Frostbite
4
Source
"You have a recurring dream. I like it. It's… fitting for you."
"It's a paradox for all I know."
"It isn't so complex. Dragons dream lots of things. Their fangs falling out, their tails raising in front of family members, their scales shedding, maybe even falling from the sky."
"That all happens because of deep-seated mental programming. It's the mind's response to unconformities and discomforts. There's a process of rationalization that manifests those negatives into visually understandable phenomena. It's all inside the head."
"You don't think any of it comes from outside?"
"No."
"That's very close-minded for someone so educated, so well-read… I think… I smell the art of literature inside you. You're a writer."
"No, I just want to be…"
"So as a writer, you know about existential crisis and outstanding circumstances…"
"Yes."
"You believe in dreams."
"Yes."
"Do you believe in ghosts?"
Cynder's eyes opened.
She was met with cold stone and ice.
Peeling herself off the floor, the dragoness coughed as her throat flared. She drank from the runoff of an ice wall and nursed a developing pit in her stomach.
She was approaching day number two inside the cavities. She was hydrated, but within two weeks the hunger would kill her. Her mutations would be able to stave off its effects for slightly longer than a normal dragon could resist. But she doubted anything survived in these cavities that was large enough for a food source, or even edible.
Cynder tried to pretend that the ice-runoff she lapped at was her favorite red wine that she kept in her castle. Recipes like that came from Darklight, the Night Dragon city on the Dark Continent. It was the only concoction of its nature she would drink in times of relaxation, and its memory did at least a little to keep her going.
But it wasn't the thirst or the hunger that was truly getting to her.
It was the need for sleep.
It had figured out that she wasn't going to be so easily manipulated. Calls in the voices of those she had been familiar with did not lure her or sway her from the straight-line path she'd been following. She was following the trail of crisp fresh air. There was a breach in the glacier somewhere, and she was onto it.
The thing understood that too.
So, it waited during the day. When Cynder staved off sleep for too long, and she inevitably passed out from exhaustion, that was when it struck.
"You have so much blood on your claws."
"What does that matter?"
"You are possibly more damned than anyone before you…"
"Hardly. Picking up a book now and then might educate you on such. Even my Mistress, plunging the world into war, could not be comparable to some of the ugliest of us who have lived."
{Scratches OST: 04 What you Waited For}
"You're alone."
"Maybe, but why does that matter?"
"You're alone."
"….So what?"
"You're alone."
"Shut up."
"You've always been alone."
"Shut up."
"You were alone from the egg."
"Shut up!"
Crashh~!
-The boulder flew apart in a blast of dust and debris. Cynder, panting, let the Shadow energy bleed through her fangs as she snarled at the slumped wreckage.
The dragoness was shivering as she limped away from the debris. Frost was dusted across the darker portions of her scales. Her breath was always a white mist in front of her snout, and her body was wracked with feverish pain.
Walking was becoming harder as her muscles began to eat themselves. She did not know how long it had been. Everything was dark, and the only thing that kept her in the right direction was the crisp smell of exterior air. She knew the breach was there. She just needed to reach it.
"Mistress."
Cynder staggered to a halt, leaning on one of the chamber ice-walls for support, uncaring for the stinging cold that ate through her skin on contact.
She lazily cast her long neck over, looking at a tunnelway nearby where the voice had echoed out from. Cynder shivered, a hungry exhale wheezing through her fangs as mist pooled in her face.
She tasted dirt. It was from drinking ice-runoff for days. The taste had become normal by this point, and she did not recoil from it any longer. She couldn't remember the taste of her wine to make things better, and so eventually the dragoness had been numbed to it.
"Mistress…~" –Moaned the throaty voice again. Cynder quivered, her pale eyes hatefully widened at the arch. Something began to creep into her breast. It was sharp, and cold like the ice…. It was…
"No." She whispered. "I am the Queen of Fear. You cannot frighten me, you worthless, lost little thing…"
"MISTRESS." –Screamed the voice. Something heavy and wet began to slap on the rocks and ice down the tunnel. Cynder froze.
The only things she had heard this whole time was the voice, the howling draft wind, and the occasional, forlorn crack rattling throughout the tunnels as the ice settled.
But this…
This was organic.
Slapslapblatplatmapl…
-The sound of a waterlogged corpse being thrown down a flight of stairs. It was getting louder. It was coming from down the tunnel.
Cynder began to quake as she did what she had always done when the thing started to harass her from a certain direction. She stared into the dark, and tried to pick out something, anything.
It always turned out to be nothing but noise.
"Mistress…." –The voice burbled, and the slapping and thudding reached a crescendo. "…why did you abandon me, Mistress?"
"…R-Reslo…?" Cynder whispered.
Something in the darkness moved. An amorphous mass tumbled around a corner, shifting and swimming in the shadows, glistening, pale flesh bouncing off all the rocks and the ice. It started to crawl towards her inside the arch.
Cynder screamed.
Her muscles regained their strength through the power of adrenaline. She sprinted down the nearest tunnel, bouncing over rocks, slipping between stalagmites…
Her foot caught on a crack in the floor. Cynder cried out as she painfully tumbled through the sharp stone and patches of frost. She ended her roll in a thunderous slam against the side of a boulder.
Weakened, dehydrated, hungry and tortured, Cynder would admit that it was not the first time she had curled up in a dark place and wished to die.
Make it stop, she begged in her mind.
"NO." –The voice told her.
Slapslapblatplatmapl…
It had followed her.
Cynder felt tears running down her cheeks as she scrambled against the boulder, curling her once unmarred and beautiful wings over herself. She saw the amorphous shape lumbering in the darkness towards her, from the way she had come.
The smell of decay was strong now. The wet slaps only ceased when the shape gained height, and Cynder could pick out actual footsteps, clumsy, disorganized and heavy ones albeit.
The black dragoness felt her heart leap into her throat when the thing revealed itself in the dull aqua light of the chamber cavity.
She was reared on her hind legs, flesh pale as snow, glistening with unnatural sudor, limbs hanging like they were boneless sleaves of flesh draped over her slouching torso. Her eyes were gray and lacking pupils, her jaw hanging and trailing morose drool as her head hung uselessly over and behind her right shoulder.
"Mistress Cynder…." Reslo's voice wheezed in agony through the walking corpse's throat. "…why did you leave me?"
Cynder bit down on her tongue, and pressed her wings into the boulder behind her. A tremor wracked her body as the corpse stumbled towards her, limp forepaws extended outwards, dead tail trailing on the rocks behind it.
By all the Ancestors, this madness…
Cynder.
The dragoness whined and wiped at her cheeks, trying to focus even as the wet footfalls got closer and closer.
Remember your own title.
You are terror.
You are not afraid.
Control.
Breathe.
"…Mistress…" Reslo heaved, her neck weakly craning as to barely lift her head, and turn it- sideways –in her former master's direction. Membranes creaked as the chops pulled back into a diseased parody of a smile, jolting with the mistimed steps of the dead legs. "I am here for you, Mistress. I will not leave you."
Cynder huffed, and her quivering ceased. She opened her eyes and snarled.
"Abomination." She hissed, her talons sliding out of their sheaths. "Your magic is weak."
Reslo's corpse wailed and its lumbering strides doubled in speed, its bloated mass slapping on the stone with wet reports as it closed their distance.
Cynder waited a moment, before twisting and bringing the business-end of her tailblade forwards in a devastating swipe. Reslo's body was scythed at the hip, and collapsed in two pieces with a dispelled wheeze of air and the crunch of decayed flesh.
A reverberating shriek echoed down the tunnels of the cavern and the howling draft tapered.
Cynder looked down at the reanimated remains in disgust. White, drained of color, now leaking green bile where there had once been blood. Reslo's deformed face stared back at her with her now colorless eyes, her cheek muscle twitching occasionally in disgusting reflexive gestures.
She deserved better.
Cynder heaved and showered the corpse in Shadow fire. The whoosh was soon mediated by the consistent crackle of fat and tendons meeting their heated ends. The chamber flickered black, white and blue from the dark magic pulsating on the floor.
Cynder- rejuvenated by the display of rebellion against the thing –tested the air, sorting through the meandering trails of rot and singing draconic-flesh.
Air.
The breach was very close.
She gave a lost, sorrowful glance at the cindering remains of her footwoman, and started to hobble down the nearest tunnel arch, her nose leading her down the turning trail of cold, fresh outdoor air.
A way out.
"Do you think I am just going to let you walk out?!" The voice rattled down the tunnel, deep, masculine, toned with the power of boulders grinding together. "You are mine."
"Fuck you." Cynder snarled.
She took another step forward, and the floor fell out from under her paw.
Earth began to crack and ice snapped. Cynder doggy-paddled in an attempt to gain traction. She panicked, her wings spreading but having little effect. She was too weak, too overwhelmed…
Cynder screamed as she tumbled through the trench developing in the floor of the tunnel. She was slammed between chunks of earth and pieces of ice, rolling, falling, descending into blackness, until…
The ground.
It was coming.
Cynder could do nothing. She closed her eyes and waited for the impact that would shatter every bone in her body.
Everything went dark.
[❄️]
…Cold wind whispering.
It had never stopped whispering, ever since the last rock had tumbled.
Feeling returned to her paw first, but even then, it was sluggish, and everything felt heavy.
Cynder opened her eyes, the nightmare neverending coming back to her. She was sprawled on the cave floor, surrounded by debris with dust stewing over her head all over the place. Darkness reigned here. The shadows were total, and…
…Ancestors, it smelled like shit in here.
Snorting, Cynder quivered as she sat up and craned her neck painfully about. The antechamber was unremarkable. Lots of black stone, veins of snow, the pillar of slight illumination from the hole she'd made in the floor, or the ceiling, or whatever the hell it was overhead…
But then her eyes fell on the center of the chamber, and they widened.
Ice cracking muffled in the air. The iceberg was ten times her size, made luminous from the dull light shedding from above. It was diveted, beaten and imperfect. Ancient, mottled with soil around its base as it remained half-buried in a pit of black earth and winding veins of snow.
Cynder's breath plumed as she observed the awesome object in silence. Her inner knowledge, and the things she had considered before came back to her.
The black dragoness shut her eyes, and wheezed as a tiny chuckle rocked her breast.
Someone Red.
She had been right.
There was a skeleton inside the iceberg. It belonged to a dragon once.
{Legend of Spyro: The Movie: Soundtrack: Heaven's Tide}
"Now you see."
The voice made her flinch. Cynder slapped her chops in distaste and turned over in the wreckage, working herself up to stand on shivering limbs.
"And now I see too." The voice hissed. Cynder looked at the skeleton. The eyes of the skull, whose jaw was opened in an eternal scream, the sockets were glowing crimson. "Terror of the Skies… I never thought I would see the day I wormed into a mind such as yours…"
"Why didn't you save me, Mistress?" -Reslo's voice mocked.
"Why did you let me die, Mistress?" -Came Darkshade.
The voice cackled.
Cynder righted herself, and she snorted at the disassembled dragon skeleton centering the ice. It had shattered, but it remained in placement intact. The arms and legs had turned to splinters, but all the strips and pieces were orbiting in the same general vicinity for each limb. The skull was missing a horn, and the wing bones hung overhead like papyrus sheets shredded and cast into the wind with creamy sticks.
"Yes." The voice hushed. "I did die here."
"I knew these tunnels were old." Cynder weakly said, her reptilian body shivering as the frostbite ate away at her.
"These mountains are old. They are as old as the world. I have watched them, through this ice. No longer will it be so."
"You….are…powerless." Cynder chuckled. "No Dracolich is worth its salt immobilized like you. You're nothing more than strips of cartilage left in the snow. And… Red, you mentioned something earlier about these tunnels running with it…"
Cynder hobbled over the rocks, standing, hunched, before the giant block of ice and the Dracolich imprisoned inside.
"The Red." She smiled. "I read it. I read about you. Years ago…"
"In revered annals, I think."
"At least you remembered something..." -Reslo hummed.
"You didn't remember everything." -Darkshade said.
"No, no… you… you've become forgotten. You're but a side-note someone scribbled in the Darkseep Tome on a whim." Cynder chuckled. "How does it go again?- 'The thing which is red as blood, and gibbers madness beneath the rocks…?' -something to that sort of tune…"
"Good of you to understand your… position." The Dracolich rumbled in her mind, its crimson eyes pulsating hatefully. The ice creaked, and steam began to leak off the crevices of the iceberg. "I need a flesh and blood form to leave this fetid prison. A personal puppet, from which I can harbor and regrow. You are going to assist me in that."
"…Aren't you afraid of my Mistress?" Cynder wavered on her paws. "What will Malefora the Dark One do when Frystdod, the Red Dracolich usurps the body of her favored general?"
"Your mistress is young and naïve. I shall see her wage war on her elder, and we will both know how she fairs." Frystdod's eyes pulsed, and something above Cynder's head whooshed. "Kill her."
Something crashed onto Cynder's back and drove her into the ground. She rolled with her attacker, snarling, kicking and slashing. She landed a hit across her assailant's ribs, roaring in satisfaction when warm life-fluids began to spray from the wounds.
Cynder's triumphant cries were silenced as she hacked and sputtered from the terrible smell that followed. Shocked, she realized that she was nose to nose with Darkshade.
He was… dead.
He was dead and attacking her.
Reanimated by the Dracolich's foul magic, Darkshade's corpse was a far cry from its original identity. His cyan eyes were now gray and hollow, his scales had sloughed off and had been replaced with sluggishly-slimed pale bloat-flesh. His wings were brown and torn, and green, toxic blood leaked from every orifice on him, including his mouth, which dumbly hinged ajar and blasted a shrieking wheeze in her face.
Cynder snarled and squirmed under his rotted grip. Her wing blades dashed his bloated chest to ruin in a series of precise blows. Her tailblade impaled her former soldier through the stomach, the tip bursting out the top of his feral pelvis with a spray of yellow mist and white mucus.
Frystdod's laughter echoed in her mind. Darkshade's corpse continued to hold her down, and his foul, decaying mouth lowered closer and closer to her face.
Cynder screamed and spit and hacked. She severed his leg at the knee and sent it spiraling away, she chopped his tail into three chunks will all wetly plopped into the dirt and leaked green bile. She opened his stomach like it was a sack filled with raw sewage, popped under brim-filling conditions.
Darkshade's corpse literally came apart as she sliced and punched and kicked. She opened her mouth, and a torrent of Shadow-fire washed over his sagging head. Darkshade's face sagged like molten metal under the attentions of the black fire, melting and dripping into nothingness as it was incinerated. Cynder- with a final roar –used her wings to send the dismembered cadaver away.
It flipped listlessly, burning, scythed to ribbons, and spattered across the rocks on the other side of the chamber.
"You cannot escape from me!" Frystdod's mangled voice hollered. The iceberg began to crack and shift. "You will be mine, Cloud Ripper."
The light streaming onto the iceberg from above…
Cynder tested the air, and looked up.
There was a fissure. Daylight was streaming from outside of it. It was just behind Frystdod's prison. The Dracolich's supernatural bellow shook the entire chamber. The ceiling cracked, and rocks began to tumble from above. Cynder steadied herself, and scanned the chamber for options.
There.
A stalactite! The biggest of the bunch. She'd need to be quick, before Frystdod could gather enough magic and attack her again.
"I have sat waiting in this cell for five thousand years! I will not allow you to escape! You are mine! MINE!" Frystdod wormed into her mind, psionically assaulting her with blinding visions of splitting flesh, snapping bones and screaming corpses.
Cynder barreled through the horror, white wind spiraling around her as she mustered the last of her energy into her Wind element.
She shot off the cavern floor and rocketed towards the ceiling, spiraling like corkscrew, her beautiful, crimson underside flipping past the black again and again. She resembled a cyclonic spout, shooting for the space over Frystdod's iceberg.
The Dracolich's entire skeleton was becoming wreathed in crimson energy. The iceberg was chipping and breaking. Soon, he would get out, and in his unrestricted form, he could subdue Cynder and take her body from her. He would be able to terrorize the living yet again after millennia.
However, his plans were for naught.
Cynder slammed into the basing of the stalactite, the massive rock-blade wavering as its foundation cracked open in a blast of dust. It teetered, back and forth, stone snapping and earth disconnecting.
Frystdod cried out a final sentence. Cynder never heard it. She sometimes later mused that it was something like- 'No!' –or- 'I will not be denied!'
-But in reality? Frystdod's echoing, mournful presence had moaned into the air only this:
"Please."
-Then, the stalactite fell, and crushed the iceberg in a fantastic ring of thunder. An explosion of dust and debris collapsed the whole chamber and showered Frystdod's prison in a grave he would never escape from.
Cynder's Cyclone kept her going. She smashed through the first layer of loose stone, through the ice, through snow…
Then the air started to whistle.
Resounding booms began to grow farther and farther away, behind her and looming. Slowly, her eyes opened as the Cyclone faded to nothingness. There was a sky. A clear, white-washed sky.
Cynder peered past her belly drunkenly, and watched as a mountain materialized in a never-ending road from behind her legs and tail. With the wind whipping in her face, she saw the mountain's top getting ever closer into the sky above her, and she smiled.
In freefall or not.
She had found it.
She had escaped.
[❄️]