Hello, everyone!
It's been awhile! I hope you all are having a happy holiday season and safe travels.
I'd like to thank Viperclaw14, NomexGlove, Marce7411, Skenjin, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, MysteryWriter175, picothea, justatiredarcanereader, and JustAnotherRandomPoster for your wonderful reviews!
I'd also like to thank my betas kwizjunior, Anticept, Samateus, RS, Dys, LapisSea, Crysist, and Crusader-Dragon for all of your help!
Hopefully I will be able to get another chapter out before the year is out. Until then, I hope you all enjoy!
Chapter 20
…
Though you were quite pleased with yourself, you would not allow victory to make clumsy your work. Having already secured your Viking prisoners under the careful eye of your subordinates, you turned your focus on securing the little brown dragon that had so fortunately crossed your path.
Your work was delicate, hands gliding over scale and muzzle and chain with reverence, each precise touch nothing more, nothing less than exactly what was needed. An adjustment here, a binding there. Every movement as vital as the last, your hands danced through the bindings. Something caught your eye during your ritual, bringing your fervent machinations to an abrupt halt. You pinched at the brown dragon's scales with a frown. With a slight tug, startlingly easy, you pulled off the scale—
No, it was not a scale. It was mud. Beneath it, the little dragon's hide was…
"White?" you said, disappointed. You frowned at the clump of dirt between your fingers as if it was the cause of all your woes. Your brow furrowed and you flicked the clump of dirt away. You scowled at the creature, pressed a hand against your temple with a sigh, and then studied it pensively.
A grin slowly curled across your face. "Well," you mused, "Not ideal. But this makes the hunt much more interesting…"
You stood and appraised your work. Satisfied, you whistled the command: Fly back.
The dragons standing by, dozing in the midafternoon sun, jerked to life. Sickly-yellow eyes focused for the first time. Tail-stingers quivered and tusks unsheathed, though the prey has been downed.
"Fly back," they whispered, each voice like a phantom's moan. "Fly back…fly back…" They sprung aloft, wings laboring under the weight of your flight machine. Four dragons were bound to each corner, ascending with perfect precision so that it lifted off the ground without the slightest tilt.
With an absentminded wave, you sang out a rising whistle. Follow. Hands clasped behind your back, you stepped onto the machine just as it reached your stride's height. You continued forward until you stopped at its edge, humming tunelessly to yourself.
As the dragons carried you about the island, the ship came into view. The people there bustled, their steady work in the face of such an unexpected day a remark on their discipline. One cage was now washed, bedded, and occupied. The golden scales of the foreigner dragon gleamed in the light. The human prisoner, fallen Viking Chief of Berk, was surely secured below-deck by now.
"I wonder…" you mused, "what could drive him to such madness."
You turned your face eastwards as though your gaze could skim across the ocean and rest upon the traps you laid there. An eager, boyish grin lit your face, jarring against the deep shadows of your bloodshot eyes.
"Ah, but we must be patient. We shall find out soon enough."
o.O.o
Captain and crew were disappointed to have their voyage so abruptly cut off, but the slave-boy and Night Fury took precedence.
"My lord," the captain said, bowing his head, "we shall abandon our hunt for the new Furies?"
You stepped up to the cage that now held the little, mud-coated dragon. "Abandon?" you said. "Take a close look."
The captain squinted, realization blooming across his face. "That's the one that last week's crew almost caught."
"Most likely." You crouched down to the little dragon's eye level, though she would be unconscious for quite some time longer. "How very polite of her to come flying to us, all on her own."
"Shall we prepare the pelt for you?"
"No, no, no," you tittered, flapping a hand. "I want her alive for now. This dragon holds the key…" You reached through the bars, stroking the dragon's forehead. Some dirt crumbled away from her scales, though she still appeared very much as a brown dragon. "Do not wash her. I want our new friend below to squirm for some time."
The captain's eyebrows wrinkled in confusion, but he nodded. "And our course?"
"Back to port," you said. You strode across the deck, opening the door to the captain's quarters, where you had set up your office. "Oh!" you said, as if a thought had just occurred to you. "When the eastern dragon wakes, come fetch me."
Now the captain was astonished. "My lord?"
You offered no explanation, walking inside, waiting a moment, and then closing the door. There was no window, but you had no need of a lantern. Growing in a long strip of fertile soil, little mushrooms sprouted. Some had button caps, glimmering like jewels hanging from delicate chains. Others stretched broad fans outwards, vying and stretching. More still clutched the moist earth, barely more than a mold, delicate stalks peeking warily out of the soil. All of them possessed a stunning, vibrant coloration that glowed, shining like a lantern in the night.
You looked sidelong at the mushrooms, humming, and sat at your desk. There lay the possessions of the Viking Chief and the eastern dragon. There was the expected: travel supplies and navigation equipment. The "reports" of Night Fury sightings written in your own hand. What perplexed you, however, was the enormous wooden crate nearly as big as your table. Its top had divots in it to place ink and a clamp to secure paper. You grabbed a lever and swung the top panel, which slid smoothly off to the side.
"Good craftsmanship," you mumbled.
Within the interior-facing side of the top panel emerged a small lip, which smoothed out a layer of sand. Buried in the sand was some sort of contraption. Composed of loops of leather coated in black dragon-scale paint, it wrapped about a metal ring that secured a fine, pointed pencil. Also inside the sand were charcoal sticks.
You fiddled with the leather contraption, eyes glowing pale in the unreal light. You gave a single, rising whistle: Come here.
Swiveling in your chair, you reached out. Pressure below, then tightness, as you secured the leatherwork. When you were done, you sat back like an artist scrutinizing their work, nose wrinkling and eyes narrowed.
"So the boy has not…" Disgust seemed to clamp your throat shut, roiling over your expression, curling your lip and tightening the muscles of your neck. A violent shudder wracked through you. Clenching your eyes shut, you took in several ragged, deep breaths. When finally you had calmed, you growled, "And to think, he wants to keep claim to his humanity and soul, even as a beast…"
You leaned forward, releasing the gentle weight of the leatherwork in a few well-placed tugs. Flinging it back into the box like it was an eel, you shut the contraption and shoved it aside. Whirling away from the thing, you leapt to your feet and stepped over to your poison-craft station, white-knuckled hands clenched behind your back.
Finding comfort in the familiar, you snatched a sterile vial from your work-bench. You held it under a glowing mushroom, this one wide-brimmed, serrated, and gleaming like the orange dusk before the nightfall. Tapping the growth gently, you encouraged a small rain of spores to flit into the vial, each speck glowing like a spiraling star.
Stinging, sharp pain. Flashing dots. Heart clenching. Draw back, back, back…!
You glanced backwards, brows lifted, lips pursed with thought.
A knock rammed the door. "My lord! The eastern dragon awakes."
You continued staring, unmoving. As though never interrupted, you returned your attention to your desk. Uncapping a vial of alcohol preservative, you pipetted a few milliliters into the vial, capped it, and inverted it several times. The spores dissolved surprisingly well. The resulting solution glowed with the same color, half-opaque like a precious gem, catching its own light within itself.
"Let us see how far gone the northerners really are, then."
Your tone betrayed your low hopes, having witnessed the extent to which man and beast melted into one another. As you got up to leave, you paused with your hand hovering over the door, a thought lingering in the air, waiting to be grasped. Slowly, you swiveled to face the box you had shoved aside.
You hefted it over your shoulder, teeth bared in a grimace, and stepped out the door.
o.O.o
Haugaeldr
Ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch.
Sharp pain went stinging from my head, over my spine, and down through my limbs in a great plexus tracking along my veins, tracing their winding, dendritic branches and offshoots. Lethargy gripped my mind and body, and though I was well aware of it, I could not fight it. What impulses I commanded to my traitorous limbs, they did not comply. So I hovered above myself, eyelids too heavy to lift, thoughts folding one over the other through the hours, blood aflame.
Ouch.
I did not like this, at all.
Light fluttered in brief flashes beneath my twitching eyelids. The pain centered at my forehead—a migraine, likely, considering its persistent location and degree of pain—flared with the stimulation. Photosensitivity. It must be a migraine, then.
I wanted to curl my wing over my eyelids, and when I put the thought to action, straining to lift even a single joint of a single wing-finger, I was only able to generate a spasm.
Progress! I could move a little. But oh, my head…
Sudden shouting rang my ears. Nausea flipped my stomach. I felt myself grimace, eyes clenching shut.
Yes, it was certainly a migraine.
With a gargantuan effort, I forced my eyes open. The world blurred into view. I was…caged.
The events leading up to now came crashing upon me. Hiccup and Toothless, gone. Missing. The King and I racing for them. Finding the island with the strange smells and the ship. Grimmel. Trying to gain the upper wing on him…
A human was the source of the shouting, standing before my cage and calling out. I blearily lifted my head, casting my eyes about for the King. I did not have thumbs; I would need his assistance getting this cage open, and—
There was a dragon curled up in the cage farthest from mine.
A small, Shadow-Blender shaped dragon.
A brown one.
"…Hiccup?" I breathed.
Was he…why had…when had…and Toothless, where—
Bang.
I jolted, swinging my head forward. My sandbox lied on the ground in front of me. Behind it was Grimmel, standing straight-backed with his hands folded behind his back.
At his shoulder was a Shadow-Blender.
"Toothless?!" I gasped, even as I knew they could not possibly be my beloved caretaker. His smell was entirely foreign, sharp on my nose, forcing an involuntary closing of my nostrils. His was one of the two odd scents I had discovered earlier. He was huge, easily twice Toothless' size. His scales were so deep-black that his form was difficult to make out even in the clear daylight. Around his neck was some sort of collar with a glass vial protruding out of the base of the skull. Purple fluid sloshed within it.
All it took was a glance at his eyes. I cringed away from the hollowness in them, like the vacant stare of the dead. The dragon did not meet my gaze, nor look around; he simply stared forward, looming behind Grimmel, muscles tense, ears flattened, dangerous as an oncoming storm.
I did not realize I had scrambled backwards until my rump hit the back of the cage.
"Oh, come, don't be shy!" Grimmel said, his bright, welcoming tone so wrong on such a cruel face. "It's not every day I have the opportunity to have a conversation with a dragon."
My legs trembled. I was no stranger to dangerous situations, but I could always rely on my family to keep me safe. Hiccup, Toothless, the King, Stormfly and Astrid, Hookfang, our nestmates. Now, for the first time, I was alone.
But maybe…
I took a deep breath and eased out of my defensive crouch.
Maybe, I could use this to my advantage.
Though my body still quivered, I lifted my head and approached the Shadow-Blender killer. I kept my footsteps slow, but not too slow. I did not scuff my paws on the tile, and took care not to let my claws clink on the metal. I sat just in front of the bars, wrapping my tail about my paws and folding my wings delicately at my back.
I glanced over at…at…Hiccup? He was too far to smell, unless the wind graced us and shifted course. He was lying on his side, back facing me, and had his head and tail tucked under a wing. It was a frightened, hiding posture. My throat welled up. Here he was, finally, finally the way the Dragon of the Sun and Dragoness of the Moon meant him to be…and he was caged like some prized prey.
I would save us. All of us.
Grimmel's lips quirked in a strange, almost kind grin when I finally met his eye. "You must know him, judging by that look in your eye," he said. "But where are my manners? Allow me to introduce myself. I am Grimmel."
I kept my chin lifted. "I am Haugaeldr," I said, enunciating clearly. I lifted my left paw, reached through the confines of the cage, and swung the sandbox open. Grimmel stood back, expression carefully blank, as I picked up the pen-holder and fastened it to my paw. Writing around the bars was difficult, but I was used to transcribing in a careful hand—well, paw—and managed to etch a single word into it.
Haugaeldr.
I pointed the human way at the inscription, and then placed my paw on my chest.
Grimmel's lightning-light eyes widened, revealing all the whites of his sclera. He composed himself gracefully, contorting his expression to something merely disapproving. "I see," he growled.
He stood frowning. I craned my neck to be at his eye level, refusing to break our gazes. Reaching out, I reset the sandbox and began to write, glancing down only long enough to make sure my letters were neat. When I was done, I sat back and nodded at him.
Why do you hunt Night Furies?
A strange shudder went through him, wracking him about like an odd, epileptic fit—starting in the hand, shaking upwards, and then spiraling down his spine to his legs. His expression twisted horridly, all stark shadows and sunlit planes. He swatted at the air, as if he could claw the image from his sight and mind.
"Eugh!" he gagged. His face grew stormy. He fixed a vehement look on me. "You have so greatly…disappointed me," he spat.
Now I was the one who was frowning. I tipped my head to the side.
"How many of you are there?" Grimmel demanded, his voice sharp as a hawk's shriek. "How many dragons of your nest read and write?"
I gazed into his black expression. Ever so faintly, a waft of fear-scent drifted over me.
Remembering how Toothless would always stare down his opponents, I met his vibrant, furious, lightning eyes and sat perfectly still. When he merely leered back at me, I glanced pointedly downwards at my question.
A crooked grin split his face, empty of humor. "Ah, I see. A question for a question." He approached the cage, so close that I could smell his last meal on his breath and appreciate every pock-mark on his skin. His grin turned feral, inhuman, ravenous. "But I fear you have misunderstood. I do not negotiate with dragons."
He hissed the words out almost like a dragon, teeth bared and face wrinkled, eyes shining with the thrill of the hunt. It took every fiber of strength within me not to shrink away from that vitriol.
He reached to his belt and held up two glass needles, each filled with liquid. One was brilliant magenta, shining like only the most vibrant of dragon scales. The other was sunset-orange, as if he had reached into the sky and scooped the color right out of it.
"We know what this one does," he mused, twirling the pink glass in his hands.
I was already backing away, facade of confidence abandoned.
"But this one?"
He swung an arm around his back and brandished his weapon from before. But, no—this one was different. It was made of different dragon-scale paint, this one a deep red. It was smaller, more worn-looking. He had more than one, but why use this older one?
With a click, he loaded the orange vial into it, and I halted my pointless musings.
"H-hold on," I stammered.
Grimmel went on as if I hadn't spoken. "Well, perhaps if you wake up, you will reconsider before you try to act as my equal."
He leveled it at me.
"But, wait—" I said, sitting back and holding my talons up in the human gesture, even spreading my talons so that they looked almost like hands. Sans the thumbs, of course.
Disgust crawled through his face, his voice, his posture. "You are a dragon," he whispered. "How dare you try to slink your way up to match humanity."
The distant, analytical part of my mind registered that there would be no talking with him. That any escape would be through a terrible fight. That I had made a mistake trying to speak to him, trying to be like Hiccup. That I should have breathed my flame upon him at the very first opportunity.
The machine cracked like thunder. Too fast to see. Sudden, stinging pain.
My blood roiled aflame. The world vanished beneath a curtain of sparkling black. A thud, a distant sensation of something hard and cool. Wrenching about. Something gripped me and shook, shook, shook, each movement pushing the poison further and further within. My heart raced, and I wanted to scream at it to stop, to plead for it to end its ceaseless tunneling into my flesh!
A choked scream tried to claw its way out of my throat, but my diaphragm closed on it, trapping it within, refusing to allow me to draw breath. My ears rang. My vision filled with a miasma of bright spots dancing across the sheer nothing before me. The poison crawled through my blood like a parasitic worm, gnawing through my tissue.
It found its prey at my heart, and something else stirred there. Something foreign, yet familiar. Slumbering and hidden, gone unnoticed all my life.
The poison-parasite latched onto it, gnashing greedily against that formless, tangible thing within me, that which I had never felt before, never known to notice—but now, now that the poison was eating it away, some deep instinct in me recoiled in horror and despair, trying desperately to protect it!
The agony came upon me as great cresting waves, frothing with spines, racing along that central hidden piece of me down an entire network within my body, like the radial rays of the sun, the roots of a tree, the twining of a river's offshoots, all of it originating from that central sphere cradling my heart. The sunray-vessels within me dimmed, choked like a flame without oxygen, and began to dissolve away at their edges, leaving behind a desolate husk in their wake.
No! I wanted to sob.
This agony was final. I was dying. Dying here, alone, collapsed before this foreign, world-consuming entity that revealed and destroyed this central part of me all at once. I would never know it. I would never again draw breath.
I would never be able to save my family. I had failed them.
And that was the worst of all.
Leave me! Leave me!
Whether or not the poison knew of or cared about my plea, I could only doubt.
Like the waves at low tide, my mind drew away, creeping back into the deep ocean within, and I had no other choice but to fling myself into the empty embrace of unconsciousness.
o.O.o
Stoick
It was not long after I woke, stripped of my weapons, that Grimmel ordered a table of all things to be placed in my meager cell. He carried down with him a pot full of soil with an enormous, glowing mushroom and hung it from a rope. It cast eerie light and living shadows through the brig. Smiling and humming a sailor's tune, he left again, ignoring me entirely.
After a few minutes, he brought a pot steaming with fragrant tea, pulled a chair up to my cell, and sat down next to a small foot-table of his own. He poured the amber liquid into a delicate cup, put it on a saucer, and then maneuvered both through the bars and onto my new table. He poured a cup for himself next, blew on it delicately, and took a sip.
Then, Thor help me, he began his gloating.
"As you can see, when I take prisoners, I am at the very least genial with them," he said. "And you should know you and your Haugaeldr are well taken care of."
I stiffened. How did he know…?
"Quite a clever trick you've taught them," he said softly, holding his cup up and leering at me over the brim. The steam obscured his face. "Writing and reading. Playing a game of deception that they are men."
I chose not to respond. Grimmel, I had quickly learned, hated not having someone to bounce his banter off of. He seemed to take joy in taking whatever someone said to him and twisting it around, finding a way to turn a man's logic against him. It was nothing but a game to him, a way for him to assert power and preen over how "strong" he was.
"What else have you shown them? Hm?" He quirked an eyebrow. "Do you consider them persons? Do they hold citizenship? Do they have a voice in your governing, or worse, vote? Do they own land? Do they trade currency?"
At that last question, I couldn't help but snort. The idea of a dragon walking around with a wallet and actually using it was just too much.
Grimmel, however, was deathly serious. He leaned closer, the ghastly green mushroom-light outlining every angle on his stretched-thin, skeletal face. "I am not jesting, Stoick. I want to know. I need to know."
"Why do you care?" I countered.
Grimmel's lower eyelid twitched. In a low voice, he said, "Because you, my friend, are playing a very dangerous game indeed."
"There's only one man here who seems to be playing," I said, meeting his stare evenly. "The rest of us, we see the world as a place to live and do good in, not as pieces on a board to knock over and dominate."
He took a ponderous sip of his tea. "Humans and dragons have always lived between a delicate balance. Mankind has its ingenuity, perseverance, and genius!" He raised his arms victoriously, spilling some of the tea. "But dragons? They have flight, strength, fire, magic."
He slammed the cup down with a loud CLANG, sloshing the tea all over. His words became tighter, faster now, near-frenzied.
"Now imagine this, if you will: a human teaches a dragon the key to his mind, the key to man's superiority over mere beasts. And thus, the dragon learns that he and the man are not all that different—no, not at all, and even worse, the dragon thinks that he can best the man, now not only with his strength and flames and magic, but also with his mind. How long until the dragon wants something and demands it? How long until the dragon teaches his fellows that very same trick? How long until the dragons get the idea to form society, to decide that they know best, not us? How long until they enforce their 'good will' and values, and how far will they go?"
"That is how a man would approach new power," I said, raising an eyebrow. "A dragon's mind works differently. You saying all this shows how little you know of them."
"Don't I?" Grimmel said. He laughed, high and manic—and then abruptly snapped forward, his face a storm. "Was it not mere spite and bruised pride that brought your Night Fury friend to mutate your boy?" I clenched my hands. He narrowed his eyes and pressed, drumming his finger into the table with each question, "Was it not tribe culture that brought the whole nest to your island? Was it not religion that led to the event five years ago that Drago's freed slaves never stop talking about? Was it not familial bonds and heritage that lured you here in the first place?"
I forced myself to relax and waved my hand. "You're riling yourself up over…philosophy. None of this has anything to do with reality."
"Then you and I live in two very different worlds," Grimmel said, the neon-green light swirling in his irises. "You think a dragon's mind is an opportunity, a gateway to some nonsense fantasy of peace and brotherhood," he spat with rancor. "I see it for its reality: a disaster waiting to strike." He slammed his hands on the sides of his table and lunged towards the bars, like a beast snapping on a lead. "I would have thought that a man whose son has been cursed to become a dragon would understand!"
I did not react to the jab.
We stared into each others' eyes.
His vitriolic expression smoothed, still as the water above a riptide, a deceptive quiet waiting to swallow a man up. He eased backwards into a prim posture. "I must admit," he went on, as if he hadn't just been shouting madness, "that I'm at least grateful for the opportunity to studysuch a unique specimen. A little pine-brown Fury…" He reached into his pocket, took out something, and twirled it in his fingers, studying it.
It was a dragon scale. A brown one.
My world shrieked to a grinding halt.
Above-deck, a dragon began to shout at the top of his lungs.
"KING!" Haugaeldr roared, his voice still booming despite the thick planking between us. "KING!"
Grimmel groaned. His lower eyelid twitched. He put the scale away, and my heart leapt out towards it. "Your eastern dragon has woken up again, it seems."
Again? I wanted to demand. But my throat had clamped shut and refused to open.
Hiccup was…
"Did I say something unexpected?" Grimmel's grin was unkind, malicious. "Oops! So sorry that you had to find out this way."
The last we had spoken had been a fight. A fight about broken promises.
"KING, I HERE!"
"It's a relief to see you still have some sense in you. Maybe you aren't so lost after all." Grimmel collected his teacup, looked inside it, and downed the rest of it. He grabbed the mushroom pot, swiveled on his heels, and strutted away with a nonchalant wave of his hand. "Well, I can't focus with all of this noise. I'll leave you to…consider your options." He began to climb up the ladder out of the brig.
I would never hear his voice again. Never see his smile again. His last words as a human to me would forever be about being hunted, trapped by humans. By Drago. By me.
That wasn't even the worst of it. This was what Hiccup wanted. What had tormented him, what still loomed in those nightmares he tried to hide, what had once driven us so vastly apart that I had given up on any hope of return. He wanted this. He wanted this. Thor damn me, I had wanted this!
Yet…selfish, foolish wretch of a father that I was, even as my heart lifted for him, it shattered into pieces for myself.
"After all," Grimmel said gleefully, his eyes shining victoriously, "how many more fathers will lose their sons to dragonkind, with thinking like yours?"
Knife sufficiently twisted, he opened the door above-deck and climbed out.
Before he let the door slam shut, Haugaeldr's voice rang out clear and unbroken:
"HICCUP HERE! HICCUP DRAGON!"
o.O.o
Saw Through Closed Eyes
Someone was screaming outside of the cavern.
A shifting of the ground beneath me finally roused me. I woke upon an incomprehensible stone, its surface so smooth, too smooth, and colder than ice. As my eyes fluttered open, I heard a great, low moaning: the deep voice of the soulless thing upon the water. Blurred forms around me shifted. As smooth as though I were flying, the thing moved below me, until a dark shadow cast overhead—then the light snapped away with a loud BANG!
Only darkness remained.
Horror jolted me awake.
It was swallowing me!
"No!" I tried to shriek, only to find that something clamped my jaw down. When I strained against it, the joints at my cheekbones only ached and ached, and I couldn't so much as relax my teeth from grinding. I scrabbled, my claws slipping on the not-ice-stone. My flailing tail smacked against something hard. Sheets of dried mud flaked from my body, pattering to the ground.
I pursed my lips and let out several hazy sight-sounds. The world that returned was resolute.
Teeth.
They clamped upon me, an enormous maw of wrong stone, just as Escaped the Monsters had once been trapped in. He had been freed before he could be eaten.
No! No! No!
I had promised that I would survive. Even cursed, hateful, traitorous as I was, I did not want to die as prey!
Heart thundering, body writhing with shocks of lightning-adrenaline, I spun in circles, whining, and slammed my paws on the teeth. Dried earth rained from my hide. There was no separation between the top and bottom jaw that I could work open and squeeze through. It was all smooth, horrid, unthinking, unbreathing.
Was this how the thing got its voice? By sucking dragons into its belly, where they cried out forever in terror?
Nobody would save me. Killed the Sea Serpent would not swoop to my rescue. I was alone, alone like I had been born into the world, trapped and weak and scared in the dark. Nobody, nobody cared, or would even know I was here.
"KING, I HERE!"
I stopped my panicked pacing. That was a dragon. There was an Outsider here. Were they like the black dragon shaped like me? Would they help?
"HICCUP HERE!" the Outsider's muffled voice shouted in an odd, spaced enunciation, a thick layer over his voice. "HICCUP DRAGON!"
My hopes died like they'd been dashed on sea-rocks. Had he gone mad?
Now there were more voices adding to the clamor: monsters. They jibbered, one raising in pitch to match the crazed Outsider's.
"NO! I WILL NOT BE QUIET!" he howled. "IF I MUST AGITATE YOU TO DISRUPT YOUR WORK, THEN I WILL ASSURE YOU, I CAN GO ON FOR HOURS!"
Who was he talking to?
I shrunk against the jaw, wrapping my tail and wings close to myself. The looming teeth in my sight-sounds sent ice trickling down my spine. Lifting my head, I took in a huge breath of air.
Sting-smell. Monster-smell. Fear-scent.
The last scent was striking as lightning, thick as ash, dangerous as wildfires, heavy as grief.
The black dragon.
I snapped my neck around and aimed my sight-sounds between the jaw clamped around me. There, lurking in the dark, he rested. His posture was stiff, but recumbent. He, too, curled tight to make himself small. His head was lifted, ears pricked, and his breathing was soft and deep as though he slumbered.
He was not trapped between teeth like I was. He could get to his feet and flame the belly we despaired in if he wanted to.
"IF YOU WILL NOT ALLOW ME TO WRITE, THEN I WILL GO ON!" the Outsider roared. "KING! KING, HICCUP IS HERE! HICCUP IS A DRAGON! I DO NOT SEE OR SMELL TOOTHLESS! I AM ALONE! I—agh!"
With a thump, the manic nonsense jolted to a halt. My ears rang in the silence, though I didn't know if I should be grateful. As insane as the Outsider sounded, he was at least defiant; he did not seem like the nothing-eyed dragon in front of me, silent and uncaring.
The mouth opened. Harsh sunlight surged forward, glimmering on the dry teeth clamped down on me. A shadow emerged within the painful brightness, then stepped inside: a monster, thin and stretched as a strained sapling in the winter. The liar-monster.
I huddled as far away as I could, even daring to let my wingtips brush against the teeth. He did not seem to notice me, groaning and running his stretched paws over his head. He kicked something, and a wrong, sharp object swung about, scooping the light out as it did, until there was nothing left and we were in the dark again.
There was a rustling like wings. A covering of some sort evaporated, and in its wake, the source of the sting-smell was revealed.
I would have wept even at this once-hated thing, if only because it was something from home. But the Outside had even managed to warp this.
The mushrooms, glowing with the light of the first ones, were…wrong. No sporer would ever have allowed them to grow in such a way. They were huddled all together in distinct groups, each perfectly spaced apart. They were not allowed to intermingle, which I knew allowed them to make connections with one another. Separated like this, they would forever be stunted and small, their light always dimmer than the lush undergrowth of the Shell. The Outside's obsession with perfection, harsh edges, and brutality had ruined these, too.
A pressing silence fell between the three of us. The liar-monster, his back to me, spider-like paws grasping things and touching the mushrooms to them and swirling liquids. The nothing-eyed dragon, alert yet asleep, breathing softly with his head raised towards me. Myself, quivering as small as I could in the jaw, surrounded by a rain of shodden earth. Even as I lied there, the dirt itched maddeningly. I was too frightened to scratch.
My efforts to go unnoticed were useless. The liar-monster suddenly got up, grasping a perfectly-clear crystal that held glowing, orange water in it. He stepped up to the jaws, held a paw over the fluid, and waved towards me.
Powerful sting-smell burned through my nose. A dull ache shot into my heart. I flinched involuntarily, pawing at my nostrils.
By the time I had looked back up, the liar-monster had receded. Now he had several more pure-clear crystals, each one only a fraction the size of the one holding the teal water. He held something in his paw, dipped it into the teal…and then the water was sucked up. It was a tongue.
Just like they could bite from far away, Outsiders could eat from far away, too.
As I watched in horrified fascination, the liar-monster licked up small portions of the teal water and spat it out again into the smaller crystals. He grasped at other objects—thin teeth, they looked like—and pressed them to the crystals. When he was done, there were ten crystals with teeth on them.
I crept further away. Alien as the Outside was, I had already felt a monster's bite before. I knew, staring at the long, thin teeth on the tip of each glowing-teal crystal, that it was meant to hurt. That was all the Outsiders ever wanted.
I flicked my eyes towards the black dragon. He had not so much as twitched during all of the monster's moving around.
The liar-monster rose and spoke. I froze, wide eyes settling on his.
He crouched before the teeth, the ten crystals at his side and a wood-smelling object in his hand. He rested it on his legs, lifted a paw, and made a motion with it that made a loud SNAP!
The nothing-eyed dragon lurched. All at once, his pupils dilated, his ears shot up, and his gaze regained focus. In that aware stare, he looked almost like a real dragon.
The liar-monster pursed his lips and let out a sharp, single, rising whistle. He murmured something.
"Come here."
I nearly leapt out of the rest of the mud coating my scales. The black dragon had spoken.
Swiveling towards him, I tried to meet his eye, to communicate with a look my desperation and fear. But the black dragon was staring at the monster. The monster clucked his tongue and repeated the whistle.
"Come here."
I wanted to speak, but the clamp around my head forbade it. I merely groaned in protest, backing further away.
Swift as the lightning in his eyes, the liar-monster snatched a crystal, put it in the wooden object, hefted it up towards me—
TWANG!
Pain in my side. I yelped and twisted towards the tooth sticking out of my side. I kicked at it with my hind paw, knocking it away. Though sharp like the worst of insect stings, that hadn't been so bad, at least—
My heart erupted. The bristling, melting heat of it spiked from my heart outwards, like the sun flaring at midday, searing through muscle and bone and scale alike. I shrieked, my legs collapsing under me, clutching at my chest to try to stifle the inferno that surely burned there. Blinding-dark spots soared through my vision even when I clenched my eyes shut, and my ears rang as if I were about to faint.
I had felt this before—I knew this agony. In the flames of it, a connection suddenly snapped into place, like ice suddenly freezing over a too-still lake. The glowing water, the sting-smell on it, the mushrooms growing wrong here…
The liar-monster had a venomous bite, like the eels that tried to hunt young swimlings, and he used the mushrooms to make his poison.
As if the knowledge freed me, the pain began to subside. Though it had only lasted a few seconds, my muscles protested any movement. I heaved for breath. My sight whirled with a nauseating headache.
The monster chirped. I forced my eyes open and dragged my head up.
He made a very clear point of grasping a crystal tooth, waggling it back and forth at me, and putting it on the wooden object. Once more, he gave a single, rising whistle.
Just like last time, the nothing-eyed dragon said, "Come here."
If I could have gaped, I would have.
Now I understood.
I stared at the black dragon. Then the liar-monster.
Despair clutched my heart.
I lied my head down, staring into the fraying, focused lightning-eyes of the monster, in a response of my own: No.
I would not.
The nameless male would understand. The same selfish part of me that once vied to be his friend now found relief in the excuse to break my promise to him.
I was cursed, I had used magic, I had called on it. The first ones surely had turned their backs on me by now, even helping the liar-monster with their mushrooms. Yet, despite all that I had done, it seemed that a dragon could stoop even lower. They could lose all that they were, becoming dead-yet-alive like the thing on the waves.
The venom-tooth rushed into my chest. I grit my teeth, bore through the pain.
I was going to die. But that was okay.
Through the nothing-eyed dragon, the liar-monster again demanded that I come to him, as I would to my own leader.
I refused. He bit me.
Again the command. Again the refusal. Again the bite.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And again…
…and again…