by Riley Keene
“The dragon is still a potential problem,” Ermolt observed, leaning heavily on his club like a makeshift crutch as he limped to the next unconscious soldier.
“Yes, but I don’t know how worried we should be about it.” Athala looked down into the semi-transparent stone to study the frozen creature. “Ingmar and his men were very clearly here to do something cruel to that dragon on behalf of their employer.”
“I would argue that it might not be that clear.” Ermolt smirked. “If I were going to fight a dragon, I wouldn’t show up dressed in metal armor.” He shook the arm of the soldier he was binding, letting the splint mail clank before returning to binding the wrists together.
“Well, I don’t know how to tell you—” Elise quipped, giving his armor a meaningful look.
“I wore this armor to fight these chumps.” Ermolt grimaced. “Though I admit I’m not happy about the prospect of facing down a dragon in this.”
“Either the dragon had some capacity to sense what goes on outside of its prison,” Athala said, “or it doesn’t. And regardless, the creature’s God was likely paying very close attention to what is going on in here. Once the spell is no longer holding it, the connection to its God will probably tell it that we’re responsible for its freedom, if it doesn’t know that already.”
“But is it going to be hungry or something?” Ermolt looked back at the half-dozen soldiers he and Elise had already bound. “I don’t like the idea of sentencing these folks to their deaths if we have to sprint out of here to avoid a fight.”
“Actually, I’m not sure dragons need to eat,” Athala said, climbing up the dais to the altar. “I would think they can, but it shouldn’t be necessary. They should be sustained by their own internal wellspring of divine magic. If it ate these people, it would be because it chose to. In theory. And at that point, there’s very little we could do to prevent it. It could hunt them to the ends of the earth. Dragging them out of the room before we release it would not save them.”
“So, it’s probably fine?” Elise asked, looking down at the dragon again. After the madness of the last few days, it was likely uncanny to come out of that nightmare to face down something out of her dreams.
“All things considered, we’re in a better situation than when we first came here.” Athala nodded as she returned to the altar. “Originally, we were just akin to looters looking to harvest this spell. Now that we’ve acted in the best interests of the dragon against a credible threat to its existence, it should be significantly more likely to view us as allies when it awakens.”
“I guess that’s the best we could hope for.” Ermolt grimaced as he came upon the final unbound guard, the one whose arm he had broken. “Elise, can you help me out with this one?”
“Oh. Of course.” Elise tore her eyes away from the dragon and went to fetch a few more strips of cloth, as well as a few pieces of broken polearm hafts to make an improvised splint.
As her friends saw to the injured man, Athala considered the enormity of her task. She was about to absorb a spell that had imprisoned a dragon for potentially hundreds of years.
Did the spell block the dragon’s ability to communicate with its God? Athala stared at the creature’s closed eyes. From the stories she’d read about, children’s tales more often than not, dragons had somehow amplified the strength of their related Gods. If this were Ydia’s dragon, would they be making her stronger somehow?
“Alright.” Elise’s voice cut through Athala’s train of thought. “We’re ready when you are, Athala.”
“So, just to be clear,” Ermolt said, getting back to his feet. “We’re not going to try and run away when it’s done? The dragon won’t be trying to kill us?”
“Yes.” Athala hesitated and then nodded. “Probably.”
“I guess that’s good enough for me,” Ermolt said with a shrug. “If I ran away any time my survival hinged on ‘probably’ then I wouldn’t be here.”
Athala took a few moments to finish her preparations. She was glad that Elise had convinced her to stop and clean herself up when she looked down at the notes and saw flecks of dried blood flaking off of her hairline and littering the pages before her on the altar.
Ingmar’s blood. The blood of a father who died because he’d gotten wrapped up in something so much larger than himself just to save his sick child. A wiggle of guilt wormed through her belly.
Athala blew gently on the page, scattering the flakes. She’d have time to feel guilty after this was finished.
As she began to recite the spell, she felt the tension grow in the air once more. She passed the first missing rune and the magic in the air hummed. A feeling of power began to wash over her as she finally approached the part where she was cut off last time, and continued on through it. Inwardly, she reveled in the feeling of the power rising as she continued, finally uninterrupted.
The recitation of the spell came to a close and Athala completed the absorption ritual.
Ever so faintly, Athala could hear the startling sound of a voice in her head that was not her own.
It wasn’t actively speaking to her, but was simply the spell itself sinking into her mind. Settling there. It was a heavy presence and she felt a physical sensation of her thoughts crowding around it as she thought of it.
This was different from every other spell she learned. From every spell she’d ever been told about.
Athala worried about how it might react to being in her mind, as if the spell were alive in some way. And what if it were? Deific magic was so completely different from the spells mortals used, and so it might have been something wholly sentient for all she knew.
With a shake of her head, Athala returned her attention to the conscious world, trying desperately to shake the feeling of dread as the spell’s whispering quieted. Elise cried out in surprise and Athala mirrored her shock when she realized that the altar was sinking away, melting before her eyes like ice in the height of summer.
The notes spread across the altar scattered as the surface below it dropped. The altar fully vanished and the strange melting spread down into the dais. Athala stepped away from the growing hole in the surface she stood on. The melting soon began to spread faster, forcing her to scurry down the steps of the dais, unsure of what would happen if it caught up to her.
Within a span of breaths the entire dais melted. The hard edge of the spell’s reach was at the foot of the dais, where the transparency had ended.
As the hole in the ground grew deeper, the optical illusion the transparent stone had given began to resolve itself. The dragon appeared to be the size of a house when they had first seen it, but that had been a trick of the light.
In truth, the dragon was much farther beneath the altar than it had appeared.
The melting hole finally reached the dragon and the perspective shifted, making it clear that its bulk would dwarf all but Ydia’s Temple or the Wizard Tower itself.
It was a beast that could crush fortresses and threaten cities.
To a creature of such size, a single warrior—or three of them—was as much of a threat as a gnat.
The melting magical stone peeled away from the dragon’s body, uncovering its massive wings and falling away from its scaled bulk. Despite its magical prison receding, it didn’t react, even as its massive head was loosed. The stone finally finished melting as it reached the floor the dragon stood on.
With the distortion of the semitransparent stone gone, Athala got a good long look at the beast.
Its scales were the yellow-white of ivory, with a silver sheen to them. The dragon had four enormous legs, each ending in three-fingered clawed hands with a thumb-like fourth digit stabilizing from the rear. A long, serpentine tail sprouted from its hindquarters. Its shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, and the back of its head bristled with hornlike growths.
The spikes on its rear legs and hips were bone white, but as they climbed up its body, they darkened. The horns on its shoulders and forelegs were ash gray and the horns on its head
were black.
Two horns that were the color of black granite curled back from the lower part of its neck, and two more curled from the top of its head. These were blacker than blackest pitch in sharp contrast to its silver-ivory scales.
From its back stretched two great wings, giant leathery things that seemed at the same time too large to be practical structures and too small to support the flight of such a creature. The surface of the wings was the same yellow-white ivory color as its scales, but the stone-gray bones beneath the surface were clearly visible through the thin membrane.
Its eyes opened. They were oddly human, though they were the size of windows. Its pupils were round, with a light blue iris and a white sclera. The lids around it were canted at deep angles, making the eyes even more uncomfortably alien in the muzzled face of the creature.
The effect changed significantly as, while Athala stared, entranced by the beast, its eyes lit up. A golden orange glow filled the sockets and blotted out the details. The creature’s muscles flexed slowly up its body as its neck arched. It turned its giant glowing eyes to regard the stunned adventurers staring down at it.
Chapter Forty-Three
Despite its size and monstrous appearance, the creature’s movements were somehow inherently natural. Its legs moved with speed and grace, dragging its bulk along smoothly as it approached the wall.
The dragon’s wingspan was too wide for the hole the melting dais had left in the floor, and so the creature’s massive claws dug into the stone wall. They sunk into the pale rock and lifted the dragon’s weight up toward the room above, where the three adventurers still stared down at it.
“Athala?” Elise said at last, finally breaking the dumbfounded silence. “I—I can’t move. Why can’t I move? Is it magic?”
“No,” Athala said, still not taking her eyes off the climbing dragon as it approached. “What you’re experiencing is a prey instinct. Your primal instincts are telling you that you need to stay perfectly still and you might escape notice. It’s a natural and logical response to any predator, but especially a dragon. A predator of such size wouldn’t find you as an individual worth the effort if it did see you, so by staying still, you avoid drawing its attention. You become boring. Literally anything of interest would take its attention away from you, and you could escape while it investigated a nearby building or dealt with someone who was stupid enough to try and run or fight.”
“Well, if it makes you feel better, I’m doing it too,” Ermolt admitted. His voice was heavy with a reverence Elise had heard reserved only for his stories of heroes long past. “Look at the way it moves. I can’t decide if it’s horrifying or beautiful.”
“I would say it’s too late to run now,” Athala added, “but it was too late to run as soon as it woke up. Dragons are one of the primary sources of magic in the world. If it knows who we are, it can find us, and if it wants to harm us, there’s not a lot we can do about it.”
“That’s nice,” Ermolt said. “I like knowing that there’s nothing I can do to influence a situation that may involve my impending death.”
“It’s, um, it’s not a great sign that it is coming up here,” Athala said, her voice wavering. “To a dragon, normally complex and expensive magic like teleportation is easy, so if it’s coming up here, it’s because it wants something from us.”
“So we’re just hoping that what it wants isn’t a quick snack?” Elise asked.
“I—uh, I would say that we wouldn’t be enough to add up to a snack for such a b-beast,” Athala stammered. “But Ermolt is r-rather large, so, um, it’s hard to say.”
“Rude,” Ermolt said in a tone that might have been playful had they not been staring down the emerging dragon.
Elise felt a strange sense of vertigo when the dragon reached the top of the hole. Its three-clawed hands sank into the stone lip of the dais as the massive head cleared the edge.
It felt so much like her dream that the differences were more striking than the similarities.
Most notably, she did not have the same feelings of tranquility and trust towards the dragon. It no longer reminded her of her mother. In the dream, those qualities had made Elise feel important and valuable to have the attention of a magnificent creature.
Without it, Elise felt intensely aware of her smallness and vulnerability before the toothy maw of an enormous predator.
It leaned its long neck down to look down at the three of them, the house-sized head still fen away. Although, with how large the creature was, it felt like rhen.
Enormous nostrils flared as the dragon sniffed at them.
It finally settled its attention on Elise. Though they couldn’t see the creature’s pupils through the glow of its eyes, all three of them could sense its focus on her.
“Child of Ydia.” Though the creature lacked the motherly aura it had in her dream, it still had the smooth, feminine voice she remembered. The creature’s reptilian lips didn’t move, but the voice filled the room, echoing off the walls. “You have done well. Ydia thanks you for the freedom of Her Meodryt, as do I.”
Elise tried to stammer, but was not able to form words in the face of the creature, especially as it confirmed that it did belong to her own deity.
“Ydia appreciates your service, as well as that of your friends,” the dragon continued as if it expected her silence. “But my freedom was the easiest task before you, and far from the last. With my freedom, events have been put into motion that can not be stopped. The other Gods are already scrambling to begin their own plans to release, return, or awaken their own dragons.”
The dragon cast its eyes across the other two before returning to Elise. “They must be stopped. Their dragons must remain out of reach, or else be destroyed. The strength offered by their freedom will counteract my own, and would prevent Ydia from ushering in the Age of Mortals. They are greedy and want to keep their power. You must stop them and take the world for yourselves.”
“Yes,” Elise managed to say at last, finding her voice when she had nothing to say. “Of course.”
“You will not be alone, Child of Ydia,” the dragon, Meodryt, continued. “My own power is needed elsewhere for many things, but Ydia has trustworthy and dependable servants beyond just you and I. There are those who will be looking for you to give you their aid.
“But you already have the most important tool you could ask for.” The dragon turned its enormous snout toward Athala.
“Um. I,” Athala stammered. Elise could hear her terror and curiosity. “What? Uh, I mean—”
“Calm yourself, wizard,” the dragon said, its voice soothing in an otherworldly way. “You have the ability to absorb the spells trapping the dragons, allowing you to deal with them. And not just the ability of any mortal wizard. The one who sought to take the spell before you did not have the strength you do. The spell would have destroyed him. You feel its power within you? It would have torn him to shreds. Few mortals have the magical capacity to contain such power. If a dragon’s escape is inevitable, you must use this strength to unseal their prison yourself, and slay the dragon before it can be used to stop the coming of the Age of Mortals.”
“I always wanted to slay a dragon,” Ermolt said. He stood rigid as the giant creature turned to look at him more directly. “Present company excluded,” he added, trying to keep the instinctive terror out of his voice.
“You would do well to stick with these two, then,” the dragon said, a hint of mirth in the creature’s tone. “They will give you the opportunity to do so, but more than that, they will need your protection in this endeavor. While the servants of Ydia will aid you, the other Gods have agents of their own. You will have to fight—and slay—more than dragons in this quest.”
“Where should we begin?” Elise asked, drawing the creature’s attention back to herself. “Where do we go first?”
“That will become clear in time, Child of Ydia,” the dragon said. “As I told you in your dreams, you will know when you are called upon to act on Ydia’
s behalf. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance, but Ydia is with you. You need not fear failure from inaction. The God of Life will ensure you are in the right place to take the actions She requires of you, just as She did this day.”
“But obviously, none of the other dragons are going to be in Khule,” Elise pressed. “We can’t stay here.”
“It is true that you will need to leave Khule in time,” Meodryt said, its tone growing impatient. “But Ydia will provide. You will know when to leave, and you will go where you are needed, whether you are thinking of your mission or not.” Its tone softened as it looked back over the group of them again. “You will have to become heroes for the good of humanity, or the world will languish under the grip of indifferent Gods. You must prove that humans are ready to begin the Age of Mortals.”
Elise nodded, and Ermolt seemed to stand a bit straighter, despite his damaged knee.
“Oh, another thing before I go,” Meodryt added, turning its focus on Athala. It leaned in close to her, the dragon’s breath ruffling her loosened hair.
“I should not need to tell you this, but casting that spell would be unwise. The Gods do not like those who meddle in such magic. Nor do the dragons.” The dragon paused as if letting that sink in. “If you cast a spell formed by deific will without permission, you will die. More than that, you will be destroyed. You and all those nearby.”
“Yes. Um. Right. T-thank you,” Athala stammered.
The dragon seemed satisfied with that response, and it lifted its head back up to normal height. The air began to ripple around it as it spread its wings, the tips touching both walls long before it reached its full wingspan. The shimmer of magic surrounding it intensified, and there was a shift in the air pressure of the room as the giant creature vanished.
Elise instantly relaxed. She realized that the dragon’s presence had made her tense, and that she had, on some level, not entirely expected to survive the experience.