its neck being torn away by the collar hanging much loosely from its ruined throat. The power core throbbed like a heartbeat. Without the barrier Heln felt the power core at full force, like a spike to his brain, and he couldn't stop coughing.
"Hey! Hey, ugly!" A piece of rock flew out from the other side of the pillar and smacked the dragon in the eye. It must have been Rhyss doing the throwing, even though Bel was the one yelling.
The dragon whipped around to face her.
"Yeah! I'm talking to you, you big undead lizard! Come and get some!"
The next rock was imbued with magic, Heln could see it glowing from where he was standing. That was too much for the dragon to ignore, and it moved towards them. The chain snapped tight and the pillar started to move.
Heln crawled under the links as fast as he could before he really was crushed. Rhyss grabbed his arm and yanked him behind the pillar. She was gray with dust and had lost a good six inches of her braid, the rest coming loose around her shoulders.
"Where's Bel?"
"She's distracting the dragon."
Heln's heart stopped. Maybe the entire world stopped.
"No."
"She's fine, she'll be okay, we need to get you out so I can get her out." Rhyss dragged him to the hole and he stumbled after her.
Heln had never felt so stupidly useless in his entire life.
But this was Rhyss's job, she had trained for it and he just needed to trust her. Maybe if it had just been him he would have, but it was his sister who was putting herself in danger right now.
The door had been knocked just ajar enough that they could get into the area beyond. It was bigger than the size of the door would have suggested. The wall wasn't natural at all. He pulled out his light stick and let the warm light wash over the cold, dark steps.
Rhyss nodded and ran back down the stairs.
He couldn't actually see anything. The door was angled at just the wrong way and the hole from the pillar was a little too high. For all he knew they were both dead and he was waiting in the dark for nothing. The dragon was still moving around, though. That had to be a good sign.
If he was honest, he hadn't given a lot of thought to his father since they'd been down there. What would he do if they never made it out? What if, by some horrible twist of fate, he made it and Bel didn't?
He didn't think he wanted to find out.
Luckily, he didn't have to. Bel crawled through the hole and nearly collapsed on the stairs. She looked up at him, her eyes so wide there was white ringing her irises.
"Are you okay?" She crawled up the steps to where Heln was sitting. She was covered in soot and dust, but she didn't seem to be hurt. She brushed some dust from Heln's hair. That settled it, she was real and alive. "Eleti alive when that pillar fell I thought—"
"You distracted a dragon," Heln blurted out before he hugged her.
Bel hugged him back, too tightly, and he felt every bruise and bump, but he didn't even care. He was probably holding his sister even tighter. She was alive. She was breathing. Well, mostly.
"Ow." Bel leaned back after a full minute and gave him a bit of a grin. She had tears in her eyes and Heln realized that his own were stinging. "Sorry. Had a hard week. You really okay? I thought I lost you."
"When Rhyss said — where is Rhyss?" Heln looked at the door in alarm.
"I thought she was… she isn't right behind me?" Bel's voice cracked and she looked back and forth, her ponytail nearly whipping Heln in the face. She started down the stairs and he grabbed her by the elbow. "Let me go!"
"We need to be smart about this-"
Bel shook his hand off of her arm, glaring at him. "I'm always smart about everything. Let's go save her."
Chapter Fifteen
Rhyss had been right behind Bel. At least, she had been until the dragon forced her to dodge back when it moved suddenly. What mattered was that Bel made it through the door and onto the stairs. She was safe. Safer, at any rate.
Rhyss shoved her hair out of her face, looking up at the dragon. It was more concerned with the doorway for the moment, but any second it was going to try to cook anyone on the other side. Bel and Heln were stupid, so of course they'd still be right there on the stairs. She would have to get its attention before that happened.
Or it could turn around and notice her without her intervention, which it did, its head swiveling out of sync with the rest of its body, the plates where the ring was around its neck scraping together.
If it had been a living, breathing dragon Rhyss would be dead. It would not have bothered with so much fire. Instead, it would have used its massive claws to kill her or just eating her whole. Rhyss was just lucky that wasn't what it was designed to do anymore.
If she'd been a proper Guard, with all of the tools and training at her disposal, it would have been her job to try her best at destroying the beast. It was no longer contained by the barrier and the wall might not even stop it for very long. The creature was impossibly massive, impervious to pain and had no regards to its own self-preservation. It was driven only by whatever purpose the power core instilled in it.
It shuffled closer and the power core focused on her.
"Hey! Over here!" Bel's voice rang out behind the dragon. "No! I won't be there! I've told you a hundred times!"
The idiots had left the relative safety of the staircase. She had known that they would do it, but it still made her smile that they hadn't left her behind. Most particularly that Bel hadn't left her behind.
The dragon wavered, confused, and she ran for the exit with everything she had left.
She didn't see Bel and Heln themselves, but she did see Bel's crystal, glowing bright blue and yelling something about dinner. She felt the dragon moving behind her and the temperature around her rose steadily.
She ran up the stairs and through the doorway just as she heard the displacement of air behind her. She was ready to at least let out one final scream when Heln activated his pendant and a white barrier closed around her, Bel stopping her before she ran out the other side. Fire and steam poured through the doorway, and it was not comfortable, but it passed over the shield and left them all unscathed. Rhyss looked back. The dragon had stopped at the hole left by the pillar. One claw reached through, scouring lines in the rock, but it was too narrow for the dragon to fit through.
"Oh good. I figured you were fast, but honestly I think you broke some records there." Bel let go of her shoulders and patted them like she was making sure she wasn't smoldering despite the shield. The dragon screamed, long and loud. They all winced back from the doorway. "Well, since you're in one piece and not currently on fire, shall we?"
The stairs seemed to go on forever, but they ran up as many as they could. To everyone's surprise, including
her own, Rhyss was the first one too winded to keep going. Trying to smash the door down had taken more out of her than she'd realized and with the adrenaline fading she was feeling more and more like a used dish rag. She leaned against her knees, gasping for air.
"Well, I haven't heard anything." Bel sounded about as out of breath as Rhyss was and winced when she sat down. When they weren't on stairs leading down into a dragon dungeon pit Rhyss would have to check her for injuries. "I think we're okay to rest now."
Rhyss hit her gently. Bel made a pathetic noise anyway and got a few steps above her, rubbing her arm.
"That was for voting dragon. This is probably not at all your fault but it made me feel better and that's what matters." Rhyss's legs decided they were done holding her up and she sat down. What was left of her braid had come completely undone and the singed ends would probably only reach her shoulder blades.
Her hair had never been that short and she wanted to cry.
"I'm sorry." Bel climbed back down the stairs and Rhyss almost flinched away when she touched her hair. "Here. Let me braid it. I'll trim off the ends, too."
They didn't have time to sit there and attempt to fix her hair. She knew that, Bel probably knew that, too, but she just sat there while Heln dug out his emergency sewing kit. The scissors were tiny and not meant for cutting hair, but Bel seemed to manage.
For a long time the only sound was the snipping and Bel humming under her breath. It was Heln who finally broke the silence. "So. Flesh construct. What is that, exactly?"
"Okay so you can use anything to create a one, right?" Bel said continuing to trim her hair as she spoke. Rhyss probably should have been more alarmed by that, or more invested in the conversation, but she couldn't bring herself to say anything. It was like any energy she'd had was just gone and even talking was too much effort. Besides that, Bel's hands felt wonderful in her hair. She hadn't expected to be so lulled into silence just from that sensation. "As long as there is a power core. Or not, as the case may be, but y'know typically—"
"Bel, get to the point," Heln snapped at her
"Touchy."
"I just got attacked by a dragon."
"An undead dragon, actually, and so did I but you don't see me getting all bitchy about it," Bel said. She swore and fiddled with the scissors a little too close to Rhyss's ear before the snipping resumed. "So. You know. Add that one to the towering pile of nightmares this trip turned into. Anyway, someone figured out that if you shoved a power core into a dead body you animate it basically like any other construct. Magic would hold it together and if there was enough of it even keep the body pretty well preserved. There was this cult like ten years back that made like a whole ton of flesh constructs. They were supposedly some group trying to resurrect their loved ones, but there were a lot and the Enforcers were pretty sure they were trying to like take over the city or something."
"That's disturbing."
Rhyss finally found her voice. "How do you know about that? I've never heard about it."
"Well, I may or may not read my dad's top-secret case files when the fancy strikes me." Bel sounded far too nonchalant for admitting to a crime. "Which might be all the time. Every day. The creepy part? They never even caught them all! At least they didn't before my dad was taken off of the case. Got a nice shiny promotion out of it. Anyway, magic doesn't work that way, a power core isn't a replacement for life or a soul or whatever. A construct is not a person, it exists to take orders. So that's what the dragon was."
"So, who was giving orders to that dragon?" Rhyss's voice sounded terrible to her own ears. She must have breathed in too much hot air. It felt absolutely frigid on the stairs in comparison, even with Bel so close. The snipping had stopped and she just felt nice, even strokes of a comb. Of course Bel had a comb, she'd bragged about it the first chance she had to comb her hair. Rhyss remembered she'd been annoyed about it at the time, but for some reason she couldn't muster up any of that annoyance right then.
"Someone very much dead," Bel said. "Did you see how deteriorated that dragon was?"
"Not really, I was sort of busy noticing the 'aaah it's a dragon' part," Rhyss admitted, wrapping her arms around herself and temporarily ruining Bel's rhythm.
"Same, though it did seem… worse for the wear." Heln admitted. "I couldn't get a good read on the script, either, it was really… It wasn't good."
"Well, a power core that big… that's a lot of magic. We're talking big time script." Bel finished combing and began braiding. Her fingers brushed Rhyss's neck. She shivered. Bel's fingers were cold, but she didn't think it was because of that. "You okay with a DoVan clan bead or do you have a band of your own?"
That was right, her hair-tie, with its green gem, must have burned with her hair. The only reason she wasn't seriously burned herself was because of her cloak, though she had a feeling that she had pushed the scripts far past their limit. Her back still felt uncomfortably warm.
"Rhyss?"
"It's fine." She wasn't sure if she had a second band in her satchel. She didn't really want to check. The DoVan and the Quel beads weren't all that different in color, anyway. Their families must have been close at one point in history.
Bel was a little better with history than she was; maybe she knew.
"Anyway, as I was saying, that dragon has been down there for a very, very long time. Someone tried to seal it in, but the power core must have been pulling magic from the cavern, which is why the trees died. That's my best guess." Bel tied off her hair. "Tada. Pretty as a picture of something that wants to murder you. Better?"
The braid bumped against her hood when she stood up, but it was better. "Yeah. Thank you."
"Of course." Bel smiled at her. "Not bad, if I do say so myself. Maybe when we get back, I'll go for an exciting career in hair dressing."
"Or fortune telling," Heln suggested. "Let's go. We… I don't think we can go back, so we'd better hope this way leads out."
"Or not, since we unleashed an undead dragon." Rhyss stumbled over the words a bit, but she was fine. This was fine. It wasn't going to stop her from getting them all home if it was within her power. "What do we do now?"
"I thought you were our fearless leader." Bel patted the top of her head, gently. "We move forward and hope for the best. That might be all we can do."
"What if the dragon follows us?" Heln asked. "I don't think that wall will hold forever."
"I believe I just said that we were hoping for the best, so none of that negativity, mister." Bel actually shook a finger at him. "Besides, I'm sure you've noticed at some point, but these stairs? They're going up. Up is good. In fact, up is fantastic."
Rhyss couldn't really argue with that. Even if she wanted to, she was too exhausted to even think of a better plan.
*~*~*
The stairs continued, sometimes letting off at wide landings, other times they peeled away from the wall. Whatever was down in those spaces was too deep and dark for them to see. Bel sent a bubble down, but it didn't return and the light eventually was too far away for them to make it out.
Slowly, but surely, Rhyss felt her magic return and the tension of something missing slowly easing from her. Bel didn't say anything, spinning two bubbles to keep light around them. The stairs were in bad repair. The fourth time Heln stumbled, he finally just pulled his light stick out of his bag. The soft, warm glow pooled around their feet. It didn't help much, but he seemed to feel better with it out.
All three of them were tired and hurting. Heln and Bel were both limping and Rhyss was stumbling when she finally told them to stop.
"We're going up and that's what matters." She sat down at the next landing. Her legs felt like they were back with the dragon and had been lit on fire. Bel and Heln practically flopped onto the stone.
They hadn't even seen the odd tree root and Rhyss had to wonder just how far down they were, and what could possibly be above them. The stairs had switched back a few times. Not that it mattered; her sense of direction was shot.
"How big is your range?" Rhyss had an idea, after everything she'd already seen, but she still had to ask.
"I dunno. Pretty big, I guess."
That was not an ideal form of measurement, but she would take it.
"This area… is a little empty, actually. I haven't really felt much of anything, just some reinforcement magic that isn't doing so well."
He kicked a loose piece of rock.
"So what you're saying is we're more in danger of this tunnel collapsing than anything else." Bel turned over to look up at him.
"Well, unless we do something ridiculous."
"Like be chased by an undead dragon?"
Heln rolled his eyes. "I thought we were being positive."
"I'm just saying. Ugh. One thing after another." Bel pulled off her satchel to use as a pillow, though Rhyss thought it probably wasn't exceptionally comfortable. "It's like when you have finals but you also have to intern for your dad but you finally got that cute girl from script class to agree to a date. Only it smells worse and there's no heating scripts and everything is terrible."
"I don't think they're really all that comparable." Heln was smiling a little, though.
"You've never interned for Dad."
"Or dated. Honestly, this isn't a very relatable metaphor."
"Rhyss can relate, she wants to smooch girls." Bel waved a hand in her direction.
Rhyss nodded. "Well, yeah. What about you, Heln? Rather smooch boys?"
"I'd rather smooch no one, I'm aromantic."
"That's fair," Rhyss said, before turning back to Bel. "By the way, I forgot to thank you for throwing your bracelet. That was actually really smart."
"I don't like that you added actually, but yes, I am pretty brilliant." Bel's eyes were closed and it was obvious from her voice that she was not going to be awake for much longer. Rhyss thought about demanding she set up a barrier, but there didn't seem to be much need for one and Bel was clearly exhausted. "But thank you for noticing. Besides, maybe the old man will get me a cute flower one. Or I could just steal Heln's. It's pretty cute."