by Renard, Loki
“Sir…”
“Sir…?”
“Sir !”
“What is it, Erias?” Vilka broke from his reverie and turned to his second in command who was standing next to him with an armful of papers and a concerned expression.
“Sir,” Erias said. “I know you have been preoccupied with the human situation, but there is another you must attend to. I have been detecting movement below the mountain. It began when the portal first opened, and it appears to be growing stronger by the day. The movements are very small, but they are registering on the scales and they continue to do so in greater numbers.”
Vilka rubbed his hands over his face. There must be a reason for what Erias was telling him, but he could not imagine why some practically undetectable tremors should be of such concern. “What does that mean?”
“I am concerned that the world eater may be awakening. Avastias may breach the surface sooner than expected.”
Vilka stared at his second in command. What Erias had just said was literally impossible. It was like saying that the sun and the moon had decided to switch places. World eaters did not just wake up and look for a snack. They were ancient entities responding to rhythms many centuries in duration. He would have said that Kate was more likely to grow wings and start spitting fire than the world eater was to awaken.
“This is not… it is not his time.”
“I believe he determines that, sir,” Erias said. “There have been many disturbances of late. The world eater could simply be stirring, but it is essential that we maintain clearance of that area—and that no more portals are opened. There is no doubt in my mind that he is reacting to the fields generated by them. It is probably the equivalent of having someone come into your bedchamber with two pot lids and smashing them together. It is imperative that there are no more disruptions, if you pardon my bold speech, sir.”
“There should not be any more such disruptions,” Vilka said. “Unless there is some other human waiting in the wings to arrive in our lands, we have closed the portal and there should be no further disturbance.”
“The young woman,” Erias said. “She is quite determined to return to her realm, and I believe she could potentially create a new portal if she were to get loose. She is uniquely inventive.”
“I have her chained to my bed, quite literally, Erias,” Vilka said. “She cannot build anything whatsoever.” He threw open the door to his chamber. “You see?”
Erias looked into the room, then at Vilka’s face. “Sir?”
Vilka turned to see the chain broken upon the floor, his room empty.
“Not again,” he groaned. “How does she do this?”
* * *
How she had done it was taking the sheer forces of the metal he’d used in the chain into account. It had incredible impact resistance, but it had not taken repetitive torque well—which was to say that she had wound a loop of the chain around a bedpost and used a separate piece of metal scavenged from the long pins that kept Vilka’s bed together to twist the chain upon itself until the link popped open. It had not taken long to do, but it had taken her longer than she liked to get enough time alone to put her plan into action.
She had picked her way through the fortress at meal time. There were no dragons on guard, which she thought was strange. What kind of fortress required no guard? What exactly was the fortress supposed to be a defense against? Perhaps the dragons had once been invaded from the ocean. She didn’t know, and for the moment, she didn’t care.
Escape was at the forefront of her mind. It had become an obsession, even though she was falling for the one who kept her captive, she still had to make it out of there. It was a point of honor, if nothing else.
Her time with Vilka had been intoxicating. He had changed her life and her body. Of course, she wasn’t planning on leaving him forever. She was hoping that once he realized that she really couldn’t be contained, he would stop trying to imprison her and simply allow her to travel back and forth between the worlds. Kate had no intention of telling others what she was doing, not yet anyway. Her research could take years, decades even. Plenty of time for them to have a relationship, and plenty of time for the relationship between the dragon realm and the human world to change. It didn’t have to be adversarial. She’d tried to tell him that so many times, but he thought she was naive.
Vilka was the most headstrong, stubborn, commanding, domineering man she had ever encountered in her existence. Of course, he wasn’t a man. He was a dragon, and maybe her judgment was clouded because his form was so human, and when he touched her, kissed her, held her, joined with her and slid inside her he always felt human to her.
Now that she was free of the fortress, Kate headed toward the mountain. She needed to open another portal, and in a world without electricity running through every wall, that meant generating power. There weren’t too many ways to generate electricity in a world without so much of modern infrastructure, but the wind blew here—and that would work. The idea had struck her several days earlier, and she had immediately set to work scavenging little bits and pieces from Vilka’s rooms, putting them together in the moments she got to herself.
Fortunately, Vilka had not confiscated her backpack. He really should have, but he didn’t know what she had in there or what it could be used for. Dragons interacted with the world very differently from humans. Coils of copper wire were not of concern to creatures that could spin ore out of rock and create fire at the tips of their fingers. There was definitely some kind of innate molecular manipulation happening, a mystery Kate was eager to solve in the future.
For the moment, getting home was the priority. She had picked out the tall mountain as the ideal spot to locate a couple of small electromagnetic generators that would operate simply by spinning little fans fashioned from bits of stick and cloth, attached through a shaft and turning fragments of the magnets she had brought with her inside coiled wire, thereby creating enough of a field to begin to power the necessary reaction. It was going to be a mucky, rough field solution, and there was every chance that it would not work but she had to try.
Staying in the shadow of a ridge had protected her from being spotted as she made her way out toward the mountain. She knew her time was limited. Sooner or later her absence would be noted and then the dragons would start searching for her. The prevailing wind seemed to be on the fortress side of the mountain, which was a pity. She was going to have to risk being spotted in setting up her mini windmills.
Kate ascended the mountain as quickly as she could. She wasn’t heading for the top of it, that wasn’t necessary. The lower slopes would work, exposed as they were to the prevailing winds. But it was still hard physical work getting there, and she was grimy with sweat by the time she got to a place where she felt comfortable setting up her gear. Hours had passed since her escape and she could feel an impending sense of doom. Vilka would almost certainly have figured that she was missing by now. With any luck he was searching the fortress first. It was a big place with a lot of little nooks and crannies and a full search wouldn’t be over in a hurry.
She wound the wires around one another, connecting the generators to the little samples of material that powered the portal reactors. Almost immediately the fans began to spin, generating current. Perfect. She smiled to herself as she set up several more of the little stations, linking them all together. By themselves they didn’t generate much power, but together they might just make enough.
She sat back and waited for the spark that would spring to life between them, biting her nails and crouching against the cold. The wrap dress Vilka had finally relented and allowed her to wear wasn’t warm enough for this. She couldn’t wait to get back into her apartment and have a nice long hot shower, eat something that was cooked in a toaster or a microwave.
As she watched the fans spinning, she frowned, suddenly noticing that they were vibrating. She’d written her own trembling off as adrenaline, but now she paid some proper attention, she could feel the roc
k humming beneath her feet.
The mountain seemed to be… moving? Was it an earthquake? An avalanche? It didn’t feel like either of those things. It was too localized. Perhaps it was some reaction to the portal. It wasn’t powered up yet, but the reactions had certainly begun to take place. It would take a few minutes for the portal to open. The damn things went out like a light if they were disrupted, and were pretty quick with AC power, but this wind source… she didn’t know if she could even hit critical mass.
A bright spark between the two metal blocks that would contain the walls of the portal made her heart skip a beat and then start thundering in her chest with hope. It was going to work. It was working.
The throbbing beneath her feet was intensifying. Perhaps a resonance with the soon-to-be-opened portal. The elements of the dragon realm did not seem to be entirely identical to the ones on earth, something she would study when she returned to her laboratory.
The portal was opening, there was no doubt about it. Sparks were flying, little apertures into the world beyond, the world she so badly wanted to return to. Kate kept her eyes focused on it, crouched and ready with her backpack on her shoulders. As soon as it was big enough for her to get through, she was going to jump. The odds that she’d end up in someone else’s apartment, in another building, or even in the middle of the street were pretty high, but she’d deal with that problem later.
Just as she was sure she was about to escape, a flash of red out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. Kate turned her head and sucked in a deep breath as she realized what that bright meteor was—Vilka’s dragon form thundering toward her.
“God! No! Come on!” she screamed in frustration as the dragon covered the space between them with an agility and speed that defied belief.
She cowered away from him, hoping to somehow be spared capture, but she should have been paying more attention to the increasing vibration beneath her feet. Looking down, she saw pebbles dancing between her feet, and cracks opening up between them, small at first but growing by the millisecond and expanding wider too.
Caught between crumbling rock and a furious dragon, Kate was out of options. Vilka was on top of her. His claws closed around her and swept her into the air just as the rock beneath her crumbled and fell into a void.
Kate let out a cry of pure fear as she hurtled above the collapsing mountainside, propelled once more by the wings of the dragon who owned her. She had been saved from one disaster, but there was another playing out before her.
The mountain was splitting open and hot air was spurting from the fissures in the rock. She had never seen anything like it, a current from deep within the ground that carried her windmills into the air and the portal generators as well.
Kate watched all her hard work be blown into the ether, a total waste of…
Bang!
A sudden booming sound deafened her for a moment or two, her blink reflex making her eyes close. When she opened them again, she saw that her mission had not been a total failure. The portal had opened. But it was not a small, manageable aperture like the first one had been. It was a long, narrow gash in the sky. There was no way she could ever fit through it, even if she had the ability to fly, which she didn’t. Unlike the smaller portal, which had been sustained by steady current and closed when the power was cut, this one seemed to be self-sustaining—much like the one that had started the first dragon war.
She stared and screamed out of fear and frustration and sheer anger and shock. This was a mess unlike any other. The whole thing had been a complete disaster. Her last chance at escape had led to some kind of cave-in of a mountain and a slit in the sky that was of no use to her whatsoever. Kate would have cried bitter tears if she were not too transfixed by the passing of the ground far below her dangling feet. Traveling by dragon was never going to come naturally to her. Her knuckles were bright white with the effort of holding fast to Vilka’s claws.
The return to the fortress was eye-wateringly fast and in minutes Vilka was setting her down on the parapets. He transformed instantly and took hold of her with strong hands, giving her a none-too-gentle shake as he thundered his anger at her. “What have you done!”
“I was trying to go home,” she explained frantically. “I don’t know what went wrong, I don’t know why the mountain did that!”
“You’re about to find out,” he said grimly, looking toward the mountain, which was still quaking and rumbling so violently that even the fortress beneath their feet shook. His hand was locked on the collar she still wore, keeping her close to him as she watched what to her eyes looked like the world crumbling in on itself entirely.
The mountain was growling, a deep, primal sound that she knew was the grinding of rocks together, but that almost sounded like the fury of a wild creature. Kate had never felt fear like this before. She was being confronted with the capacity of the very ground beneath her feet to reshape itself at will. If Vilka had not come for her, she would have been turned into human bacon, seared on the elemental explosion destroying the terrain. Even at a distance it was obvious that the mountain was crumbling, opening up into a grand crater that seemed to have been lurking beneath it for a very long time.
The chaos was not limited to the terrain either; all around the fortress, the dragon men, Vilka’s soldiers, were taking their flight forms and speeding into the sky. There was something almost involuntary about their actions, the way they screamed and whirled and called to one another as they sped toward the crater and cartwheeled in the turbulent draughts rising from the chasm.
“What’s happening! Why are they flying around like that?”
She had to yell to be heard over the cacophony, and still her voice was almost carried away in the cry of a hundred dragons circling above what had been the mountain but was now a jagged crater from which a roar continued to issue.
A volcano? Was that what it was? There was a strong smell in the air, something like sulfur, but not quite. It was bitter and acrid and it filled her nostrils with every breath. But there was no lava and there were no plumes of smoke—though there did seem to be heat, judging by the way the air above the crater waved and wriggled and made everything behind it shimmer like a mirage.
Her eyes went wide as something emerged from the hole. A dragon, but not like any of the dragons she had seen so far. This dragon had a head so large it seemed to be as big as the mountain it had destroyed in emerging. It was massive, monolithic, leviathan, scales gleaming green and gold, great eyes bulging as a mouth full of teeth like skyscrapers opened and let out a cry that sent the flying dragons into a frenzy of diving and darting, like moths around a light bulb.
Frozen with horror, Kate watched as the dragon emerged from the ground much like a train passing at crossing; it seemed to go on forever, the length of its neck winding into the sky as the larger bulk of its body began to ascend and suddenly wings burst from the earth, showering the surrounding areas with dirt and stone for miles. They cast a shadow over the sun, blotting out the light over the entire plain and fortress besides. Their span was unthinkable, and every beat of its wings sent powerful winds buffeting across the plains, snapping trees like twigs.
She quaked, her knees weak, her stomach churning with a fear she could barely contain. What she was seeing was so majestic and frightening, so undeniably dangerous and yet so awe-inspiring tears coursed down her face and she was unable to take her eyes off it. Green, gold, turquoise, it shone with bright colors that looked to her as fresh as a newly shed reptile.
It flew high into the sky and out toward the ocean, taking Vilka’s dragon legions with it in its wake, arcing around to return toward the ground that had once served as its chamber and then passing over the fortress proper, before repeating the circuit. It let out regular rending cries that made pure fear spear through Kate’s heart.
Vilka dragged her into the fortress, which mercifully had clearly been built to withstand the emergence of the massive dragon.
“What was that!?”
“That is a world eater,” Vilka said. “His name is Avastias and this fortress is here to guard over his slumber.” He spoke somewhat mechanically, as if he were in some measure of shock.
“You’ve never seen one of those before, have you,” Kate said. “That was… he’s…it…” She couldn’t find the words to express herself. What words could there be for something that seemed to defy the very laws of creation. The dragon, the world eater, it was so large and so terrible, and it had been beneath the ground the whole time she had been there, totally undetected. She could barely believe what she had seen, but adrenaline was coursing through her body, making her hands shake and her breath come in short, fast little gasps. There was no doubting the physical manifestation of seeing such a creature—and she could still hear its cries as it performed its waking ritual in the skies outside.
“I was never meant to see him,” Vilka said, his tone tense. “The world eaters are supposed to remain asleep. They awake every few thousand years. Most dragons will never see one—they call to the souls of our kind in a way which takes them in thrall. I have lost my legion to Avastias.”
“Wow. That’s… what are the odds of that?”
“Rather high, thanks to you,” Vilka snarled at her suddenly.
“Me? What do you mean, me?”
“Your portal seems to have had a major hand in waking Avastias. His slumber has been a disturbed one, and there is no telling what the consequences of that will be. His calls have taken the dragons who once roosted here, and they will not return to earth or take their walking forms again until he sleeps.” His hand clasped around the nape of her neck, holding her almost uncomfortably tight. “Thanks to you, I have lost not just the world eater I was posted to guard, but my entire legion with him.”
“Sounds like a bad day for you,” Kate said. “Sounds like you should have let me go when you had the chance.” Her words were unsympathetic because she was still terrified, but more than that, she was angry. She would not take the blame for this. Vilka had never told her not to make a portal because of the giant dragon. He had never mentioned anything like this.