Talon POV
“Ah, ye mean those rumors,” the skeleton-gaunt old man croaked darkly as he guided the barge through the reedy riverwater. “Ye’ve heard about the monster up north, sure, but I’m bettin’ ye’ve never heard the legend of the Sun Fiend and the Nine Great Dragons, have ye? Better listen, lad, it just might save yer soul.”
“I have, actually,” I told him. “Several times. Dozens, even, as a child. It’s the Sun Falcon’s most famous legend”
“Aye,” said the boatman, “but ye’ve never heard it how I tells it. Best teller of tales this side of the mountains, I am!” He spread his arms in a grandiose gesture, and launched into the tale.
It was, in fact, the exact same version of the story that I had heard many times from near everyone in the village growing up. The very foundation of the Angran way of life. I found the implication that I somehow didn’t know this story to be mildly offensive, actually.
Well, I supposed that this man didn’t know I was Angran—so long as I dressed in the style of a Heishanese peasant, I found I could blend in extremely easily. Heishanese and Angrans had very similar features—long dark hair, dark almond eyes—the main difference being that Angrans tended to have much shorter, wiry frames. Most likely due to living in the wastes, but that didn’t matter here in the backwater countryside of the Heishan Mountain Range, around the foothills.
No one expected to see an Angran when they looked at me, they expected another Heishanese wanderer, and so that was what they saw. Still, I took no risks, changing my clothes to better blend in, and using strips of cloth to cover the Angran glyphs that marked my body.
At least this boatman’s droning voice blended well with the peaceful lapping of the water.
“When the Sun Fiend first sees the land Crown Naruune and Hallow Zaya made, she was right jealous of how pretty-like it all was, how gorgeous it seemed. She wants to reach out and touch it, to makes it hers, but when she did, her immense heat burns the pretty flowers and beasts to cinders, all the jewels and the glaciers melts, and shiny desert sands turnin’ to shiny glass. So she says, if she can’t have it, no one can either.
“So the Fiend starts an awful rampage. Just took the form of a huge, wingless dragon, bigger’n the mountains that blots out the sky, with burnin’ eyes, shootin’ flaming arrows offa her back. Her tail’s topplin’ the clouds and her claws makin’ the earth bleed. The humans screams out to the sleeping Crown Naruune for help. The Crown rose up in a snakes’ sacred form to save ‘em, but she weren’t alone—the mighty Sun Falcon, Crown Arcturus, is comin’ down in the form of a sacred white griffin! But with the head and claws of a wolf, that’s important—that’s a sign of loyalty an’ devotion, them wolves.”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “I had heard that the Sun Falcon was helped by a human. Amurensis.”
Amurensis was one of the oldest heroes of the Angran people, the first to swear eternal vengeance upon the Sun Fiend.
The skeleton of a man scoffed. “Are ye daft, boy? The Sun Falcon don’t need no help! ‘E’s a god, ‘e’s beyond human! They says ‘e was so beautiful, great artists stabbed their eyes out ‘cause they’d never capture ‘is likeness! Why, in my youth, I met a beautiful noble woman who said I looked a little like—”
“Fine, fine,” I grumbled. “So the Sun Falcon isn’t a human. Then what happened,” I asked, despite knowing damn well what happened.
The boatman huffed, but continued his tale.
“Well, then the Crowns went to war against the Fiend, that’s what happened! Crown Naruune stays to shield what humans and creatures she can, so the Sun Falcon starta chasin’ the Sun Fiend. Like a huntin’ dog. But that Fiend, every night she comes across a cave at the ends of the world, and goes hidin’ in it. She knows she can’t beat the Falcon, y’see, so instead she’d give birth, a right bloody affair. That’s why the sunset and sunrise are always red, ‘cause she’s given’ birth to some new monstrosity every night, and every day the Falcon attackin’ her and chasin’ her outta that cave.
“O’ course, the first nine children she birthed were the Nine Draconic Sons—the eldest Orioselaine, whose roar causes the stars to go shaking all across the sky, then there was—”
“When the Nine Draconic Sons attempted to take flight from the earth, the combined might of their heat aura caused the plants to wither and the ice to melt. So the Sun Falcon punctured their wings with arrows, binding them forevermore to the earth, and leaving himself and the Sun Fiend as the only great lights in the sky,” I interrupted again. “Except for the moon. The legend never does explain what the moon’s supposed to—”
Now the old man rapped me on the head. I scowled as he berated me. “Who’s tellin’ the story, brat—you or me?”
I muttered something derisive under my breath. In the version I had grown up with, it wasn’t the Sun Falcon who clipped the wings of the Great Dragons—while he was busy chasing the Mother of Monsters, the people who would one day become the Angra Tribes dealt with the dragons, and chased them down south along the Ter. Supposedly they had once lived in the foothills of the Heishan Mountains. This was, in a way, a long-awaited homecoming for me.
“Anyways,” spat the old man, “the Great Dragons were hardly the only children the Sun Fiend gaves birth to—jus’ the oldest, strongest, and biggest. All monsters are her children, really—that’s why they calls her Mother of Monsters. ‘Course, some monsters ain’t all that bad; the Yín Kingdom’s Royal Family has loved their azure phoenixes ever since…” As the old man spoke, his dark eyes fixed on a single spot in the sky. Idly, I followed his gaze. Then felt my blood spike with icy alarm.
“Shit.”
Abruptly I leapt from the barge, stumbling into the waist-high muddy water, and swept out my rough traveling cloak. Red illuminated the world, and a shooting star fell from the sky, directly into the pocket I’d made with my cloak and thankfully avoiding the river water. A distinct smell of something burning lingered in the air, as the old man stared open-mouthed at me. After a bit of wriggling about, a familiar feathered face popped out of the recesses of my cloak. The phoenix named Crim let out a cheerful honk upon seeing me.
“That’s a…that’s a phoenix. That’s a real phoenix, ain’t it?” whispered the man, reverently.
“It’s an idiot,” I said over Crim’s excited crooning, and began to wade through the river to shore. It was a very lucky thing I had caught Crim in time, before he hit the river’s surface. While not directly fatal to a phoenix, water was amongst the things that could prevent a phoenix from reviving. “What were you thinking, going that fast? You were way off-course,” I scolded the bird as it gazed up at me with big, dumb eyes. “Even if you didn’t end up in the river, you could’ve really hurt me. And I’ll need to buy a new cloak.”
“Er—young man!” the old man croaked after me. “Young man, are you—are you Prince Fèng Yǒngruì? Sir Prince Fèng, my toll—! Young man!”
Despite Elian’s attempts to explain it, money was still an unfamiliar concept to me. A good meal and a warm bed were certainly convenient, but the wild had plenty of high-flying falcons I could shoot down to make a stew for myself, without needing to keep track of little metal bits. Still, when villagers thanked me for helping with their problems I seemed to accumulate them, and so I tried to estimate a fair repayment, and threw a handful of coins back at the boatman. Now that Crim was here, perhaps it would be better to hide him. If there was anything I’d learned from Hallow Zaya, it was that according to her, fame was tiresome. Being mistaken for royalty sounded like it was asking for trouble.
Crim had brought with him another letter from Nania. I would read it when we stopped for the night. It was a very lucky thing that Nania and I wrote to each other on clay tablets rather than paper, I considered. Paper was too expensive to waste frivolously, but it also just turned out to be more practical when our messenger regularly caught fire.
The last few months had done much to clear my head, as I gradually cultivated both my strength and knowledge. Occasionally, I attempted to incorporate channeling into my fighting, in new and unique ways, such as by using it to read an opponent’s actions more clearly. At times, I even tried channeling to communicate with Crim. But after my attempts, I doubted anything ever happened inside that bird’s head.
Instead he made himself useful ferrying messages between myself and Gresha City, as Nania reported how things fared there. While I enjoyed my travels, often her words brightened my day, and I found myself missing her deeply. Especially when our relationship was still in its infancy.
But I couldn’t go back. Not when I had no idea how to protect that relationship. Elian claimed he had a plan, of course. But I felt his emotions. He was a liar, as always, and had no idea what he was doing. I needed to find a surefire way to slay the Fiend and then return, before he became a danger to all those around him as well.
The nearby village was only an hour or so away on foot, but that was more than enough time to let my mind wander, as I carefully waded through fields of marshy terrain and tall grass. It had taken several months to travel this far north, even sticking to the Ter. As I traveled, hunting local monsters while seeking rumors of stronger targets had slowed me. Such rumors now drew me north, with promises of an almost literal vein of gold. In the shadow of the Heishan Mountains was the Jiǔ Hé Province, which largely made its living off rice and transporting shipments along its many tributaries, for which the province had been named. One of the villages in the north of the Province sat on a copper mine. But recently all production within had halted.
Some claimed this was because a dragon was waking in the mine’s depths.
No one was quite certain which of the Nine. People loved telling tales about Orioselaine and Mataralaine but I was fairly certain none had seen the dragon yet. Perhaps it wasn’t an actual dragon, and was instead just some other sort of subterranean beast, but it was my best lead into the Fiend so far. And even if it was nothing, there were those age-old rumors of some underground cult devoted to the Sun Fiend lost in the twisting passages below the mountain range.
For years the Sun Fiend had felt like a driving force behind my life, and that was just as true now as it was when I was a child. When I had started to consider a life with Nania I had wondered if that might change, but Elian’s duel had been a wake-up call. One I had sorely needed. There was no running from my feud with her, and no peaceful life hidden from her gaze. Not until I did something that caused her to leave us all alone. Forever. Like I had told Zaya, there would be no healing the hurts she had caused so long as she existed to reopen them.
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Of course, there was no thinking of the Sun Fiend without thinking about Elian. After months of avoiding them, something new had grown beneath the sharp sting of my anger—a sharper sense of loss. But it made no sense. He had betrayed me. Lied to me. The one I was actually missing must have been Nania. I did not need Elian’s foolish and reckless plans to destroy her—if I could destroy a dragon, then I would prove that I had grown in strength. I could prove I would destroy them both on my own. Without risking his lies and trickery.
As I silently listed the names of the Nine Draconic Sons, I was ripped from my musings by the sound of rustling grass. My head snapped up and saw a shadow watching me. Without yelling out any sort of warning, I began to chase after the intruder. As swift as a bird taking flight, it disappeared, and I quickly tripped in the boggy landscape, falling face-down in the mud. Crim made a noise that sounded uncomfortably like cackling.
The intelligence of that bird was frightening, sometimes.
By the time I made it to the little mining village, it was nearly sundown, when the sky was supposedly stained with the Fiend’s blood. Before entering, I donned my cloak again, doing my best at hiding Crim within its folds. I shushed the excitable bird as I tucked him away. It was a little late in the day for me to attempt to find, let alone slay, the beast, my body covered in aching bruises from my tumble. But I may as well try to examine the mine and gather some information before I went down. The crevice’s entrance wasn’t too difficult to find—it was the site of a rather lively argument between two men, and the entire village seemed to have gathered to watch.
I did not barge into the argument immediately. Instead, I took a few moments to watch the two participants, guessing who they were, what the argument was about, and what their stances were. It wasn’t so demanding a task—while my grasp of Heishanese dialects was not good, the dialect in this province was close enough to the Angran tongue that I understood what was being said. The burning emotions present only made this easier, as did the reactions of the gathered villagers.
Popular with the locals was a middle-aged man I took to be the spokesperson of the miners, who I did not catch the name of. He was broad-shouldered with kind eyes, and a young boy clutching at his leg—the boy seemed to have seen ten or eleven sun-seasons, by my estimate. Probably his son, from their strikingly similar appearances.
Opposing him was likely the foreman of the mine, or perhaps some official from the King’s court. He wore clothing that was much more expensive than anyone else here. While the villagers and Spokesman wore practical garments in green, grey, and brown, the Foreman wore a more comfortable cerulean robe with complex embroidery; his hair was sleeker and shinier, and he carried some paper documents and seals with him. I failed to catch either man’s name, dubbing them in my mind the Foreman and the Spokesman.
“So what if it’s making noise now,” argued the Foreman in a huff. “No one in this village has seen a dragon sneaking into the mines, have they?”
He stopped after his sarcastic remark, to emphasize his point by scanning the faces of those gathered. “If none here have seen it enter, and no tracks lead into the mine, and there has been no rain to wash it away as of late, then it is likely that the dragon has been within the mines for some time, yes? And no one has reported miners being eaten by dragons before, no? Therefore, this dragon—if it even is one—can’t possibly be a threat! Crown Naruune protects you below the earth, and so there is no reason to fear this so-called dragon!”
“Everyone knows that dragons are very strange and mystical creatures, Mr. Foreman. It’s said they’re capable of changing their size at will,” the Spokesman of the villagers said. The assembled villagers nodded their heads, apparently considering his words very wise. “Perhaps it is Crown Naruune’s prisoner, but Crown Naruune slumbers, and only stirs when she hears her people call her through channeling.”
“So if there does happen to be a dragon and it does create a threat, simply call her! The simple fact of the matter is, people need copper, and this village needs the coin that copper brings, yes?”
“Certainly, but no coin is worth a man’s life.”
“Ah, ah, ah, but there your reason falters!” said the Foreman, waggling a finger. “Coin buys clothing, housing, food. And these are the things which a man requires to live. Mines are dangerous, but it has not stopped you in the past!”
“A farmer does not go out to farm during a deadly storm, sir. Mining operations will stop, until we feel confident the dragon is gone,” the Spokesman argued, unmoving. A few villagers voiced their assent.
The Foreman fumed at the rejection. “Now, look here, there is no way to prove that the dragon is absent, because there is no proof that the dragon is here! Unless the noble Sun Falcon himself descends to elucidate me—”
The earth growled and trembled. I stumbled, as did a number of others. A pebble or two fell from the entrance to the mine. The Foreman fell on his ass, and the Spokesman’s son giggled at that—though his father quickly covered the boy’s mouth.
There was a silence as the Foreman looked towards the yawning mouth of the mines, suddenly quite pale. Before the argument could continue, I decided to step forward.
“I will accept that as proof that there is a monster in these mines,” I said, “and you may both be at ease. My name is Talon. I am a hunter of monsters.”
“A hunter!” said the Foreman in a relieved sort of squeak. “Well, I leave the matter in your capable hands then. Once the beast has been dealt with—or you’ve confirmed that there never was such a beast, and Crown Naruune’s thrashings came from some other cause—you will report back to me for a proper reward!” The man leapt to his feet, shook my hand, and made himself scarce. The Spokesman was less obvious in his cowardice.
“The mines are a dangerous place at the best of times; moreso when there’s a dragon afoot,” he said. “Please. I insist that you stay at my home tonight, and let my wife cook you a fine meal. Tomorrow, I will pack you supplies, and guide you down where we suspect the beast to be hiding.”
I accepted the Spokesman’s offer, as the crowd began to disperse. We walked to his home, and I struggled to focus on how delicious the simple peasant’s meal was, ignoring the way the couple’s son stared at me wide-eyed throughout the whole affair. It was uncomfortable, and reminded me a little too much of Kite.
“Are you really a monster hunter?” the boy tried asking, all throughout the meal. “What’s the biggest monster you’ve ever slain? Do you have a trophy? Can you talk to monsters? How big is a dragon, will I get to see it once you’ve killed it—”
I deflected his questions, as I stealthily fed a hidden Crim portions of my meal, and his parents chided him for the rudeness he was showing. “Besides,” his father remarked, “it’s unlikely Sir Talon here will really kill such a monster. Only a God like the Sun Falcon can properly slay a dragon. More likely, Sir Talon will drive the dragon away so it bothers us no more.”
“Really? Tell me about the Sun Falcon, Daddy?” the boy asked. I excused myself, and retired to the room they’d lent me before I could hear the legend of the Sun Falcon and the Nine Dragon Sons for the second time that day.
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The next morning, preparations for my task began early.
The Spokesman seemed to pause every few moments as we walked to remind me how grateful the town was for my courage and strength, even those who did not work in the mines personally. Each time I brushed his concerns aside. Zaya was correct, fame was tiresome.
When the suns were just barely risen, we were ready with rations, lanterns, and my weapons. Overkill, perhaps, but it was a dragon we were going to face. Crim had been surprisingly well-behaved throughout the whole ordeal, hardly making a peep. Or perhaps he was just sleepy.
As we ventured down into the twisting passages of the mine, leaving behind the well-lit and reinforced passages for the more unsteady and dangerous branching offshoots, the Spokesman chatted away, giving me all manner of detail I didn’t ask for. From when the tremors began, which dragon it was speculated that it was, and even a list of incidents I doubted had anything to do with the dragon, such as recent illnesses and miscarriages in the village. Yes, I knew the Mother of Monsters was also known as the Bringer of Plague, and some monsters were fabled to jealously carry off weak infants in the dead of night, but now that I had seen her myself, I thought her more likely to burn down the baby’s entire house. If nothing else, she would have stopped in the village square to rant about it.
About half an hour into our walk, though, I stopped walking. “We’re being followed.”
“A monster?” asked the Spokesman.
I shook my head. Monsters did not make sounds like sandals scuffing on cavern floor. Apparently the Spokesman heard it too, because his face cycled through a number of emotions, before finally settling on exasperation. The scuffling of tiny sandaled feet stopped—but much too late, because the Spokesman was already on the warpath.
“I know you’re there,” he called into the tunnels. “Come out now! This is not the time or place to play games!”
Silence stretched on, uncannily quiet now, as no answer came. Finally the Spokesman glowered—the first truly angered expression I’d seen from him—and stomped towards our little interloper, before dragging him from the shadows by the ear. As I expected, it was his son.
“Daddy, whyyyy—!” whined the boy. I could only feel a flare of irritation that the boy would do something so foolish. Were all children like this—?
A flash flood of guilt quickly drowned those feelings. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut, and the father berated his son, his voice slowly rising in volume.
“Why? Because even without a monster, the mines are dangerous! I’d told the hunter this, I’ve told the Foreman this, I’ve told you this! You, more than anyone else!” he scolded. “Do you know how scared your mother must be, not knowing where you are?”
“I-I—Daddy, I’m sorry—”
“Damn right, you’re sorry! As well as grounded!” His shouts echoed through the tunnels. “Our apologies, Mr. Slayer. But he is coming with me right now, back to—”
Dmm. Dmm. Dmm.
The Spokesman stopped talking as we looked around. Dust rained from the ceiling in a gentle patter. Slowly, my gaze drifted upwards, following its path. Cracks grew in the stoney ceiling above—the ceiling that was not reinforced. I ripped my war bow off my back.
“Out. Now,” I snapped. “Now!”
Then all Hell seemed to break loose, as the stone ceiling collapsed. I was too far away from the father and son to do anything for them., and the cascade of dust left me blind. So I ignored them, and saved myself. I dove away from the rockslide.
All was blindness and chaos and noise. When the dust settled and I could see again, first I picked up my lantern, shining it around.
Crim was crying, quietly, in my cloak, so I gently patted him while whispering reassurances. I squinted through the dust-choked air. The way the father and I had come was completely blocked off now. It was fortunate I was not the type to run, as I’d had no intention of leaving until the monster was dead and I had proven myself. But what would happen afterwards? Would my survival have any meaning? Not to mention, how it was the most evil of luck for the father and son.
Carefully, deliberately, I panned the light across the tunnel for any sign of life. A series of coughs drew my attention. Ready for more tremors, I approached where the pair had stood just moments prior.
Sitting below the wall of stone, coughing, his face ashen grey and tear-streaked, was the boy. I didn’t have it in me to admonish him further for his foolishness in following me down here.
His father was nowhere to be seen.