On the other side of the obsidian slab, Aaron was suddenly no longer submerged in water. Gravity, being an unrelenting and selfish asshole, immediately reasserted its hold over him. He dropped to the floor, but found his feet were under him before he’d finished registering that he was falling. He’d always been quicker than he looked, but nowhere near that fast.

Another sign I’m ‘awakening to my power,’ Aaron thought. Although that still sounds goofy as hell.

Ahead of him, a large tunnel had been carved out of the rock, sloping downwards and curving left. The stone of the walls was smooth but they swelled with gentle rises and falls, like waves. The tunnel was at least thirty feet wide and twice as high, with a dense array of massive stalactites hanging from the ceiling. The floor, however, was barren and free of debris or rock formations. Veins of some kind of crystal coursed through every side of the tunnel, emitting a soft blue light that bathed the passage in a soft glow.

The flood of memories Aaron had experienced in the lake ended at the passage through the obsidian portal, leaving him with no recollection of this place or idea of what awaited him further down the tunnel.

Maybe that’s by design, Aaron thought. This is supposed to be some kind of test, after all.

Despite the uncertainty of what lay ahead, Aaron was excited to find out and pressed onwards through the tunnel.

After at least fifteen minutes following the tunnel, Aaron realized the curve meant the tunnel had circled back on itself several times, like a great spiral or helix. If the tunnel was artificial, it was a terrific feat of construction. Then again, magic probably didn’t give much of a crap about the logistics and limitations of structural engineering. Geological engineering? Some kind of engineering, anyway.

As his time walking the gently-spiraling tunnel approached the half hour mark — or so Aaron guessed — the roof began to slope downwards. Five minutes later, the tunnel came to an end.

It opened into a massive cavern with a low ceiling. Low, in this case, being a relative term, since it was still thirty or forty feet high. The depths of the cavern were awash in a soft orange light that emanated from the floor, which was not solid rock but a lake of magma. A lip of obsidian jutted up from the ground about two feet in height, sloping out over the molten stone and forming a kind of bench on the shore of the fiery lake.

“What the hell?” Aaron said. “First I’m thrown into a Dungeons & Dragons LARP, now it’s Minecraft?”

“Does that make me an Ender Dragon, or just the regular kind?” a deep voice asked, resonating against the walls of the stone chamber.

Aaron scanned the massive space, unsure where the voice had come from. He could find no sign of another person anywhere on the small embankment overlooking the glowing lake or in the tunnel behind him. He even examined the roof, looking for some small opening where a person or speaker might be embedded.

After several seconds, Aaron noticed an odd shadow on the surface of the magma. It was darker than the soot-black, partially-cooled clumps of rock that floated on the surface like tiny oil slicks. The shadow was easy to overlook until it blinked at him as his eyes traveled over the pool, seeking the source of that strange comment. Shadows didn’t blink because shadows didn’t have eyes or eyelids, so it was impossible to disregard the dark stain after that.

What Aaron had originally mistook for cooled rock or a shadow was neither, but a long, reptilian head partially submerged in the molten slag. Two eyes and a long snout crested slightly above the liquid, not unlike a lurking crocodile, except there were a number of key differences between this beast and a crocodile.

First and most notable was the sheer size of the thing. A crocodile with a head as long as the one Aaron was looking at would be somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty feet long. Aaron wasn’t certain, but he believed that would be the largest animal ever known to have existed.

Several ridges ran up the great beast’s head, flowing over the nostrils, up the head, then around and over a slightly-protruding brow. The ridges grew more pronounced the further up the head they traveled, resembling something more like spines or horns as they trailed over the scaled crown. The hide of the creature wasn’t gray, green, or even brown like most crocodiles, and was instead a deep mahogany red, with an undertone that had a dark quality, like dark smoke.

As it was deeply improbable Aaron was facing a magma-dwelling, giant dinosaur crocodile — that could talk — it was somehow less absurd that he was looking at a real life, literal, straight-out-of-legends dragon.

Score one for critical thinking! he thought.

But… wait a second… let’s keep that critical thinking bus in the station for a minute and let another passenger on board. How would a dragon, living in a lake of magma buried under Yellowstone National Park, know about Dungeons & Dragons or Minecraft? Perhaps there were more pertinent questions to ask that treated this situation with the gravitas it deserved, but that was the wheel squeaking in Aaron’s brain, so he decided it needed to be oiled.

“Am I wrong or are you an actual fairy-tale style dragon residing in a secret lava lake under Yellowstone?” he asked. “And, if so, that raises the question of how the hell you know about D&D or Minecraft.”

The great beast lifted its head slightly, its snout and jaw emerging fully from the molten liquid.

“I have the internet,” the colossal serpent cooed. “You’d be amazed what you can accomplish with immense magical puissance and Amazon Prime. My cult of mind-controlled slaves helps, too.”

“The internet? Really? Who’s your provider? Wait, what was that last part about slaves?”

The dragon laughed softly, a rolling, sinuous sound that caused ripples and bulges in the surface of the glowing lake. Then, it hoisted itself a bit more fully out of the magma, until it had emerged to about chest level. The pointed tips of great, leather wings were folded against the dragon’s back. It had arms — or maybe forelegs, but they were held like arms — and the great wyrm let them float on the surface of the lake like it was relaxing in the shallow end of a swimming pool.

It’s almost like talking to someone sitting in a bubble bath, except it’s in exactly no way like that at all, Aaron thought.

The dragon’s arms ended in hands with three fingers and a thumb, each tipped with a claw that was surprisingly less threatening than Aaron had expected, almost like overlong fingernails. They were a deep black with a glossy shine, as if made of obsidian themselves.

Do I have to fight this fucking behemoth for the Tribulation? he wondered.

That would be wildly unfair, but Aaron couldn’t rule it out. He might be meant to be a leader for the human-sized, can’t-turn-into-a-dragon dragons, but this was the genuine article. Like, the thing was practically fanart, lounging in the hottest of hot tubs. He’d been pleasantly surprised by what he could accomplish as this whole dragon thing had unfolded so far, but if he had to duke it out with the dragon in the lake of fire? He didn’t like his chances.

“I’m just fucking with you,” the dragon rumbled. “About the cult and the brainwashing, that is. Not about keeping up with the times or my sweet fiber connection.”

“That’s cool,” Aaron said with a nervous laugh. “So, uh, how is it that you’re, y’know, a dragon? I’ve been told actual dragons — like real life, giant, flying lizard beasts — are more of a parable resulting from propaganda.”

“I think you’ll find that many things that are or were true are no longer thought to be,” the dragon said. “It has been some time since the drakus could take on our full, ancestral shape.”

“Why are you different?”

“That is a complicated tale and one I’m afraid you’ll have to learn another time,” the dragon said, a tinge of sadness creeping into the response. “But come, let us introduce ourselves properly.”

Aaron frowned slightly. He had hours to complete this Tribulation, surely there was time enough for the dragon to enlighten him a little about the mysterious nature of its being.

Maybe that’s not a hill you want to die on, eh? he told himself. Besides, maybe it’s some kind of personal thing and you’d be prying.

“Well, I’m Aaron Abrams,” he said. “I’m here to prove my place as Primus Draconis.”

The serpent bowed its great head slightly. “I am Raz’ale. It is a pleasure to meet you once more.”

“Once more?”

The dragon, Raz’ale, offered no reply other than an enigmatic smile. At least, that was the way Aaron interpreted the look on its face.

Is it an ‘it’? Aaron wondered. That seems like a rude way to think about someone, but I can’t just ‘they’ the dragon.

“Okay, maybe a weird question, but do dragons have sex or gender? How should I refer to you?”

Raz’ale bared rows of fangs in what might have been a grin. “Dragons are people and have both sex and gender; I am a male.”

“Cool, very cool. Me, too,” Aaron said, rocking on his feet. “So, uh, what is it you’re doing here?”

“This is Wyrmhold Cavern; I abide here. I wait.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“You.”

Aaron blinked at the dragon several times. Another seemingly simple concept that obviously had a complicated history and connotations attached to it that Aaron had absolutely no sense of. In this case, he thought he could at least piece some of it together from the context.

Raz’ale was waiting in this cavern for the Primus Draconis, which was Aaron, but it wasn’t just Aaron; it was many other people over a very long history. This was an easy thing to know in an intellectual sense, but much harder to fully comprehend. It was like the difference between knowing the war was scary and having bullets and artillery flying through the air near you.

How many other individuals had been plucked from their lives, hounded by would-be assassins and other unknown dangers, only to find themselves standing in a sprawling cavern filled with magma, facing a dragon? Would they even have had the knowledge to understand what the molten stone was or where it came from?

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

The span of this secret history stretches back untold ages, and I’m standing at the end of it, he thought. I never had to consider a legacy or anything like that, but now I feel the weight of it on me. I can bear it; I will bear it.

“Why are you waiting for me?” Aaron asked.

“It is an ancient duty to remain in this sacred place and act as one of the Tribulations.”

“How long have you been, uh, waiting?”

“Long,” Raz’ale said simply.

Again, the dragon offered a monosyllabic answer that carried so much meaning — history even — behind it that Aaron couldn’t really wrap his head around it. As desperately curious as he was to know more about that history, Aaron’s personal experience with isolation and withdrawal harrowed his thoughts.

“Don’t you get lonely?” he asked the dragon.

For a long time — perhaps a minute or more — the dragon said nothing. The reptilian face was expressive in much the same way a dog’s face was — all lips and brows — so Aaron could only pick out large emotions. The dragon didn’t even have ears. The dragon’s seemingly stolid expression and the extended silence started to fray his nerves.

Did I put my foot in my mouth, again? Cross some boundary I wasn’t aware of? he wondered. Maybe I should say something…

He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, that was too personal.”

After a moment, the dragon shook its ridged head. “It is no less than I would expect from you, father. You are more compassionate than you realize or often allow others to see. My existence is lonely at times, but magic allows me to view much of the world when I wish, even if I cannot interact.”

Aaron was no stranger to social isolation and he’d been going through one of the worst bouts of it in his life over the past year. He knew it was no way to live and wanted to comment on that, but something else the dragon said had caught his attention.

“You called me father.”

There was a slight pause from Raz’ale, then, “Are such titles no longer used among the drakus? Scale father, brood father, father of wyrms, patriarch of flame, and so on?”

“I don’t know. I only became aware of all this dragon stuff a few hours ago,” Aaron said, scratching his jaw.

The dragon craned its neck forward. “Hmmm… I confess I haven’t paid close attention to the Drakon recently, but isn’t the Vault generally the first Tribulation? Usually followed by some training and education?”

“This was on the way and I get the feeling they’re a bit desperate after so long and so many failed prospects,” Aaron shrugged. “It’s been a long time since they had a viable candidate to be, uh, me.”

“I suppose it has been longer than usual since I was last approached by a candidate,” Raz’ale mused, tapping his long, clawed fingers on the obsidian lip of the magma pool.

As much as Aaron might like to sit around and shoot the shit with an honest to god dragon, Raz’ale had reminded him that he was in the cavern to accomplish something. The dragon obviously had something to do with his task, but there were no serendipitous flashes of insight or memory helping Aaron figure out what that was. Which meant Aaron was going to have to try to find answers another way.

“Speaking of the, uh, Tribulations…what is it I have to do here?” Aaron asked. “All I know is the task is called ‘entering the depths’ and I had to jump in a lake without an oxygen tank or goggles or a flashlight or even the faintest idea of what the hell I was supposed to be doing.”

“That’s quite the run-on sentence,” Raz’ale said, regarding Aaron with an expression that might have conveyed skepticism. “Would such gadgets and gizmos have been useful?”

Aaron shook his head. “It turned out I didn’t need them, but it strikes me as shortsighted not to even consider it since no one seemed to know that. They were more worried about tradition than accomplishing their goals.”

The dragon huffed another small laugh, which sounded a bit like the sound a train made when it first started to move from a stop. “Using tools wouldn’t disqualify you, but I suspect it’s part of the reason you’ve never, in any life, shared information about what this Tribulation entails. Consider this — if you had utilized those technologies, would you have found the entrance as swiftly as you did?”

That… was an excellent point. If Aaron hadn’t needed to try holding his breath or struggled to open his eyes, would he have learned he didn’t need an oxygen tank? It was possible the struggle and revelations of his own abilities had prepared Aaron to evoke or endure the flood of memories that told him where he needed to go. Without those trials before the trial, he might not have bonded with the essence of the Primus Draconis sufficiently to even find the obsidian gateway.

Barrett did talk about awakening to my power, Aaron thought. And that might be exactly why no one- why I never shared the details of this Tribulation.

These were deep questions and it would be a long time before Aaron could even start to make educated guesses about them. He’d like to think dragons weren’t inherently limited from adapting to the world, but adversity had a way of bringing out the best (and worst) of people more effectively than just existing did.

What still rankled, however, was that Barrett and Mallory had been unwilling to consider venturing beyond tradition without explicit permission from the past. Being placid, being reactionary, being scared; these things were the slow death of a vibrant society. But Aaron could only address those problems by conquering the challenge in front of him right now.

You’re on a tangent; the lava lizard asked you a question, bud, he chided himself.

“I’m not sure I could have found the portal if I hadn’t had to overcome the obstacles created by not having that stuff,” Aaron confessed. “Is that all there is to the Tribulation? Or is there something else I’m supposed to do?”

The great wyrm chuckled. “Do? You’ve already done it. You have come here and you are you, just as you always have and always will. None but the one who bears the essence of the Primus Draconis could find and enter this place, drakus or otherwise. Only you, those who came before, and those who will come after could stand here before me.”

“So I did it? A winner is me? That seems too easy.”

“I have… impeded candidates I found particularly odious, in the past,” Raz’ale said.

“I’m not particularly odious? That’s not the best compliment I’ve ever gotten, but I’ll take it.”

Now the dragon’s head swept forward until the great, fanged maw was just over the lip of obsidian at the edge of the lake. Aaron’s instinct was to push the scaled snout away, but he kept himself still and faced that magnificent visage.

“You are, indeed, not particularly odious. This Tribulation is complete.”

Aaron let out a long breath. “Well, that’s a relief. Anticlimactic as shit, but still a relief.”

The dragon’s face inched even closer to Aaron, until it was barely at arm’s length.

“We could have us a rassle if you’re not feeling narratively satisfied…” Raz’ale rumbled.

“I’m good, thanks,” Aaron said, holding his hands up in front of him. “I know we’re technically done here, but there’s so much more I wish you’d tell me — about magic, about dragons, about everything.”

Again, Raz’ale considered Aaron for a prolonged silence. “The world of myth and magic is, like time or love, very complicated. Perhaps we can discuss it further in the future.”

Aaron frowned at the dragon. “What? After I die and my soul or essence finds someone else?”

“No, not at all. I meant that, perhaps, you would be interested in visiting me on occasion. No dying needed.”

“I’d like that,” Aaron said. “I imagine I’ll have to be discreet since this Tribulation is supposed to be such a big mystery, but I’ll figure something out. It might take some time, though.”

“Time I have, in abundance,” Raz’ale said, pulling his head back from the obsidian shore. The dragon’s maw spread in something like a grin, at least as far as Aaron could tell. “I will look forward to your visit. I suspect you will face challenges few of your predecessors have had to overcome but I’m sure you’ll rise to them admirably.”

“You say shit like that and it makes me want to call the whole thing off!”

The great wyrm laughed again and, with a final — completely absurd — wave goodbye, sank back into the lake of magma. Aaron watched until Raz’ale had disappeared from view completely. Turning back to the tunnel, Aaron wondered where Raz’ale would even keep a computer down here and how it got power.

Does he enchant it so it’s immune to lava? he wondered. Or maybe he just has a literal nerd cave somewhere down here?

It was something Aaron hoped to find out in the future. For now, though, he had to get back to the people waiting for him above.

Walking back up the spiral tunnel, Aaron tried to calm himself down. He was practically jangling with excitement from his encounter with the great dragon, but it was marred by the knowledge he would have to keep the details to himself. It was a secret that wanted — no, longed — to be told; it was also something so profound and personal he wanted to lock it away and jealously hold onto it so it was his and his alone. The cognitive dissonance of those conflicting motivations was a righteous son of a bitch, no two ways about it.

Personal pettiness aside, Raz’ale had made a good point: there were reasons each of Aaron’s predecessors had tightly held onto the specifics of this Tribulation. In this case, forewarned might not be forearmed; too much preparation might make completing it impossible, or at least significantly more difficult.

I’m missing a piece of the picture, too, he thought. I have no idea what information is passed along after the Tribulation that usually comes first; opening the vault or something like that.

He would need to keep that in mind as he trudged back up to the lake and through whatever came next. He was excited to find out what that would be.

When Aaron pulled himself up onto the shore of the lake a while later, no one noticed him at first. In fact, he couldn’t really see anyone near the helicopters, either. It was downright spooky — of more than a dozen people who’d been around the small clearing, now there were none.

Was there an attack? he wondered. If he had to run, he had probably the most secure panic room in the world under a few hundred feet of water below him.

Movement in the treeline caught his attention. He had a moment of instinctive fear urging him to get low to the ground or slip back into the water — anything to maintain an advantage — but he quickly realized it was one of the security personnel. They had apparently moved to less obtrusive positions while he’d been away. Examining the deep shadows at the base of the evergreens, Aaron could see more of the guards stationed around the clearing. He could even see someone in the cockpit of the smaller, military-style helicopter.

Before he’d taken another five steps, the door of the big helicopter opened and four people started down the steps to meet him — Alice, Barrett, Mallory, and Tia. Aaron had used the time walking and swimming back up from Wyrmhold Cavern to think about what he wanted to say.

When the others had gathered around him, there was a moment of tense silence.

“It’s done,” he said.

A brief rush of questions followed, but Aaron didn’t offer any more details. Instead, he began to walk towards the helicopter and interrupted with a concern of his own.

“My socks are wet; it’s quite uncomfortable. Can anyone do some magic about that?”

Three of them were taken aback and seemed uncertain of how to respond, but Tia laughed loudly and held out a hand towards him. She muttered something under breath and waves of flameless heat washed over Aaron, drying him out almost immediately.

“Much better, thank you” he said, then stopped abruptly and turned on his heels to address Barrett and Mallory. “I’m not going to fault you for not knowing whether technology was permissible and I won’t say one way or the other because that should be a choice made by our successors in the future. What I will say, here and now, is that I’m disappointed it wasn’t even considered. That shows a lack of forethought and lateral thinking that’s going to be very dangerous if our enemies are as dedicated to our instability as I’ve been led to believe.”

“We were navigating completely uncharted waters, so we put our faith in tradition,” Mallory said.

“No, he’s right,” Barrett sighed. “It’s not caution to refuse a compass or sextant in uncharted waters just because no one ever had one before; it’s reckless.”

It looked like Mallory was getting ready to respond, but before he could Tia slapped him lightly on the shoulder with the back of her hand. His face puckered up for a moment, but he bit back whatever he’d been planning to say.

“Okay; what’s next?” Aaron asked, resuming the walk back to the helicopters.

“We go home,” Barrett said, placing a hand on Aaron’s shoulder.

“And where is home?”

“New York,” Barrett answered.