After moon-cycles of recovery, Lily was ready to leave the homely cavern that she had grown to loathe. Its pond was scummy and plagued with bugs, the grass was too soft, the ceiling too low, and the space far too open without a single thing to hide behind. She hated the cavern with every fiber of her impatience. Not every fiber of her being, she was sure it was a very nice cavern if she could look at it impartially, but after being stuck there for so long, she refused to do so. It was terrible in her opinion, and that was the only one that mattered.

"I won't miss you," she declared as she took to the air. The sensation of flight still filled her heart with pure relief, even after so much practice, and that took the edge off her irrational hatred. But only slightly. "I hope you collapse in on yourself."

"I'm not sure how I would do that," Beryl dryly called down from his place up in the tunnel in the ceiling. "But the sentiment is appreciated."

"Not you," she exclaimed as she flew in a few slow circles below him, working out a small cramp in her wings. She refused to feel any embarrassment over her totally justified dislike of this particular cave, "I meant this place!" It was possibly she was a little bit giddy over finally being fit enough to safely leave and continue their journey. If she let it out by acting stupid, then at least she was doing so when the consequences consisted of some light banter.

"I don't know," Beryl remarked as she flew up and dropped onto the edge of the tunnel opening, pushing herself the rest of the way over the lip, "it has its charms." He backed up to give her space to stand.

"And its greatest charm will be me never needing to see it again," Lily retorted as he led her further in. The tunnel was too narrow to safely fly, so they had to walk, much to her dismay. If she didn't know where they were going, she would have demanded Beryl take her somewhere she could fly in. As it was, she knew from his descriptions that they only had to walk a short distance, so she didn't complain… Even if her wings were itching in anticipation.

To take her mind off of her lack of mobility at the moment, she thought about the first thing that came to mind. "Beryl, would you call this tunnel natural or dug by someone?" It was a question that often flew through her mind, since coming down into this underground world, but one she had never voiced. Or if she had, she had never gotten a satisfactory answer.

"Natural, the crystals jut out from the surface tunnel itself and they would not if someone was just pushing forward through solid rock," he replied. "If there was someone boring a hole, they would have cut the crystals too. Does that make sense?'

"Okay…" She hummed thoughtfully. "So, these tunnels we do not think anyone intentionally created… how did they end up here in the first place?" She didn't understand how caves and tunnels formed, unless they were just always there, and that led to more questions. Besides, they seemed too convenient to be totally random and only coincidentally useful.

Beryl shook his head in dismissal. "That is a question we cannot answer. Maybe they were always here. Maybe some dragon or something else carved them an immensely long time ago, and the crystals came afterward. Or maybe the ground itself moved over time. These tunnels are lines, mostly, and the caverns like bubbles... But there is no way to know."

"No way at all." Lily began walking quicker and stealthily stalked Beryl's absently waving tail. Her eagerness wouldn't accept talking as a suitable substitute for action. "How long until we find this water we're hearing?" she asked, speaking just quietly enough that he wouldn't hear her getting closer.

"Soon, but it is a truly large river, so not as soon as you might think," Beryl said, still unaware of her intent as she approached his tailfins, intently watching them glide over the stone behind him.

Then he sped up, putting a little distance between her and her prize. She didn't know what she would have done had she actually come close enough to pounce on his tail; they still weren't back to that level of intimacy, and though doing so was not inherently intimate, he would take it that way because of everything that had occurred between them.

"It's right up here," he called out, loping along to a distant shift in the tunnel, a place where the tunnel did not turn so much as double back, from the looks of things. He peeked around the corner and chuffed, his tail waving excitedly at her. "Come take a look."

Lily ran up and past him, out onto the rocky outskirts overlooking a torrent of water turbulently rushing past. The last flowing water they had seen was relatively slow and divided by many stone spires. This, a fast-moving flow of water that was so far across she could not possibly have leaped to the other side, was pouring from one side to the other so chaotically that it sounded like distant thunder, amplified by the echoing cavern.

"You fish in this?" was her first question. "How?"

"There are tricks you learn," Beryl admitted. "I wasn't very good at it, not at first. I used up all of my fire just getting two fish the first time around. But there are ways. I'll teach you as we go."

"Sounds like a fun time," she hummed. "Which way are we going?"

"I was going to ask you about that," he said. "Upstream or downstream?"

"Is there a difference?" They were both unknown directions, and she didn't think either led directly to somewhere she would know. When in completely unknown territory, a choice of directions was mostly meaningless.

Beryl was quick to disabuse her of that notion. "Well, we are lower than the underground sea we started by," he reasoned. "It is not impossible that this comes from there, but it is impossible that it flows to there, because water does not flow up. Also, we were told to avoid the depths of the world, and again, water does not flow up. So we know that one direction leads down, and the other does not."

"We definitely should avoid going down," she agreed. She didn't think the nightmare dragon was what the guardian was warning them about, it wasn't that bad, objectively speaking… but she had no desire to find out what was worse. Not by walking right into its domain.

"Upstream, then?" Beryl asked.

"Upstream," she agreed. It was never really in question, given how he had explained it to her, but she didn't feel like he was patronizing her. He hadn't expected to be disagreed with, but he had been open to the possibility.

She was thankful that she was out here in the middle of nowhere with him, specifically. For several reasons, only one of which being the way they worked so well together.

Lily leaped into the air, for once leading the way, and flapped her way out into the airspace above the water, noticing as she went that the ceiling was actually fairly low. This was not going to be an entirely safe flight, not with the tumultuous airflow forcing her to make many small corrections as she flew, but she could handle it.

"Be on the lookout for anywhere to set down," Beryl called out from behind her. "We will set down at every good stopping place. The biggest danger here is going too far and getting tired."

He wasn't wrong, and despite her regaining her stamina for flight, she was going to be the weak link. "Stay behind me, then," she roared back, "and watch me. You're in charge of calling when we need to turn back." She would call it for herself if she could, but she still found it hard to judge how much time she had left at any given moment. Even after so many days of endurance training. She recognized the feeling that came with being physically unable to continue, but everything up to that point was a haze of willpower over discomfort, not something she could measure. He would probably see the signs of her getting tired more clearly than she did.

Besides, she wanted to be in front for once. In this, she could lead, and there was a legitimate reason for him to be behind her.

A short while later, she realized that there was another reason for her to enjoy leading the way. She liked looking at him to distract herself. He was a great distraction, if also a taunting one for the time being, something she could not act on. It was possible he felt the same. He might be ogling her right now.

She hoped he was. Beryl respected her, but she would not be nearly so happy if her mind was the only thing he liked about her. He could stare, she didn't mind at all. Especially now. She was flying and her body had never looked better, she was sure.

Lily impulsively flicked her tail around a bit in the air, easily countering her own movements with her wings and only bobbing in the air a little in the process.

"Are you okay?" Beryl called out worriedly. So he was watching!

"I'm fine," Lily reassured him, holding in a purr. "Just keeping my tail loose. Don't worry about it." Now she knew he was definitely watching, and she was tempted to do it again… But he might catch on that it wasn't an innocent stretch if she was too blatant.

Something had to be done about that. Soon, but not yet. She wanted to let enough time pass that it would not feel like she was rushing him, and she didn't want to make a move until she could survive indefinitely on her own, so that he would not feel trapped between caring for her safety and caring for his own feelings. Whichever of those came last.

They flew for a while, the raging of the river below filling a companionable silence with its constant roar. Lily spent much of her time consciously correcting herself to fly efficiently; Beryl had taught her all of his little tricks, but they required her to remember to actually do them to have any effect. Knowing which way to tilt her tail to lessen the strain on her wings when an updraft hit her was no good if she didn't actually do it.

But even with the constant stream of technical corrections running through her mind, she found the time to simply enjoy the sensation of being on the move. Of making progress, flying with a purpose, even if that purpose was just to move away from where she had been. Days on end of flying in tight circles had taught her the appeal of… not flying in circles. The scenery, a constant white foam below lit by intermittent crystals, both above and below, gave the tunnel a dim, moody atmosphere, mysterious and unknowable.

It was perhaps the nicest bit of scenery she had seen since coming below the ground. Wild, untamed, violent, backlit in just the right way… If they had to fly along it for long enough she was sure its charms would wear off, but for now it was downright entrancing.

"This is great," Beryl barked from behind her, "but how about a little challenge?"

"What sort of challenge?" she responded, tipping her wings back to slow down and fall in above him, looking down at him.

He looked up with a mischievous smirk. "Put all of that practice to use," he suggested, waggling his wings and dropping closer to the water. "Show me how fast you can fly in a straight line, now that we have the space!"

Lily liked that idea so much that she immediately began pumping her wings, striving to find an optimal speed. Too fast and she didn't get enough lift, too slow and she wasn't going anywhere, too weak or in the wrong pattern and she would exhaust herself. She fell into a quick crossing beat, pushing her wings down and back, then forward, then up and back to swipe down at the air in short, aggressive sweeps.

That decided, she shifted her base fins, clenched her tailfins in the correct fashion, and squinted into the wind, striving to focus all of her energy, all of her willpower, into her wings and cutting through the air. The turbulent currents caused by the river below were a complicating factor, but not enough of one when she was putting so much force into her flight.

The air rushed by her face, drying her nostrils out within a dozen heartbeats. She cut through it like a shriek through pure silence, pushing herself. The river rushed by below, seemingly faster than ever because of her own relative speed, nothing more than a white blur. The rough sides of the tunnel blurred past in their own indistinguishable fashion, broken up by crystals flashing by and blinking, they were there and gone so quickly, leaving imprints on her vision for a brief time.

A roar of exhilaration forced its way out of her chest, even as her lungs burned with the exertion, and she let it out with wild abandon. This was what it was to be a light wing! This, and hiding from prying eyes, and all the other things that made up daily life, but this most of all. And she had been missing it for so long.

In that moment, hurtling through the air, in mild danger but also in complete control, she felt at peace in a way she had not felt in a long, long time. There was an appealing simplicity, a completeness, to it. Her, testing her limits, throwing her body into a task that strained it to its utmost…

With a companion. She glanced down, her eyes blearily and still mostly closed, and saw Beryl was right there with her. He flew below her because of the narrowness of the tunnel, but she felt as if he was beside her, because he was in heart, if not in body.

O-O-O-O-O

Their trip up the subterranean river was not a short one. Lily lost count of the amount of times they set down on some rock or high ledge to sleep, and it was impossible to tell how long the trip should have taken even if she had kept track, because they did not rest regularly, instead seizing every opportunity that occurred without consideration for a steady pattern. They covered a lot of ground, but not in a manner anyone could call efficient. Safety was more important.

And nowhere was the 'safety over speed' method more apparent than in fishing. The underground river never slowed or became less chaotic. There were fish, but they were rare and almost impossible to see in the froth, let alone catch; even they seemed to be travelling, because nothing could stay in one place in that kind of river. That made things difficult.

Not entirely impossible; Beryl could do it. But the process was much more complicated than the usual firing into a school of fish and scooping up whatever floated to the surface. It involved finding a good place to wait, somewhere the currents slowed, usually a bend or rise in the tunnel. Then it required patience and a keen eye, to watch for the flashes of silver that denoted fish in the turbulent, mostly opaque waters. Finally, a one-two blow of fire, one shot ahead of the fish to make a dip in the water that would slow it down, then a second to kill it. Retrieving the fish was perhaps the easiest part, just swooping down to grab it as it was carried along by the current, but even that was dangerous.

All for one or two fish; they didn't travel in groups in this river, they couldn't. Fishing took almost half of what Lily would call a day of their travels, and that was if they stuck to one large meal before setting out, and went to sleep slightly hungry. Otherwise, they spent more time hunting fish than actually travelling, which neither of them liked.

Beryl had been the one to set their travel schedule, to teach her to fish, and to do almost everything except physically lead the flights; he remained in the back to watch her for fatigue then. Lily didn't complain about him taking charge in most respects. It was an ironic fairness, all in all, that necessity put him in charge in a 'first among equals' sense, after so many moon cycles of her holding that position and more over him when they were with the pack. Out in the wilds, she defaulted to following him, whether it was above or below ground.

But that did not stop her from somewhat resenting their slow pace, even if it was reasonable. Every good resting place was a reason to stop for a while, no matter how close it was to the one preceding it. And then there were the few times they had been forced to backtrack, sleep, rest up, and try again, the distance between rest stops too large to safely traverse while already fatigued.

There was no way to know how far they had gone, or how long it should have taken. Time down here was important, and Lily knew the consequences of not being able to track it, but at the same time it was not. There were no deadlines, no changes in the environment based on the passage of time.

But something else was changing, something ominous…

It was subtle, so subtle that she might have missed it were they travelling in a larger group. But they were alone; her attention was always either on him or her own thoughts, and he was often the more interesting of the two.

He forgot that he had taught her a little trick with fishing. He forgot that she had already eaten that flight. He forgot that he was supposed to wake up to keep watch. A common thread continued to pop up, over and over again. Beryl forgetting things.

Every time, he laughed it off, but there was a look of genuine confusion on his face whenever she corrected him, one that was vulnerable and real. It was not a trick or a joke, he was really forgetting and needing reminders.

"I'm just… forgetting things," he said when she brought it up. "I'm tired."

Or, a few long flights later, after he had forgotten they agreed she would fish for the both of them for once. "I guess I just didn't think it was that important?" he offered.

They were excuses, but they were meant for him as much as for her. As far as she could tell, he didn't know why he was forgetting things any more than she did. That was, of course, even more worrying than if he was intentionally messing with her.

But between the long flights, the constant minor danger of flying over a raging river, and the long fishing sessions, she didn't think it was safe to really confront the problem. There was nowhere for him to go if he needed to be alone, they were usually stuck on ledges so narrow they ended up sleeping next to each other out of pure necessity, and she had absolutely no idea what was happening to him, or why it was happening now. They were in a survival situation where obsessing over something other than the current moment could get one or both of them killed, even if they were not in any direct danger otherwise. Throwing such a huge distraction at him would be actively detrimental to his safety.

So she held her tongue, aside from asking why he had forgotten every time it happened. She tried to keep track, to see whether it was getting worse over time, but the inconsistent nature of their travels up the seemingly endless river made it hard to be sure of any conclusion she could come to.

A creeping dread grew in her as they flew, made worse with every new incident, every little thing he needed to be reminded of. A dozen individual moments, each one on its own innocent and normal, but taken together a terrifying descent she wasn't even sure he knew was occurring.

The river was no longer a place of mystery and appealing sights; instead it was a merciless, endless path that stopped Lily from acting on something that worried her, a mandatory distraction she resented more with every passing flight that didn't reveal a way out. The water was a lurking predator, waiting for her to slip or have an accident, so that it could devour her. The bright crystals grew dimmer in her eyes, even though they likely had not actually changed, and the times she missed her fish felt far more intentional, like the river itself was antagonizing her with her ineffectiveness.

They met no other dragons while travelling along the river, something that only enhanced Lily's growing sense of dread. They were alone. Her, Beryl… and the river. She did not actually consider it to be alive, she was not falling into another bout of paranoid insanity – Beryl would have caught her if she was, he was still otherwise his normal self – but she felt it was a fitting metaphor. Nature had seldom felt so actively anticipatory before.

The very first time they came across another tunnel intersecting the river, she leaped on the opportunity. It was narrow, led upward, and was dry. The river rushed on, of course, but it was for once not the only path they could take.

The choice was obvious. Beryl summed it up in a single statement uttered the moment they landed in the tunnel mouth. "Anything is more interesting than more of that." Lily agreed wholeheartedly, though not for the same reason. Anywhere safe enough to raise the question of what was happening to him, and why.

O-O-O-O-O

Contrary to Beryl's hopes, the new tunnel did not provide anything of interest immediately, however nice walking was as a change of pace. Lily let him lead the way, glad to get back to her preferred place in their travelling formation. Not in the least because it let her watch him, both for entertainment and for her own peace of mind. More the latter than the former at the moment, though.

She was too worried for Beryl's health to really focus on her distant plans to woo him back. In addition to the general worry of having bigger things to be concerned with, a problem with his memory might make anything she did to regain his affection… questionable. If she talked him into being her lover, and he forgot about it the next day, she might do something that offended him without realizing it. Or if she did it and he remembered, but then he forgot later, he might doubt that she had been sincere. Or any number of other scenarios she didn't want to think about; romancing someone who could forget random things was a risky proposition.

It had been a long while, though. She and Beryl had spent moon-cycles together as just friends, and he seemed comfortable with her. She hoped that he was comfortable with her, but the thought that it might be all he was lurked in the back of her mind, acknowledged only because she was learning to force herself to think about such things rather than locking them away and letting them fester.

It was possible, she made herself admit in the privacy of her own mind, that whatever she and Beryl had was broken for good. Maybe he was content to just be friends, now and forever. It was also possible he was waiting, to make sure she really was sane, or because he didn't want to force her into a situation where she felt she had to weigh her safety against his desire. He might be waiting for her to learn to be self-sufficient in every way, so that she would not feel bound to him.

Such altruistic motives were exactly like him, but she could ascribe less happy motivations too. He had seen her at her worst, and now he was helping bring her back, but that didn't mean he had forgotten. It didn't mean he wanted to take a chance on her, when she could go back to that lowest point the moment he was not there to put her to sleep. She had never regained the ability to sleep on her own; it seemed to be a permanent disability, one that scared her more than she would admit. His steady paw was there to make it a non-issue now, but he might not want to be tied to a female who needed help to stay sane…

Then again, that could very well be a problem they had in common, if his memory problems did not go away on their own. There was always a way for things to be worse.

"Lily," Beryl said, completely unaware of her unhappy line of thought, "do you remember what direction we came from, back when we were first travelling beneath the ground? Did we pass through a bunch of ominously regular tunnels then, or was that later, when it was just us?"

"You don't remember?" she asked, pushing away her dark thoughts. A side-effect of actually confronting the things she would rather not think about was longing for distractions, and this was a legitimate one that warranted doing what she wanted to anyway, and thinking about anything else.

"It's a bit fuzzy, but I was just thinking about them," he admitted. "About what might be able to make such things. As a way to pass the time. Any ideas?"

"We are imagining creatures that can eat through solid rock?" she asked.

"That is it, yes," he confirmed. "I was thinking especially strong teeth, but biting at a flat surface is hard."

"Surely they would use claws, not teeth," she objected, letting herself sink into the discussion at paw. She would raise the problem of his slowly faltering memory later, when they were not walking through unknown territory. Though she had to raise it soon; he seemed to be getting worse every time he forgot something. This wasn't some small moment he was 'feeling fuzzy' about, it was a long trek through extremely memorable terrain, with light wings all around them. That he couldn't remember when it had happened was extremely concerning.

"You have never seen any of the dragons that actually do eat through rock," he retorted. "Some are little more than torsos with teeth… But those leave very distinctive tunnels. I know the look, and we have not come across one yet down here. So it's something else, but I would think it is something similar."

"It doesn't have to be." She spent a little while eyeing the surfaces of the tunnel they were passing through, trying to imagine herself with super-strong claws digging it out. "But claws would leave very obvious marks," she conceded. "Scoop marks, sharp edges…" There were none of those that she could see, and she didn't remember seeing any in the unnaturally perfect tunnels, either. "Maybe fire?"

"Fire on rock… It would be very hot fire." She could imagine flames melting through rock, but they would have to be hot, and a constant stream. Sort of like the fire she used to heat things, but much larger and much longer.

Beryl stopped and backpedaled so quickly Lily ran right into him, still thinking about fire. She stuck her nose out to one side of his tail and snorted, momentarily disoriented by his strange action.

"Lily," Beryl hissed, still slowly backing into her, forcing her to either resist or be pushed back herself, "make no noise."

Lily wasn't about to argue; anything that could get Beryl this alarmed, this quickly, was nothing to take lightly. She backed up with him, straining to look around his body and see what had him so alert. Whatever it was didn't immediately make itself obvious to her; all she saw was an open space beyond the tunnel, one lit by purple crystals.

"Up ahead," he hissed after a moment, "the tunnel widens into a cave. In the ground there is a gorge. One filled with green fog."

Alarm raced though Lily, and she began walking back faster than he was, not even trying to slow him down. "A gorge?"

"Yes," he confirmed. "I do not know how deep it is, just that it is there and it is filled with fog. It could just be a tiny dip in the ground, but that would make no sense."

"One of those nightmare dragons is here, either way," Lily concluded. "But it's not spilling out up here, right? Is the gorge the only way to go forward?" She would turn around and go right back to travelling up the river, if that was the case. They had gotten extraordinarily lucky the last time, escaping after an ambush. Walking into another one's territory would be asking for their luck to run out. If it was a choice between 'fly into the pit of hallucinatory fog' and 'fly over the river for who knows how long,' then… well, it wasn't an easy choice, but at least the river wasn't actually out to get them.

"It's not spilling out. The tunnel keeps going." Beryl stopped backing up. "What natural defenses did this fear dragon have, again?" He never took his eyes off the distant danger.

He should have remembered. He was there. But she shoved her worry aside to focus on answering him; that was more important in the present moment. "Strong coverings on its back that can move like wings," she reported, the encounter clear in her mind at least. "It might not have wings, or it might have perfectly good ones under the weird covers. Fangs with venom that will take either of us out of the fight, but possibly a limit of one bite at a time. The other one couldn't do two in a row." A limitation on venom seemed logical, but she couldn't be sure. What one dragon considered a limit might not affect another of the same kind.

"Fire?" he asked.

"Maybe, but I don't know what kind," she admitted.

"Fire, venom, and a shielded back. It probably has claws and talons." Beryl shuddered. "And it can make us crazy and see things that aren't there. Back to the river?"

"We could…" She didn't want to retreat that easily. "But the fog is its domain. We can just fly right past the gorge. It did not look like it would be fast in the air." That was an observation she was only able to make in retrospect; the green fog made measured, careful deduction based on observation very difficult, so she hadn't noticed that at the time. But skinny, with weirdly shaped wings that seemed armored? That wasn't a combination made for speed.

"Last time it surprised us," Beryl growled. "It pushed us into the fog instead of attacking, even when it had that surprise to work with." He remembered that much, at least, though the haunted look in his eyes made Lily wish he didn't.

"And it's probably down in that fog right now." She would bet on that. The fog was its natural advantage; it would make its home down there, if anywhere. "Can we just fly over the gorge and keep going?"

"We could?" Beryl answered, looking back at her in obvious disbelief. "That seems like a huge risk when we don't have to go this way."

"We know what we're getting around, here," she argued, warming to the idea in spite of the danger. "We're quiet, fast, and it probably doesn't know we exist yet. I would bet on us if it tries to come for us in an empty tunnel while we're sane and forewarned." She was not a fighter...

That needed to change, sooner or later. Now there was absolutely no excuse for her lack of combat-oriented prowess; gone were the days where simply running into someone was cause for agony.

Something for later. And there would be a later, because if it came after them while they were in the tunnel beyond the gorge, its wing coverings would not save it from a barrage of explosive bolts of fire. "We can take it if it comes after us. So long as we don't go into the fog, there is little danger."

"Maybe…" Beryl hummed indecisively.

"If you don't want to, we can go back to the river, but I would rather we just push forward and fly away if it notices us." She didn't want to flee so easily. Call it stupid, reckless behavior, or brave courageous behavior, the result would be the same. She didn't want to flee, and she didn't think they really needed to.

"I would rather go back to the river," Beryl decided, looking back at her.

Then his eyes widened. "Not my choice anymore," he hissed, looping his tail around one of her front paws and insistently pulling forward, forcing her into a flat-out run before letting go.

Lily didn't look back; there was only one sight that could have gotten that kind of abrupt reaction. She ran as fast as she could, matching Beryl in speed.

The ensuing sprint was an eerily silent one. Lily could hear her paws thumping quietly against stone, and the frenzied beating of her heart, and Beryl panting, but nothing else. There were no cries from behind them, either of anger or glee at sighting new prey. That just made it all the more intimidating; it could be right behind her and she might not hear it. But to look back would be to slow down, so she didn't.

The tunnel widened around them as they ran, and the gorge filled with green fog appeared before them both, wide and obviously deep now that they could see it up close. Beryl leaped into the air, and she followed.

Lily felt a brief instant of vindicated satisfaction, however out of place that was, as she soared over the wide gorge with ease. This, right here, was proof she was right to have risked her life for flight. She had learned from the last nigh-impossible obstacle that had blocked her, and she had learned well. Jumping would have been impossible this time. Flight, on the other paw, rendered it completely unimportant as an obstacle, and they were leaving it behind in mere moments.

The tunnel did not narrow past the gorge, continuing forward for as far as she could see. Lily and Beryl flew as fast as they could onward, having a straight and clear path forward.

But all was not well. Lily noticed it first as a shaking in Beryl's wings, something totally out of place right now. They were both well-rested; she was nowhere near tired, and his stamina far exceeded hers. He looked exhausted, and his quivering suggested he felt just as tired.

"Lily," he groaned, slowing down. She overtook him with ease, before chancing a brief look back. The nightmare dragon was nowhere in sight; the only proof she had of its existence was the fog they had left behind, and Beryl's panic.

"What is it?" she asked worriedly.

"I need to set down," he gritted, haphazardly flaring his wings to land unsteadily on the stone floor not all that far below them.

Something was very much wrong, but she had no idea what. She dropped down to land beside him, keeping one eye on the gorge and the tunnel behind them at all times. "What is happening?"

"I don't… know," he wheezed, panting so fast he could barely talk. His eyes were wide and slitted, the kind of expression Lily would expect of someone fighting for their life, and he was not calming. Far from it.

"Calm," Lily hummed, speaking for the both of them. The nightmare dragon was still nowhere to be seen. She suspected some sort of new trick, but it could not be that; they had both avoided the fog, flying far above it. They had not fallen prey to the same trick as before. Beryl had not. Or, he shouldn't have.

"Lily!" Beryl barked, still hyperventilating, worse than before. "Ahead!"

Lily turned to look at the tunnel ahead of them.

A nightmare dragon – it had to be that, the fangs, the odd wings, it all looked exactly the same – was staring impassively from a distance, standing in the middle of the tunnel. Waiting for them.

"No problem," Lily muttered, refusing to give in to panic. "We'll just have to-"

There was a sound from very close nearby, and Lily swung her head around, seeking the source. A single pebble rolled to a stop on the ground a few steps away. Her eyes almost immediately went up, to the vaulted ceiling.

Two more nightmare dragons had just emerged from a small opening she was almost certain had not been there before. They stood on a ledge, together, staring down with baleful glares.

Then two more crept up from the fog filled gorge they had crossed, cutting off the escape from behind.

Lily did not let panic set in, but she knew this was going to be an issue. One had almost had them both at his mercy. Now they were facing five, and Beryl was suffering from some unknown issue. Things did not look good.

One of the dragons from the ledge above dropped to the ground, staring directly at Beryl. Its eyes, a misty white, were focused on him. Specifically, on his wing shoulder, where the scar from the last encounter with a fear dragon stood out, grey against midnight black.

It spoke, her voice low and gravelly. "Do not be afraid," she said.

Author's Note: I didn't want to leave you guys with a false cliffhanger, so I kept going just far enough to leave you with a real one. If I wanted to leave you with a false one, I would have stopped at 'Things did not look good.'

It would have been especially bad, too, since there won't be a chapter next week. We're getting near the end of this story (twelve chapters left, give or take one), and I want to build my backlog up a bit, make sure my beta has seen a few chapters ahead before I post anything. So, yeah, no chapter next week.