Carefully, going slowly so as not to trip in the dark, I stumbled back to the makeshift camp. Crim remained perched on my shoulder, cooing and purring in a matter that made him sound quite pleased with myself, and I reached up to stroke his plumage again. Fingertips met soft feathers, and I sighed, allowing my hand to linger there as I breathed. Lazy bastard probably enjoyed that.
It had taken me some time to stop crying. Now a strange jittery, electrical feeling haunted my entire body. My thoughts were a mess. But walking through the dark tunnels, one foot at a time, was something to focus on as they slowly but themselves back into some sort of order.
It wasn’t just Nania I missed. It was Elian, too. For some time after losing Asha, I had dismissed the concept of close friends and relationships altogether. Elian had challenged that—challenged me. Our rivalry was just meant to be an opportunity for me to test my skills and grow. It had quickly become something more, and then he brought Nania into the mix. When it turned out he had lied for all those years, it was easier to believe he had lied about everything. That all of it had been fake.
But no. The truth was, while I could still be quite angry, it made sense that he would lie. Telling the truth would have gotten him killed—or worse. Possibly by me. But that did not mean his lies and flailing weren’t dangerous. How much was truth, and how much was a desperate wish? How much could I really rely on those skills I’d come to test myself against, time and time again?
How much did I need his power, and how much did I need his companionship?
If nothing else, now I felt a strong need to return. A need to remember who ‘Talon’ was just now and what he wanted. But in order to do that, first I had a dragon to slay.
For just an instant, the enormity of what I had felt weighed upon me. Millennia of knowledge pressing down on my nineteen sun-seasons. An ant bearing up an elepha—a what? Dozens of concepts flickering around the recesses of my mind before vanishing as I tried to grasp them.
I found I had brought my hand up to my mouth and was biting down on my fingers. Crim was making concerned noises again. Slowly I collapsed to the ground, removing my hand and petting Crim again. He crawled onto my lap.
The fear, the immensity of my task, seemed to solidify the resolve within me. I would not die in this damnable cave, nor would I become another Alunelaine. There must be another way. Something that comes next, after the fire and the fighting and the dragons and the rage.
I scratched Crim under the chin as I stepped back into camp. The boy was still awake as I returned, his dark eyes shining very slightly in the lantern-light. “Were you looking for the dragon?” he asked, almost reverently in the dead-silent cavern night.
I took a seat within the camp. “What if I was?”
“Did you find it?”
“Maybe.”
“How big is it?”
Clearly, the kid wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. Why’d it have to be me who got stuck with this kid? Elian was much better with children than I was…I wasn’t sure how good Nania was with kids, though. But she’d like some, someday, right? Maybe I would too, if I was thinking about ‘what comes next’? A flash of Kite’s face suddenly burned itself into my mind. Maybe first I should figure out how to be good with kids.
...It’s okay to lie to children for entertainment purposes, right?
I snorted at the kid’s question. “I’ve slain bigger.”
“Bigger monsters?” the kid asked, his eyes shining. “Like what?”
I thought for a moment. “Do you know what a crownbear is?” The boy shook his head. “It’s more of a mountain than an animal. Its thick fur is nearly impenetrable, and there’s a gnarled nest of horns atop its head, like a soldier’s helm. It’s so big that every time it’s not hunting, it’s hibernating, no matter the season, and it moves so little while hibernating that moss grows in its fur. If you’re simply passing by, you might think it was a boulder.”
“Where do those live?” the kid asked, a note of worry entering his voice.
I shrugged off the questions, and began to recount a dramaticized version of my encounter with a crownbear. I had actually stumbled across one once, once, when I was fourteen. So the story, and how I had beaten it, were more or less accurate—I just changed a few details, like not mentioning the encounter had left me with a broken leg, or that I’d only drive the bear off in search of easier prey instead of killing it. But this kid didn’t just want an interesting story of his past—he wanted to hear that the great monster hunter could kill the dragon.
Later on there were questions, of course. Like, “How big was the bear when it stood up?” and “What weapons did you make from its body?” and “How’d you meet your phoenix, anyways?”
“I met him around the time I met the Goddess of Flowers,” I said entirely truthfully.
The boy scowled. “Now that’s a lie!”
“Then let me tell you about the time I ripped open the Sun Fiend and scared her away. She seems scary, but she’s actually a dirty coward, you know. You could probably scare her off.”
----------------------------------------
“Here it is. What do you think?”
In preparation for my fight against Alunelaine, I needed to prepare as much as possible. The camp had been completely cleaned up, and now I hoped to get the boy out of the way, too.
Though I had dismissed the squeeze that led to open air earlier as an awful choice, I couldn’t possibly watch the boy if I was fighting the dragon, or if it went very poorly. I left to him the choice to chance the squeeze, his own wild, hopeful alternative to a humiliating demise. Not that I spelled out that the other option was starvation, or being killed in the crossfire during the dragon’s attack—despite his dumb choice in coming down here, the boy should be smart enough to put those pieces together.
With a thoughtful frown he wordlessly examined the squeeze before nodding. Then he looked up at me with a determined expression. “I’ll get through it. Then I’ll go find the village and come back with lots of help. I know the area around the village really well, you’ll see! I even saw you before you arrived!”
I didn’t actually expect the kid to bring back help anytime soon. I wasn’t counting on it, either. But I didn’t tell him that, just nodded and said, “Good.” Then I waited, expecting the kid to start trying to get through the squeeze right away. Instead he hesitated first and asked, “Do you think Daddy will be waiting out there?”
That gave me pause. I scrambled for something to say. I nearly told him that his mother probably was, but…there was the chance she died with her husband, after a fashion.
The boy seemed to realize I wasn’t going to give him an answer. Thankfully he didn’t start crying. “I’ll bring back help,” he repeated, quietly. I took my leave soon after.
Again, Crim insisted on accompanying me to fight with the dragon. I spent the last few moments arranging my weapons and the lantern, trying to balance utility with mobility. Securing the lantern against my hip meant the light was unsteady and shifting, but it also kept my hands free and that was more necessary. While stringing my war bow I struggled to keep myself calm, mentally tracing through breathing exercises and different Flame Arts stances. No matter how this battle ended it would be beneficial for me—no, that was wrong. I didn’t just want to win and prove my strength, this time. I wanted to survive. I wanted to return to someone. To do things outside this place.
So I’d find some way to win, and claim the bounty promised to me. Even if I wasn’t completely sure how to do that yet. But I resolved to at least try. My preparations had a number of purposes: to physically and mentally prepare, to consider strategies(most of which seemed pointless, even if I was still fully insistent on doing something about my situation), and giving the kid enough time to try and exit the caverns and get away. I was under no illusions about how large Alunelaine was and how fighting him would likely cause greater tremors, but after a certain point I could wait no longer. Things couldn’t remain like this.
Finding Alunelaine was easier this time as I retraced my steps. The boiling stream, the tunnels, and then the dragon itself. Its great eyes, each larger than my head, were still shut but I was under no delusion that it was sleeping. Alunelaine was offering me the first blow, but if the dragon was anything like me then it would not idly sit and wait as I killed it. Even in a hellish existence where it could see no victory, it would fight to the last. Putrid sulfur tickled my nostrils, and I struggled to shrug off half-remembered nightmares and fantasy. A rush of fears suddenly surged through my mind—does Alunelaine have an inner fire I can quench? Does it have any weaknesses at all? Even if I can defeat it, how will I leave?—and I shrugged off those too. Escape seemed utterly impossible, but maybe it would come within sight if I started taking these first few steps.
Knowing so little about the dragon’s capabilities, I’d probably need to take a few probing, testing shots before figuring out what to do. First I checked that my hands weren’t shaking. Then, carefully, I nocked and drew my bow, feeling the spark within ignite into a flame illuminating the cavern tunnel. I pondered the weak points of the dragon, deliberating between the nostrils and the corners of its mouth. Either would help me bypass its thick scaled armor, and even disrupt its sense of smell. Could a dragon taste the air like a serpent did? Eventually, I chose to aim for the nostrils, which would be an easier shot in the dark than the gap between its teeth. I could have caused the arrow to split mid-air for a wider attack, but against one enemy with fewer weaknesses, it was better to keep this strike concentrated.
I fired. A bright shooting star sailed through the darkness, and collided with the dragon’s snout, refracting off its obsidian-dark scales and jeweled horns.
Alunelaine’s head jerked back with a wretched screech as its horns slid along the cavern ceiling. Then its head jerked forward again and it sneezed out puffs of smoke. A great rasping came from the depths of its throat, like the grinding of rocks against each other. I fired another arrow into its maw. Then Alunelaine turned its burning eyes towards me.
Good thing I realized before it started clawing in my direction that, sense of smell or not, there were very few places I could really be in a cramped tunnel like this. I yelled at Crim to run as I turned tail myself, slinging my bow over my shoulder. In my chest my heart was pounding away but I felt no fear—only exhilaration. A breathless laugh slipped out of me and I heard Crim cawing and honking just ahead, his red-gold feathers shimmering in the lantern-light.
The first tremor caused me to lose my footing and scraped up my hands and knees. From the stinging in my forehead I was sure I bumped my head, too. Smoke began to spill and undulate across the cavern floor, and with shaking hands I pulled my cloak up to cover my mouth and nose. Then my ears were ringing as a loud noise, between crunching rocks and a dire shriek, pierced through the smoke and stunned me: the dragon’s roar. I was left reeling, until I felt a tugging on my cloak from Crim. I stumbled to my feet, and began to run again. As I did, my mind spun.
What now, what now? For a moment, I had surprised myself: it really looked like I had hurt it. But obviously fire was not enough to fell a dragon. Dashing at my side, Crim managed to keep up the pace with flapping, feathery hops. I prayed to Naruune that this would not be like slaying a phoenix, where the creature’s inner fire kept reviving it. The only way I knew to permanently kill a phoenix was to drown it, and temporarily dampen its inner flame. Briefly my mind thought on the last time I’d killed a phoenix—back when I had first met Elian.
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Wait. There’s a source of water down here. But will it be enough? And more importantly, would Crim be able to—
Another tremor and the sounds of falling stone, as Alunelaine tried to drag itself after me, despite how the dragon was much too big for the tunnel. I nearly tripped over my feet, but there was a sharp turn up ahead and I caught myself on the cave wall instead. Crim wasn’t so lucky—his long train of tail feathers pinned him in place when a rock fell on it. His shrieking cries of distress drew my attention—and Alunelaine’s. Faster than I thought was possible I threw myself at the bird and shoved off the rock, taking a few golden tail feathers with it. A claw came down from above, too close for comfort. As Crim scurried ahead I ripped off the lantern and tossed it behind while following. It made for a short-lived distraction; only moments later I heard a sharp crunch as it went out.
I cursed my impulsiveness. Without the lantern there was very little light to navigate by—Alunelaine’s glowing eyes just weren’t enough. By the time I had won, my feet would be all cut up from the rocks in the tunnel. Adding to those difficulties, I was tiring, my muscles ached, and there was a persistent cough at the back of my throat.
I secured my hands around the handles of my daggers, hoping the stamina-increasing effects would help me. Then I slipped into that familiar mindset of channeling magic. Though I couldn’t manage Flame Arts right now, perhaps I could still imbue some burning fire into my muscles to help me push past the pain. Crim also proved helpful. As I felt the tunnels shake, again and again, I sometimes heard Crim chirping amidst the chaos, leading the way ahead.
Will it be enough though? At the back of my neck, I felt Alunelaine’s hot breath. I didn’t know these tunnels well at all, and I had no idea how near or far away the stream was, or if we’d missed it entirely. Even if I found it, what then?
For a moment, Alunelaine’s emotions and mine seemed to overlap. This beast wasn’t frightened of me at all. It was toying with me. Somewhere up ahead, the boiling stream burbled merrily.
Well, every stream has its source, doesn’t it? a voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like Elian quipped. If it’s not enough water, then you know which direction to go.
This battle was ridiculously unfair. Cheaters like Elian and Nania would’ve had an easier time in this fight than I. As the floor pounded new cuts and scrapes into my feet my heart slithered up my throat pumping oozing, hot blood through my tongue.
Then my feet hit boiling water and I fell again, soaking my cloak. Crim shrieked at the splash, and I gasped. Quickly I shrugged off my cloak—I’d miss it, but wet clothes would only slow me down now. Then I stood again and began sloshing upstream. The heat within my body somehow made the heat without more tolerable.
“Crim—Crim, get over here,” I croaked, opening my arms.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I was alarmed at how hoarse my voice had gotten—when did that even happen?
Crim ignored me, though. Instead, as the dragon approached, nosing its way towards me and causing the earth to quake and crack with each step, Crim flew towards the beast, flapping his wings and releasing piercing, awful shrieks. Claws and beak went to gouge out Alunelaine’s eyes, and it responded with a violent hiss as it screwed its eyes shut tight. My heart nearly fired out from my mouth. What the Hell was I supposed to do now? Flooding the cavern might have worked, and now I had the time to do so, but if Crim got swept away…
There was very little I could do to fight Alunelaine, conventionally. Though I believed the battlefield was a free-for-all, the truth was, Harrier had drilled into me certain things one did and didn’t do when fighting. Nania was a Priestess and not a warrior, so she fought unaware of what tactics she was ‘expected’ to use. And Elian threw ideas of fairness and honor away entirely, going for sore spots like between the legs, or channeling to distract rather than attack…
As I was stuck in thought, Crim continued to harass Alunelaine, pecking and flapping. The dragon snuffled, snorted, roared—then with a thunderous tremor it squeezed a single claw into the tunnel with it.
The claw speared my bird, pinning him against the cavern wall and crushing him with a sickening noise and a strangled squawk. A hoarse cry ripped from my throat, and a knife twisted in my heart. There was a brief flash of fire around the dragon’s claw, and Crim’s mangled body vanished in ash and soot. I tried to call the bird’s name. No sound emerged, my clawed hand grasping uselessly at the darkness.
Anger strangled my heart and I raised my daggers again, only for my sodden cloak to tangle around my feet. I couldn’t react in anger. Crim couldn’t die for nothing, too. Cunning, intelligence, strategy, cheating. If only Elian and Nania were here, but they weren’t. And now neither was Crim. It was only a matter of time before I died too, unless I let myself be devoured. I couldn’t do this alone.
If only they were here now, if only—wait.
It wasn’t a form of channeling I was skilled in at all, despite my attempts to master all forms of channeling when I was young, after Asha had died. In fact, it was something I had thought Elian was ridiculous for using when we had first met. But so far as distractions and stalling the beast went, there may have been no other choice.
In the back of my throat, I began to hum. That humming became a hoarse and off-key melody, gaining strength as it echoed and reverberated in the cave tunnels. It wasn’t a beautiful lullaby, or even a very relaxing one, by any means. But life-or-death situations suddenly made it a lot easier to put your whole heart into channeling, and I would bet good meat that Alunelaine hadn’t heard a lullaby in many an age.
But it worked. First, Alunelaine's flailing began to slow, becoming almost drunken, and the creased and wrinkled folds of scales around its eyes began to relax. I didn’t stop singing. I didn’t stop until Alunelaine slowed entirely, and fell upon the ground with a thud in a liquid pile of muscle and scale.
I sat in the stream, hands turning red and tender from the heat, tears beading in the corners of my eyes and lungs spasming, but I didn’t care as I stared at the dozing dragon before me. Even its inner light seeping out from its scales had dulled, more than I’d ever seen. It had worked. Laughter bubbled up from somewhere inside me, some part of me that only now began to relax and unclench—and then I felt sick for laughing.
Where was Crim?
I shook my head, slapping at my cheeks. Crim was—Crim would be fine. The bird was a phoenix, and was not in the water when he died. He would be fine. He—he had to be fine. But the fight wasn’t over, not by a long shot. I couldn’t be satisfied with just stalling Alunelaine—I needed to kill it.
Is that even possible, though? It’s so…big, and Ruuthelaine—NO, I thought, shaking my head. Don’t even consider if it’s impossible. If I don’t kill it here and now, I’ll never kill Ruuthelaine, and she’ll be a plague upon the world forever. I’ll never even see the sky again. I have to find a way to kill it. Here, and now.
Briefly, I glanced upstream again. Should I make an attempt to drown the beast, and trust that Crim and I wouldn’t be drowned ourselves…or should I try to do something completely unfair?
I was attacking an enemy in its sleep, and the enemy was one of the Nine Dragon Sons. Nothing about this situation was fair. I just had to do my utmost to get past it. And so I’d take every chance to make it easier for me.
Now that the dust had settled a bit, I took a few deep breaths of the stale air. Even this would taste sweet compared to what I was about to experience. Then I slowly approached the dragon’s jaws, setting my feet shoulder-width apart, and hoisted its upper jaw open. Once I had wrenched the stinking maw open wide enough I slipped between the teeth.
I rolled into a crouching position and looked around at the dimly-lit wet cavern. There was an ooze of saliva pooling around my ankles already, and it smelled utterly grotesque. That awful, rotten-hot-sulfur scent was everywhere, and now even an improvised cloth mask would improve it. This was perhaps the most dangerous, risky, all-or-nothing gambit I’d ever made in battle, and I was the type of warrior who dropped all defenses for a chance at taking the foe down with me. Even if Alunelaine didn’t rouse fully, the dragon could easily accidentally swallow me in its sleep.
So I need to work quickly.
The dragon’s tongue was the most obvious feature of the wet cavern, like a bloated and hideous slug. Careful not to slip I inched closer to it, raising up one of my dual daggers and sheathing the other. In the human body, biting off one’s own tongue caused one to bleed to death: maybe it was the same for dragons. I stabbed the blade into the meat of the grimy tongue with a squelch that oozed blood and other vile liquids, and began to saw and hack away at it.
This was also slow and tiresome work. The tongue was muscular and thick, and I worried my blade would start to dull by the time the messy task was through. Already my hands, still tender from the stream even if I couldn’t quite feel it, were starting to weep blood, making my grip slipper. I ripped off strips of fabric from my pants wrapping them around my hands like bandages and went back to work. It wasn’t long at all before the saliva around my feet became pink with blood and bile. Only a short time after that sharp whimpering began to echo out from deep in the dragon’s throat. I froze.
When nothing else happened, I forced myself to relax. Alunelaine was not yet awake, and returned to ensuring the dragon would never awaken again. This was a nasty way to go. It wasn’t glorious at all, like one would expect in a story about killing a dragon—it was distinctly messy, unromantic, and gross. But it was the only certain way I could think of. I hoped Alunelaine would die in his sleep without stirring.
As I stabbed at the sick, worming flesh of the tongue again, I heard Alunelaine whine shrilly. I hesitated, and for my trouble was blasted with another wave of foul air, which wrenched more coughs from me. Still, I struggled to keep hacking at the tongue. Each time I plunged the blade in, there was another sound of keening. Under these sounds were grosser noises: squelching, wet ones. Grimly, I dragged the blade’s edge through another inch of meat. Nearly half the tongue was severed now, blood gushing over my feet and pants and down the dragon’s throat, forming sodden puddles and rivulets. Chunks of meat floated there. These clothes would need to be burned later, and my weapons thoroughly cleansed.
Then, from what I could tell, the dragon began to thrash.
Abruptly I was thrown onto my ass, a wave of gross matter coating my whole body. Outside the dragon’s mouth, something—Crim?—shrieked in fear, and I heard the sound of roaring. Strangely, it wasn’t coming from within the dragon’s throat…
It’s not Alunelaine’s roar, I realized, though my thoughts were muffled and distant. As if I were only listening in on the thoughts of another. If the dragon were the one roaring, I’d be completely deafened. I’m right in its mouth, after all. But if it’s not Alunelaine—
The stream, I suddenly recalled. Where there was a stream, there must be a source. A source, like an underground river—!?
The dragon’s thrashing is flooding the tunnels.
Crim!
I leapt to my feet and sloshed through the puddle, moving so fast I slipped. There was no time to wipe the muck from my face. Through touch, I found the dragon’s upper lip and winched it open. A small stream of water gushed in through the gaps in the teeth, but so did something else—something small, soot-colored, and screaming. Small and grey enough for me to easily miss before in the darkness of the cave, but I scooped Crim up before the water swept him down the dragon’s gullet. It was too-near a thing. The bird had died and revived, now in the form of a tiny chick, dirty and frighted. I held the bird tight to my chest as the jaw fell back in place, blocking the flow of water. Crim was drenched, violently quivering. Hopefully being inside Alunelaine’s mouth would keep us from drowning, too, though. There would be no second revival if he inhaled water in this state.
No, forget drowning, we had bigger issues, like being eaten. Alunelaine was still thrashing, to the point it was hard to stand. Crawling into a dragon’s maw… I’ve lost all privilege to criticize El’s idiot schemes, haven’t I?
Crim was still shaking, making soft, desperate chirps. With a bloodied hand, I stroked his head, though I wasn’t sure how comfortable that must be. “Don’t be such a baby, I wouldn’t let us die,” I muttered, then hesitated. “Not a death this embarrassing, anyways.”
I began to channel, trying to project feelings of safety and…something, into Crim’s avian mind. Even if I couldn’t really feel those feelings myself right now. Dear Crown Naruune, Zaya, Crown Arcturus, whoever’s listening, please make it so…
I had to wonder when the last time I had comforted something like this was. It must have been Asha.
Somewhere outside, I heard the wurm continue to twist and thrash, the underground river roaring as the earth cracked. For a moment I thought I felt the beast’s skull rising, and worried we’d fall down its throat. Thinking fast, I stabbed my dagger into the floor of the dragon’s mouth, holding onto it with one hand and cupping Crim with the other. Small rivulets of water dribbled in through the jagged line of the dragon’s mouth. I could only watch. Slowly, torturously slowly, Alunelaine’s thrashing ceased. Briefly, I thought I heard a throaty laughter bubbling up from Alunelaine’s guts, then a deep sigh…then silence.
Like the echo of a ghost’s whisper, foreign emotions touched my mind one last time. I see it again…blue…
I was struck by a strange feeling. Melancholy and grim and sour. Alunelaine was a monster, undoubtedly, and seemed to care little for the loss of human life. It had tried to…to eat me and fill what was left behind with more of itself. But the things it must have seen, the things it could have told me, the brief, strange kinship we shared in our mutual hatred of Ruuthelaine, the emotions and knowledge it had imparted to me…
Was it alright to grieve a mind so alien? Did it make me a hypocrite, that I didn’t feel happy that a dragon was killed, when I was certain either Ruuthelaine or a dragon like Alunelaine had caused my sister’s death? When each dragon had caused so much suffering? Or was it just a necessary distraction from the thought I might die here, cradled in a corpse’s mouth?
Through sheer willpower, I somehow avoided panicking. But that wasn’t enough to stop darkness from edging in around my vision. It had been months since I had seen Nania. We had only just begun to dream of a future together. I couldn’t even tell Elian his lies, about my decision and resolve.
Was I really going to die here, after fighting so hard to survive? After finally deciding that I did want to survive?
No. I refused to accept a fate like this. I would continue to fight, until I grabbed the ending I decided I wanted. Until I was finally happy again, and fuck Ruuthelaine and her other eight sons if they thought they could stand in my way. As everything became black, I thought I felt a cool breeze, and smelt something divine, like fresh air. Now more than ever, as I clung tightly to Crim, I felt certain that I would survive this, and much more.
For a moment, I thought I saw the dragon’s jaw wrenched open, and glimpsed blue sky, a color I hadn’t had a word for before now, beyond.