I suppose it would be of poor form for me to omit one of the more dramatic moments during the trip through the crystal caves. I am more than a historian as I go about this task. I am a storyteller as well, and at times that means offering something of wonder but little consequence. It helps that this actually occurred, though there is hardly any evidence of it. At the end of the day–for as much as time could be measured by days down there–the only impact was the upraising of a small number of thralls to sapience.
The only thing that truly matters from this time, after his confrontation with Golden, were the harrying parties, the raiders and auxiliaries that preyed on any thrall left to wander from the herd. Little micro-tribes of cannibals hunted them, nipping at their extremities because no true host could charge into the caves meaningfully. Every attack shrunk their force and prodded Lucius into deeper thought about strategy.
Occasionally, it was the animals that hazarded their journey, lion worms and the like.
Once, it was an ironhide dragon.
While lion worms can be said to form one of the middle parts of the food chain down below, a very important role to be sure, they are not, never have been, and never will be the top of the food chain. Such a lofty and prideful role belongs to creatures such as ironhide dragons. The name may cause readers to mis-imagine the creature, for it has no wings nor arms. Its legs are myriad, but no longer than a finger. It has more in common with a millipede than a dragon, if superficial appearance is all that is judged.
Slay one, rip the steel sheets from it, and do a bit of post-mortem biology on an ironhide, you’ll find all the right organs and bones, even if some of the spine is repeated a hundred times over. It makes perfect sense as well. Not many creatures can form the evolutionary foundation for a monster able to carve new tunnels through the firmament.
Sacerdote’s herd encountered the thing at a watering hole. They were trying to siphon the contaminated water through filters when the water began draining. The stupid thralls fell on their knees, slapping and clawing at the receding shoreline until they felt the trembling in the ground. Their ensuing shrieks drew out the beast. Had they the wit to keep their mouths shut, nothing would have happened, but their primal urge to screech warning won out.
The dragon had been only interested in flooding its gut, to soak the myriad minerals and stones enough that its muscles could grind it to mud and excrete the stone slurry(1). Their fear roused its hunting instinct, near dormant. The beast shoved its head up from the pool like an antlion.
While an ironhide dragon primarily lives off the profusion of bacteria in its gut which suckle nutrients from the stones it eats, the dragon never lost the ability to consume meat and it certainly never learned fear of humans.
A dozen thralls had been chased down and ripped apart by the time Lucius arrived at the chaos. Perhaps if he had thought more cruelly and utilitarian he would have ignored it entirely, but he wasn’t used to being a prisoner.
A reasonable fighter would have turned and fled from such a foe. Lucius had been inadvertently trained to see any enemy as killable, a flaw of hubris that many of his future enemies tried to turn against him. They had returned his sword to him after he stole a weapon from a thrall, but his infantry blade was not fit for breaking through steel carapace, nor was there enough finesse to slide it between the plates. He should have retreated and gotten a hammer or mace, instead he charged in.
The ironhide dragon was nearly invulnerable as far as he was concerned, but that didn’t mean it could carelessly attack him. With nothing but stub limbs, the only method of attack it had was to lunge and bite, to chomp with its maw of rough fangs. It lacked even the serpentine ability to whip its tail. Lucius saw this at once, staying light on his feet.
When the dragon lunged, he darted to the side and slashed. It slammed into stone and twisted, he hacked at a leg. It curled and tried to constrict around him, he dared to vault over. The hooked toes were enough to rip his clothing in shreds, to draw lines of blood across his back, but not to hang him up and snare him.
Blood began to spew out of the dragon, mixing on the ground with Lucius’. Scratch by scratch, he chopped at any exposed flesh or joint. He hacked off limbs and fought to keep his footing as the dragon rolled and thrashed. If there had been enough time and solid stone, he might have been able to fell the beast with bloodloss, or at least drive it off.
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The caves were not bedrock however, not even firmament. They were a lattice shell of stone barely holding together. Drenched in the blood of the dragon, he was caught completely unaware when the cave collapsed beneath them. Cracks shot through in every direction, turning the pool basin–drained–into rubble.
He fell, screaming into the abyss. Hitting the mud below was like being caught between a castle gate and a battering ram. It knocked all the sense out of him, but not out of the dragon. Bone crunched as he was lifted from the mud, one arm ripping apart inside the ringed maw of the dragon. Ripping him from the clutches of the dark mud nearly ripped his shoulder from the socket, but it freed him to hack and stab with his sword.
The jaws of a beast, especially a dragon, are a curious and bloody affair. Mostly bone and tooth, they are still laden with blood vessels. It took only a moment for him to break several of the teeth free, for steaming blood to come pouring across him. As for wounding the dragon however, it did nothing more than infuriate the create. It thrashed, yanking him back and forth and digging its teeth in deeper like barbs. Lucius howled in pain and tried to stab out its eye. He jabbed the metal through a gap in the steel carapace, but not the gap that sheltered its eye.
Perhaps he would have eventually bled it out, he stood a good chance of doing so. But the fight did not remain one against one. After fetching a proper weapon from the supplies, Lupa fell down through the hole, swinging a hammer in both hands. What impacted the dragon’s hide was anything but a hammer.
I believe I have previously and satisfactorily described the way ley stone functions. It amplifies force from an expanded face and redirects it out the contracted face, similar to how cream erupts from a pressed pastry. With clever stone cutting, axels, and steel cams, a recoil engine can be created.(2)
Like the metal beat of a heart, the mallet slammed against the dragon’s carapace, then from the middle spike of steel slammed forth. The natural armor crumpled and cracked. The dragon roared, reeling away and dropping Lucius as its body thrashed.
Lucius had never seen such a weapon before, but he understood that his former warden had just saved him. She landed on the muddy cave floor beside him, soiling her feet but unharmed.
And well, from there blood flowed more plentifully than wine at a wedding. Lucius could hardly use his left arm for a time, but the fracture of the carapace was like the cleft between a harlot’s legs. He thrust into it until the beast bellowed and screeched. More than once, it rolled atop him, cracking ribs and bursting blood. He was smashed between tail and stone, his guts nearly liquifying for he had no armor of his own.
But the life and the heat of the dragon were pouring out. The scent of death oozed out from the thing, and that scent laid hooks in the minds of the thralls. Their ancient and atrophied scavenging instincts were roused. During the fight, heedless of the metal clash, they descended in ones and twos.
The thralls grabbed at the little appendages of legs, first at the tip of the tail. The dragon was dying inch by inch as blood failed to flow to its fatty extremities, so it could hardly kick off the carrion eaters. They swarmed like maggots, not quite waiting for the creature to die. They ripped the limbs off and stuffed hands into the steaming flesh. With broken nails, they ripped out marrow, meat, and tendon to gnash between their teeth.
The bleeding of the dragon went from one wound, to a dozen, to scores. As though they were tying it down with ropes, the thralls stretched their wirey bodies across the creature to pick and tear and eat. At last, with laboring breaths and twitching whimpers, the dragon’s blunt head collapsed to the mud. It laid, twitching and dying as the half-living men of the desert feasted on its flesh.
Lucius staggered off, seeing enough of the grotesque act in just a moment. Just a short ways off in the cave was another pool. Heedless of leeches or eels, he waded into it and let the cold water prickle his skin, wash off the blood, and cool his fervor. Then he turned his mind to Lupa, beckoning her over.
“Are you my captor or my savior?”
She smiled and sat on the stony edge, dipping her feet into the pond. “Can’t I be both?”
“Only if I can trust you.”
She laid back, turning her face to the cave roof. SIlence dragged before she said, “There’s nothing I can say to that until after you meet our god. You’ll understand why we have done what we have then.”
“Is that where you’re taking me?”
“Of course. You and the things you have stored away within your brain.”
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1. The slurry is of course digested. Leeching iron is but one thing an ironhide dragon does with the stone, and from this mass digestion, like a whale filtering for plankton, they collect enough nodules of iron to create their armor carapace.
2. The fact that ley primarily operates through impulse and orthogonal to the initial vector has made many an engineer tear their hair out with frustration. A recoil engine was discovered long ago in an attempt to turn the exerted force back on the initial object. Truly skilled workers can use such a device to quarry stone, but the impact is far less precise than boring holes, wedging with wood, and cracking them with water as is traditional. Thus, the recoil engine is little more than an expensive way to make gravel, or obliterate armor.