The cave loomed high in front of the October Children (plus Petra and Jesse), high enough that when Jesse tilted their head back to look at the top it looked like the opening extended up to swallow the clouds into darkness.
Speaking of darkness, the cave itself was so dark that it was difficult to see more than three feet inside. Seriously; it seemed to be light up until two feet in, and then it looked as though the rest of the insides had been purposefully soaked in squid ink, pitch black that was almost tangible.
Jesse was a little frightened to go near it.
Gill whistled, hands on his hips as he surveyed the maw of the cave with an almost impressed look on his face. "Welp. They weren't kidding when they said we needed to bring light for this."
"No kidding." Lukas squinted into the cave, as if trying to make out more past the almost permeating darkness and having no luck with this attempt, since it was so black that you couldn't have done better than if you'd soaked a piece of paper in ink entirely. "It's a good thing, too; I'm not the best with light spells right now."
"None of us are," Aiden replied, shifting the lantern he was holding.
He hadn't lit it yet- something about wanting to save the oil in case- but he had it at the ready and it was comforting just to see it hooked on his arm, at the ready to be lit just in case they needed it.
"It's nice that they were willing to provide us with stuff," he added after a moment.
"Of course they would; they're not heartless," Petra chimed into the conversation; her sword was resting almost lazily on her shoulder, like she went into caves and fought mystery monsters every day.
Then again, maybe she did. Jesse wouldn't have an idea about what she usually did.
"This'll be interesting. Usually they don't just chuck us straight into the heart of things without warning, you know?"
She mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like 'that's usually Ivor's job', but Jesse wasn't sure if they'd heard her right so they didn't ask. They got the feeling Ivor was the kind of lord who might be forgetful enough to forget to tell Petra what she was up against.
Romeo was probably the kind of lord to just omit the fact for the drama of it, to be fairly honest.
Maya hummed, flicking some nut-brown hair out of the way of her blue eyes. "Well, I think they usually know... what we're up against."
"True that."
Jesse clutched the straps of their green backpack a little tighter. Reuben snuffled from inside the backpack, his head poking out the top like he was a plushie.
Yes, of course Reuben was inside. Jesse was hardly about to go ducking and diving away from whatever this monster was and leave Reuben scurrying to catch up with them. That was mean.
"Everyone got plenty of those redstone things that Harper gave us?" Lukas double-checked, receiving a chorus of 'yes'es, nods, and a few people holding up the item in question. Jesse unzipped their backpack to show that Reuben was practically padded in the stuff from where he was sitting in the backpack.
Harper held out several small packets of redstone to the departing October Children- enough that she almost dropped several until everyone took a good handful to alleviate her load.
They honestly looked a little like sugar packets in restaurants that you tear open and then dump into tea or coffee or something, except they were translucent and you could see every granule of redstone plus some kind of mystery goopy substance inside.
Also, you probably wouldn't care to stick this stuff in your tea. Or your coffee. Or in your body in general.
Or maybe you would, but you probably would've just had a stomachache afterwards. Or food poisoning.
"Light," she uttered once everyone had several of the mystery packets.
"These provide light?" Jesse guessed when nothing else was forthcoming, Harper nodding with a pleased sort of smile at the guess.
"Trail."
Jesse looked back at the packets, turning 'trail' over in their head; then back up at the white-haired demon lord with an excited look on their face as it clicked. "Oh! Kinda like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs? Except, um..."
They looked at the sugar-like packets in their hands, watching redstone dust smudge around the inside and slurp around in the weird goopy substance.
"... inedible."
"Oh, really? Couldn't have guessed," Gill joked back, even as Harper pointed at Jesse with an almost proud nod for guessing it right.
"Well, yeah, you're a fucking idiot," was Maya's sharp reply.
Gill's response was to nearly break her rib by elbowing her, and her response to this was to smack him over the back of the head with her staff and almost crack his skull since, well, it was her staff.
Things went downhill from there.
Harper mimed throwing, one of the redstone packets in her hand, either not noticing the way Mevia had just picked Maya up and was now holding her across the room from Gill to avoid one of them accidentally maiming the other or just deliberately ignoring it.
Honestly, it was a toss-up either way.
"Throw..." She mimed throwing the packet again.
"Um... throw... like this?" Jesse tossed one of the packets of redstone to the ground.
To their surprise, it immediately started emitting a rosy, warm glow. "Oh!"
"Automatic," Harper added.
Lukas glanced at the packets, then up at Harper. "So if we get separated, we should just toss them down and it'll automatically make a trail so that we can find each other again?" he 'translated'.
Jesse had to honestly wonder how he'd managed to get that out of a single word, especially when Harper nodded at him pleasantly.
Then again, he probably had known Harper long enough to interpret what she was trying to say anyway. So it wasn't all that weird.
"Um... thank you!" they said, giving her a small smile when she looked at them. "I mean, hopefully we... won't, get separated, but it's still good to have in case."
"Yes, it doesn't hurt to be prepared," Isa mused, fiddling with her sleeve as she kept Gill from jumping at Maya with her free elbow. "Do be careful not to crush them, though; I believe these will last for a few hours but it's still better to not activate them until it's necessary."
Jesse nodded seriously, carefully tucking them into the inside pockets of their jackets. (Inside pockets were a gift from whatever god or heavenly being existed.) "So don't squish 'em unless necessary. Got it."
Mevia's lips twitched at the use of the word 'squish', and she ended up having to turn away so that they didn't see the tiny smile on her face.
It was too late. They'd seen the quirk of her mouth. But they didn't gloat about it.
It was a nice smile.
Harper nodded and gave Jesse a little squeeze, patting their back. "Safe."
"Stay safe?" they translated. "I'll try... I'm not sure how well I'll do, though."
She patted them again. "Agility."
"Yeah, I'll be sure to dodge as much as I can," they promised, which earned them another pat.
They kind of liked it.
"Well... you guys ready to go in?" Lukas asked, fidgeting with his sleeve slightly and tugging an errant thread that was attached to it. Jesse didn't know if that meant Lukas was nervous.
Actually, it probably did. Lukas wasn't exactly a fidgety person. Petra, sure, maybe even Aiden, but Lukas was more of the type of person to just stare.
Well, stare as well as he could with a blindfold on.
Aiden shrugged nonchalantly. "Nope. Let's do this."
There was a growl, a soft sound that sounded almost like a stomach grumbling for food. Jesse was too nervous to be hungry though, so they knew it wasn't from them. It was probably from Gill; he'd been joking about being hungry the entire walk up until Maya almost shoved him off the walk.
"Gill, eat something. Honestly, don't just let your stomach growl like that, you're going to scare us while in the middle of the cave," Maya scolded him, not taking her eyes from the cave entrance.
"... that was definitely not me. I'm not hungry," he replied. "I thought it was Aiden."
Aiden arched his eyebrow, red eye blinking twice. "Look, if I was hungry, my stomach wouldn't growl that loud. Not to mention we would've called a break to eat," he pointed out. "Lukas?"
Lukas shook his head, crossing his arms. His lips thinned into a line. "Not me. Jesse, I assume it's not you?"
"No... I thought it was from Gill, too." They glanced up at the bigger half-demon, Gill scratching at his beard with one hand nervously.
Jesse realized, with something of a jolt, that Gill's gun was in his hand, already poised to shoot into the cave.
There was another rumble, a growl, but this time it was louder and more present and they could all tell instantly that it was from the cave this time.
Petra's sword was out, and Aiden had his whip at the ready- not in the bladed whip, but rather just something that looked like a stub of a dagger. Lukas's hands went into his pockets as he turned his head from side to side, surveying the area.
A tremor ran through the ground.
Then another.
Jesse looked up from the ground, watching pebbles skitter on the ground from the force of the growl, and realized something very, very pertinent with a little start and this awful, awful sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach.
There were two pinpricks of violet light in the darkness of the cave ahead. Evenly spaced, both at the same height.
Like a pair of eyes.
"Move," Lukas said quietly.
None of them did, all staring at the two glowing violet eyes that bored into their skin, keeping them frozen in place.
Twin wisps of smoke came curling out of the cave, in a huff that smelled of cities burning to the ground and earthy soil crumbling to ash and the kind of metallic smell that one will smell when in a room filled with rusting tools and objects (and blood, it smelled of drying blood staining everything, but none of them said this.)
"MOVE!" Aiden barked this time, but this time it wasn't at Lukas, whose claws were coming out, or Petra, whose sword was at the ready, or Gill or even Maya, but at the tiny human who had come along for a battle that they could not fight.
Jesse threw themselves out of the way in the nick of time, just as a piercing, vicious shriek of a roar sent the October Children staggering backwards from the sheer force of it. Maya even fell over from it.
Reuben was squealing up a storm once their ears stopped ringing enough for them to hear it. They couldn't see the little pig, but he was trembling enough that they could feel it from where he was on their back in the backpack.
They peered from behind the rock they were crouching behind, trying to catch a glimpse of the creature as their friends-
Friends, friends, when had that happened, when had these half-demons who were helping them in a task Jesse had agreed to because it was only fair that they help Romeo after staying in his home for a few days who had murdered an entire group and scared them and stayed in a tree with them become their friends?
The minute they hadn't left.
The minute they'd stayed.
That was when Jesse had stopped being afraid of them.
They tried to catch a glimpse of the creature as their friends scrambled to catch their balance, get back up, stay ready-
A black shadow exploded out of the cave entrance, wheeling around their heads as reptilian, beating wings caused a wave of wind that very nearly bowled them all over in an instant- even Jesse; who was holding the rock and not even standing up in the first place.
The October Children all scattered, dissolving into shadow enough that they could all pelt sideways and avoid the black shadowy force that shot through where they had been standing before solidifying, having been split into a wide circle around the shadowy creature.
It slammed into the ground with enough force to send several rocks and pebbles flying through the air and dancing across the ground, still enough for the moment for Jesse to see a reptilian head with horns spiraling off the side of its skull, violet eyes flaring with some dangerous fury as gleaming black scales shone in the red-tinted sunlight, its reptilian, thin (and yet dangerously, crushingly heavy) body almost undulating as it prepared to fight the half-demons standing before it.
And then the magic of it slammed into Jesse.
If the bandits had felt like a weight was pressing on Jesse, this felt like the entire sky's weight in Jell-O had been dropped onto them. They could still move, but it was with some difficulty to get started, and it was heavy. Jesse wasn't sure they could've jumped or leapt high into the air without immediately being dragged back down.
They knew this was just an illusion, of course- there wasn't any actual weight on them at the moment. It was all just their sensitivity to magic speaking. They could have run around at their usual speed had they wanted to.
But it didn't stop Jesse from being forced onto their knees in that first moment when the weight of the creature's magic crushed them from their feet to the groundwith a gasp.
It stood still enough for a moment that Jesse had an idea of just how massively big it was. The dragon's head was almost three times the length of Jesse's height. Petra's sword looked like a needle in comparison to its huge, rippling bulk.
Jesse had seen this creature before in books, in storybooks, but not in real life, and not quite this reptilian, and angry, and huge, and real.
This wasn't quite as snakelike as Kaster and Bedivire, not quite as undulating and almost not as real (which was funny, if Jesse was in any mood to appreciate the humor, since Kaster and Bedivire were literally just iron doorhandles on Romeo's door and this was the real deal).
But it was a close second.
And it was certainly much, much angrier about being disturbed.
Two large shapes began to shift off of the creature's back, unfurling almost like a rug being unrolled for the first time until the tips touched the clouds, two huge wings that blotted out the sky and the sun stretching until they cast shadows that threw the entire area into a darkness that was sinister and very, very deadly, casting a shadow that had to look something like out of some kind of horror movie.
The creature that the Hizelkian lords desired was a dragon.
A/N: This chapter should not have been this difficult to write... I finished writing this in Portugal! Why are we in Portugal? My dad likes photo opportunities. Anyway, this was a fun chapter to write. I'm excited for the next chapter. It's a huge fight scene, basically.
Yep, Ender Dragon showed up!
Reviews are my cookies. I got some cookies but would love more x3
Responses to reviews!
Toni42: Indeed she did. Sorry, Ivor, you... sorta got to Jesse too xD This is not as fluffy but hey, badass stuff I guess xD
TheAmberShadow: That and then I would've had to spoil the Ender Dragon showing up xD / Oh, indeed. She refuses to acknowledge it though xD / Harper tries. So hard. xD / She is indeed. / The workshop's her room; she'd otherwise have to trek between her room and her work every day and she's kinda the type of person to... not want her work to be that far away xD / Hehe :3
ThinMintE: Anyone would look cute as a koala, I think xD / Yeah, I definitely agree. / That's my middle name! Well, actually, no, my middle name is my Chinese name, but xD
DarkbeastDend: I'm glad you liked the chapter! Here's the update :3
That's all for now. See ya, so long, and g'bye!
x.X. A.L. X.x
