Dragonfire

I.

The great drake lay languid.
Shadows cast from lanterns in his lair
painted scales like chain mail sable in places.
Where the firelight illuminates his plates
they are brilliant burning azure,
marinated in ultramarine,
near violet, the shine so violent,

the most vivid shades of blue ever seen.

 

This is what happened.

We were all so young, that’s what I need to you to understand: bravery, stubbornness, and foolishness, the corners of the young man’s triangle of fate.  May as well say stupidity, stupidity, and stupidity!  The town I lived in wasn’t so small, you know, that I hadn’t seen a few things already even at that age, and I thought myself wise to the ways of the world, as did many of my fellows.

It was perhaps six months after the Orange Wars had ended.  I had been just a little too young to join the last time the recruiters had trooped through.  How we envied those that went to war!  How we looked up to them!  Idiocy!

When the war ended, the surviving men were cut lose and many of them had nowhere to go, you understand, and so they trooped about the countryside.  The day I saw Green Jake and Peter the Shadow walking down the high road through our township was a fine, warm day and - well, they looked glorious to me, you understand?  Green Jake was big, almost bursting his fine uniform.  I caught hints of his shiny breastplate underneath the ceremonial soldier’s vest, and the sergeant’s saber at his side bounced cheerfully against his thigh, the hilt catching the light of the beautiful day.  He was a redhead with a bristly beard and he had a great huge smile and all of his teeth were bright.  Someone said later that they had been wooden ones, which was probably true.  Very few front line soldiers had all their teeth by the end of the war!

His companion, Peter, somewhat smaller, was marking Jake’s stride, almost heeling him, walking just to his left and slightly behind him.  The ripple of scarred skin and eyepatch on his calm olive visage looked like a badge of honor to us lads.  Peter was a bit distant, or as some would say, had the veteran’s temper; he very rarely spoke and he always wore a sort of dreamy, faraway look on his dusky face.  Most of us had seen no more than twelve or fourteen summers when Jake and Peter came trooping through town, warhorses from some far way place.  Jake had a kind of graveyard humor that lent him an air of bravery.  They seemed men of the world.  How we looked up to them!

They took a room at the tavern and spent the next few weeks drinking and regaling us with tales from the war.  There were about ten of us boys who came to hear their stories.  They told us about the Sacking of the Library at Stair, and how the books and machines there burned in hues of blue, and green, and violet.  They said they had been at the Battle of Basilisk’s Awakening, and recalled to us how hundreds of the men they fought beside had been turned to stone.  They told us about the battle mages who had created nets of steaming acid in the sky to fall down on enemy formations and how those enemies had been diced from above, peeled into tall rectangles of blood and bone at the Gates of the Forsaken, and how our glorious Emperor’s army had turned the tide at the Reckoning of the Twelve Angles.

They told us these things, and we were jealous.  Jealous!  Envious that they had seen such marvels!  What foolishness! Why is it that young men are never content with the green grass, I ask you?  Why do they wish to see pages blazing in green fire?  Stupidity!  Green is green, and the grass is more beautiful than the flame – believe me!

The soldiers were released from service without any sort of pension or pay save the plunder they had managed to stash on their own, and the widespread destruction wrought during the war meant that many had no homes to go back to.  Green Jake and Peter were in dire straits.  They had no money, nowhere to live, and no skills save bloodshed.  So when John Ermingild told them about the dragon, they jumped at it.

We had all heard about it, of course.  It was an old, old story in the village.  We were forbidden from ever going to the caves near the Quiet, or even to the dead patch of ground and huge black stones that marked its border.  The Quiet surrounded the Peak of Silence, a great claw of black stone jutting from the desolate land.  It was a week of hard walking from the town, too far away to go and not be missed, and thus none of us had ever ventured there.   Some of us had been to the dead patch.  Of course there were a few of us boys who just had to break the taboo - I was among them, and had ventured out that way one summer with two companions.  Once we arrived we found that we lacked the courage to actually step on to that great ashen patch of land.  It was strange in there, there were no birds or other creatures anywhere near the place, not even insects; the animals hated it.  And it was always hot there, like the land itself radiated some kind of heat.  We dared each other, but in spite of our curiosity, we couldn’t make ourselves go much further once we’d come to the edge of the poisoned land.

Anyway, Green Jake sat in the tavern, and he wheedled at those of us who still came to hear their stories.  He scoffed at the Drake.  “’tis dead,” he’d say, with Peter the Shadow sitting next to him and staring off into the tavern with a slight smile on his face, “it has to be.  If ‘twer’n’t then we’d’ve seen it by now, or someone would’ve.  How long has it been since anyone saw the dragon?” he’d ask.

As far as we knew no one in living memory had actually seen the Great Drake.  Some of the town elders, like the tailor, talked about great-great-grandparents they had never met, and who had supposedly seen it.  We’d heard that the last time the dragon had flown down from the caverns near Quiet was when it had destroyed the old village, and nothing would grow there now.  But no one we knew personally had actually encountered the thing.

Green Jake wanted to investigate.  “Look, we’ll all go together, and what we will find will be a dead dragon on a heap of treasure.  I’m telling you.  Why, it’s been at least two hundred years since anyone from around here even says they saw it, and who knows if they actually did?  Nothing lives for that long, I’m telling you.  We’ll go up there and come back with a fortune!”  Peter was usually silent during these outbursts, but he would nod occasionally at no one, as if agreeing with Jake.

We wanted to go, you see.  We had that lust that young men have to go out into the world and see amazing things, have experiences that no one else has had, to prove themselves.  The fire of youth!  Ha!  You would do well to remember that fire consumes even as it warms! 

But even then, we weren’t quite ready.  We’d nod along, just like Peter, but when Jake would say, “Well then!  Let’s go!  Let’s swear it together!” we’d all nod a little and then someone would say, “I’ve got to help Da with the cow tomorrow,” and suddenly all of us would remember some little chore that needed doing, some responsibility that kept us from committing, and we’d scatter off until the next night.

One evening, we had another set of veterans come through the town.  It was late summer, and the trees bent under a sparse but driving rain when these five men came into town, and at once we all knew they were trouble.  They came down high street in a wedge, wearing swords and military issue grey cloaks.  None of us had a good feeling as they strode down the way.

Ol’ Jenny was a stray the town had kind of adopted.  She was a good dog, a yellow dog who never bit or growled at anyone.  Us townsfolk saw to it that she was taken care of; the butcher would feed her scraps, and when it got cold out, she could go scratch at just about anyone’s door and they would let her in to lay down by the fire.  Jake, especially, had taken a shine to her, and Ol’ Jenny seemed to like him right back, would run up to greet him and jump up in excitement until he rubbed her head, laughing.  I don’t know what she was doing out that day in the rain, but when she saw the leader, a man with eyes black as night and a pale face covered with a week’s worth of beard, she started snarling and barking and those of us in town who hadn’t already noted the interlopers did then, you can bet.  Jenny didn’t bark at anyone.

The group walked towards the tavern where we had holed up with Jake and Peter. We watched uneasily as Jenny backed away a little at a time, growling the whole while.  Jake stood just inside the doorway, squinting at the strangers through a window.  He swore under his breath.

“Hey, Pete, those lads look like they’re from the 19^th Vilitas Pikes, don’t they?  Look at those cloaks.  Those cloaks were issued to the Vilitas.”  Pete nodded, smiling a little.

Later, Jake told me that the Vilitas were a regiment who had deserted a critical position during the battle at Stair, and left both Jake’s and Pete’s units in very, very bad shape indeed.  Their cowardice was responsible for the deaths of many of their friends.  It’s possible there would have been a fight even without what happened next.

Jenny had finally pushed herself up against the tavern wall trying to get away from the strangers, and when they kept coming, she must have felt she had no choice.  She snapped at the pale leader.  Instantly, the man whipped his sword from its sheath and stabbed her, all in one go.  He was fast.  She yelped and then gave a long, sick-sounding cough, like she was trying to throw something up.  The leader held her there on the end of his sword and then twisted it.  That’s what I remember.  Poor Jenny was going to die - he’d got her right through the ribcage and through her heart when she’d reared up at him.  But after he forced the poor old thing to attack him, he twisted his sword and she cried, and he smiled.  And I think that smile was what led to the next thing.  It was bad enough he’d backed her into a position where she felt she had to fight him, but when he twisted that sword just to hurt her, and the look of hungry joy on his face when he did it, that’s what got everything started.

Green Jake stormed out of the tavern, Peter at his side, and he started cursing at the stranger.  I can’t recall exactly what he said, but it was colorful language, and he had just finished implying that the stranger’s mother had only the most passing acquaintance with humanity and had somehow impregnated herself with an inanimate object when the man pulled his sword out of Ol’ Jenny and took a swing at him.

A lot happened very fast, then.  Jake was holding his sheathed sword in his left hand and got the scabbard up just in time to block the swing.  He recovered pretty fast and bulled into the leader with his shoulder even as he drew his blade, flinging the scabbard to the side.  Meanwhile, the leader’s companions unsheathed their own weapons. 

That was the day I figured out that the dreamy look Peter always wore where he wasn’t focused on anything was his way of seeing everything.  The leftmost man swung a sword horizontally at him. Peter stepped under it, I think – it was damned hard to follow his footwork, all of a sudden he was moving in this strange, stuttery way.  Anyway, they wound up back to back and in an instant and Peter’s fist came down from beside his ear to his thigh.  He made the motion before I realized he was holding a dagger.  He killed that first man with that hammer-fist dagger strike, exploding his kidney, and he somehow used the momentum of that stab to spin himself inward towards the second stranger, who had only just begun to turn. A smallsword had appeared in Peter’s left hand and he whipped the point through the nape of the man’s neck.  It popped out through the front of the man’s throat as his head was forced involuntarily backward by the force of Peter’s blow.  He made a funny, glottal sound as Peter pulled the blade out, and then kind of sagged, blood running down his throat and over his chest. He slumped to his knees like a broken marionette. I could see Peter’s face, and he still wasn’t looking at anything in particular, still had a small smile and that mild, hazy look like he was doing nothing more than pouring a glass of milk.  I have only ever seen that look on he faces of two other men since.  Men with that look are natural born killers.  Men with that look are dangerous. 

Green Jake was still struggling with the leader.  Jake was stronger by far, but the pale man was faster.  He had already pulled his blade back and now he lunged. He would have rammed it right through Jake’s heart if it hadn’t been for the breastplate he wore under his vest.  Instead, the point skidded off-center, slicing through the fabric and screeching as it tried to bite into the armor.  That lunge left the man momentarily off-balance with his wrist right by Jake’s side.  Jake immediately snapped his arm down to pin the man’s wrist there and at the same time he thrust his foot out and down into the stranger’s leading leg, letting all his weight come down on that heel.  Jake still had the man’s arm trapped and as he followed through he brought the edge of his saber down and blasted it right through the stranger’s shoulder. There was a sick crack as the shin broke and the man’s arm fell to the ground almost simultaneously.  The pale man fell too, squealing and writhing in pain, his ruined leg flopping horribly, showing occasional glimpses of gleaming bone.  One thing I remember is that you could see the man’s heart pump as the blood sprayed from the stump of his shoulder in gory pulses.  Jake watched him coldly as he bled out, and spat.  You could tell he was furious.

“You fellows better move along now if you know what’s good for you,” he said, looking up from the wreckage of the leader’s body at the pair of strangers that had been on the leader’s right when all hell had broken loose.  They had frozen and were clearly having second thoughts about this whole affair. Their eyes were fixed on Jake, and meanwhile, Peter had floated unnoticed to a position just behind them, dagger held in a reverse grip, point down in his right hand, smallsword position quarte in his left.  He could have killed them both where they stood.  Neither had observed him.  They were stunned by developments since they had drawn their swords.  But they didn’t need to be killed - they threw their swords into the mud at their feet and fled, leaving the three corpses of their compatriots behind.

“Teach those scum to hurt a dog,” Jake grumbled.  Peter the Shadow whipped his blades through the air, casting the blood from them both, and sheathed them, slight grin on his face as always, and gave a little nod.

After that… well, after that, we would have followed Green Jake and Peter the Shadow into hell, and that’s just what we did.

 

II. 

His roar: a searing sound,
a jagged song of death so loud
it forces his foes to freeze
and fall to their knees in misery.
Brave battle cries die on their lips,
Mouths go slack, the smell of drying spit
as oxygen is trapped, stuck sudden in the lungs.
Their throats quest for breath like men hung.
The noise halts hearts, cages blood in the veins
all circulation stopped, ears ringing in pain.
A thousand decibel scream,
pushing so much air with its undertones
it will kill with the shockwave of the sonics alone.

 

The day after the stranger killed Jenny was an odd day.  Most of the townsfolk hailed Jake and Pete as heroes, and it didn’t take much to see why - it had been the first real violence our town had seen in decades.  However, the older folks also started to steer clear of the pair and of the ten boys who had been listening to Jake’s stories regularly, only six of us showed up the next night.  I guess the other boys had a little more sense than we did, and wanted no part of fighting like that.  Most of us were farm boys, no strangers to bloodshed, but none of us had ever seen anything quite like the display of violence Jake and Peter had shown when those strangers killed poor Ol’ Jenny.  Once again Jake talked to us about joining him on an expedition to the caves of Quiet, “to loot the Great Drake,” as he put it.  The boys that did show up, myself included, all felt like something was about to change.  Sometimes your body knows things before your mind does.

“Well boys, it’s now or never.  Peter and I have to be moving along pretty soon no matter what.  Will you join us?  Think now!  Stay here, in this town for the rest of your lives?  I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable, and things will be very boring!  Or join us? Make a fortune to spend as you see fit!  See the world!  It’s there for the taking, I’m telling you!”

Those of us who’d returned would have followed Green Jake and Peter to the ends of the earth after the way they had bested the strangers who’d hurt Jenny.  This time there was no equivocation.  In addition to myself, five others swore to Green Jake that they would go on the journey: Wally Triboulet, Darrold Durmad, Abie Colvyr, and the brothers, John and Steven Ermingild.

Jake had a little tube.  He said a friend had given it to him as a way to get in touch.  Just after we’d agreed to the expedition, Jake went outside the tavern and snapped the tube in half.  It made a funny sound, a kind of deep chime like a big, big bell.  Like those giant brass bells they have at the Hall of Good Repute in Stair. It was strange… a much bigger sound than a little tube should make.  And after he’d broken it, Jake just grinned and said “Should be on their way, lads.”  We asked who of course, but he wouldn’t tell us.  He just smiled and said it was a friend of his and we’d know it when they got here.

Two days later, a person flew into town.  Actually flew.  This person soared through the clear blue autumn sky, landed gently by the tavern and walked right inside as though they knew exactly where they was going.  I saw this with my own two eyes.  It was late in the afternoon, and I was on the way to the tavern myself.  A mage!  Well, I’m sure you can guess that us townsfolk had never seen a thing like it.  We had only heard about mages, stories from far off places.  I was eager to see this mage up close!

I made to go into the tavern, and as I did, Darrold Durmad came out, his face bright red.  He was almost shaking.  I grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Darrold!” I said, “What’s wrong?” But he just shook his head, and as he did I heard a burst of laughter from inside the tavern.  I could hear Jake laughing, but there was another laugh that was musical, and sweet, totally unlike Jake’s hearty guffaw or Peter’s little chuckle.  I headed inside, not knowing what to expect.  

Green Jake was there with Peter, as usual, and standing with her back to me was a woman.  When I entered, she turned slightly to look at me.  She was a middle aged woman, and a bit chubby but she had the prettiest hazel eyes.  What really struck me was how intense her expression was. When she turned and looked at me her eyes were wide and unblinking and her brow was knitted.  She was almost glaring, though she didn’t look angry, just interested.  And I felt scrutinized in a way I never had before.  I locked eyes with her, and before I knew it something … changed.  Her eyes weren’t hazel anymore, they were a kind of green with golden flecks and she wasn’t a plump middle aged woman at all, but someone else, like … royalty, but with the wilderness still in it is the only thing I can think of.  The most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.  She was so pretty I couldn’t talk!  It made me embarrassed and I stammered a bit.  Jake laughed and came to my rescue, introducing me.  I barely heard him until he said, “..and this is Mildred Scrutts, who will be joining us on the expedition.  You may address her as Auntie.” 

And then, all of a sudden she was just a plump, faintly smiling, middle aged woman again.

Well sirs, I just couldn’t get words out.  I managed a how’d’ye’do or something similar, and then I turned around and walked right out of the tavern, my face, really my whole body burning, just like Darrold.  And just like Darrold, there was an eruption of laughter from inside after I had left, but it was good natured, and I didn’t mind it.

That evening, one after another, all the lads met Auntie Scrutts, and one after another, they all had their tongues tied and their faces turn beet red.  Well, it turned out to be some kind of magic that made her look so pretty.  Auntie called it a glamer.  I never did forget it, but once she dropped the illusion, I was able to talk to her without blushing and falling all over myself like a fool.  She was a remarkable woman!  She had been an honest-to-goodness Battle Mage!

Machines of the ancients, that was what she said all magic boiled down to, including the illusion that she had used on the boys and I when we first met.  They don’t call themselves mages or wizards, you know.  Called herself a prophet of engines, said that’s what the ancients had called themselves.  Anyway.  She said magic was the machines of the ancients, “Foglets,” she said.  “All around us, there are machines so tiny you can’t even see them.  The ancients called it the Useful Mist.”

“If one only knows the passwords to use these tiny machines, one can use it to do the most marvelous things!” 

Auntie tried to teach some of us these passwords, once, but she got frustrated.  We weren’t intoning correctly.  Apparently the ancients had made the passwords deliberately difficult to say, and they had to be combined with precise movements.  This was so the useful mist didn’t do anything bad by accident.  That’s what we were told.  Well, it was too hard for us.  But not for her.  She could use it to fly, to make fire, to create light, to make herself invisible or beautiful, all manner of amazing things. 

Anyway, she was the friend Jake had been waiting for, and after she came to town, he gave us two more days to settle our affairs, to pack up and get ready.  My folks were not happy with my decision, I can tell you that, but they saw I was too stupid and stubborn to argue with.  I guess nearly all young men get like that at a certain point, and my Ma and Pa were wise enough to know it.

We got our stuff, and we set out across the scrubland, with Jake leading the way.  Auntie Scrutts walked next to him, and then us lads – with our hatchets and knives, a few of us with bows.  First the Ermingild brothers, then Wally and Darrold, and Abie and me in the back with Peter the Shadow stalking along behind us, heeling us, almost.  We were in high spirits indeed.  We never could have guessed what was coming at us.

After walking the scrubland for a few hours, we found the Track and began to follow it.  The Track is like a metal road, a strip of steel made by the ancients who also made the Useful Mist.  It never rusted and stretched off into the horizon reflecting the blue sky in its polished surface.  At regular intervals it was combined with an odd kind of stone that the old ones had used and shaped and which looked very smooth and regular – like it had been poured instead of carved.

As we followed the Track, Auntie Scrutts told us about how the old ones had a carriage of metal that levitated along it at fantastic, eye-watering speeds.  We joked about how useful it would have been to have the carriage working, but so few of the things the ancients made worked now.

Someone, Darrold I think, got up the courage to ask Auntie why she didn’t just fly to the Peak of Silence instead of walking with us.  She grunted.

“Believe me, I would if I could!” she said, “Dead magic zone.  There are some places where there is no Useful Mist.  Usually in places the ancients never really lived.  There might have been some around the Track, at one time.  But it’s gone.”

The afternoon of the fourth day, we saw the Peak of Silence rising in the northwest, a shadowy fang jagged against clouds bloody and bruised in the fading sunlight.  At camp that night, even Jake was quiet, contemplative. 

He called me over and he looked so serious.  I’ll never forget it.  He said, “If things don’t go as we expect, you must take Auntie and run.  Promise me.”

At first I tried to tell him that he shouldn’t worry – but my words felt empty even to me, and eventually I promised.  And just after I did so, we heard a commotion from Wally, who had been named one of the lookouts.  Jake and I rushed over to him as others from around the camp converged on the same spot.

A thing stood there in front of him, brandishing a long black spear.  It had a humanoid profile, but stood almost eight feet tall.  It was draped in rotting black rags that gave it a terrible spectral look.  The hands and forearms were bare, and this was the only flesh I could see.  Even the face had been covered by a kind of black mesh, designed to allow vision out, but not in.  The little bit of flesh that was uncovered was dark grey-green and looked sickly and wrinkled.  The thing shifted the long spear in its bony hands.  As we joined Wally, it started to scream, an awful, high-pitched sound.

Jake and Peter immediately drew swords.  Jake thrust high, but the thing blocked his blow with its spear and then whipped it around and low to take Jake’s feet out from under him. Jake fell hard, but as he did so, Peter came up and over Jakes body in a leaping thrust with the smallsword which he drove through the creatures ribs.  It gave a shriek and backed away even as Peter pulled the sword from the wound.  The rest of us were still rooted to the spot.  I didn’t see any blood come from the wound.  Instead there was this nasty black goo and an awful choking smell like hot tar.  Peter kept attacking it, beating it back with blows from his smallsword and dagger, as Jake stood groggily.  Auntie said something to him, I couldn’t hear what, but Jake shook his head no.  He picked up his sword and charged the thing, calling on us to follow him.

That finally snapped us out of our battle hypnosis.  We followed Jake and in a moment we had the thing surrounded, all of us poking, slashing, cutting and beating at it.  It set about itself furiously, whipping the spear around and whinnying and screeching like a wounded horse, but we had the better of it at that point and just overwhelmed it.  After we’d filled the black cloth covering it with holes, the robes and hood covered with that black goo, it fell to the ground.  There, it arched its back horribly and then stopped moving altogether.  The hot tar smell was overwhelming, stifling – I couldn’t breathe and I backed off.  Abie Colvyr threw up.

“Gods, the stink!” he said, wiping his chin and backing away.

We examined it from a short distance.  Auntie was the first one to speak.  “It’s one of the Hollow Folk,” she said.

I think Wally was the one who asked, “What’s that?”

Auntie shook her head.  “A kind of mutant.  They have human blood in them, but they aren’t human.  Maybe this thing’s great-great grandfathers were human, hard to say when the devolution began taking hold, but today they are little better than animals and they are more than happy to eat human flesh.”

Jake and Peter poked at it while I tended to Wally and Darrold, who had both been wounded by the thing.  The wounds themselves had not been serious, thankfully.  After several of us poked at the body and were satisfied that there were no valuables or anything to take, Jake grabbed the spear and handed it to Auntie.

Auntie took it with a curious expression on her face.  The spear was made out of some kind of dark metal, and had no shine or luster.  The head of the spear was a foot long and sharp not only at the point but also on the edges – the weapon could be used for cutting or piercing.  There was a strange and ugly symbol on the socket where it met the haft, a little pictograph that reminded me unpleasantly of worms and spiders. 

“It’s not a weapon of the aged ones,” she said.  “And as far as I can tell, it’s not enchanted.  But the implements of the hollow folk are said to be black luck.  We’d probably best destroy it,” she said.

Jake was having none of it. “We could get a decent amount of money for this in Stair!  No way we are going to just throw it away, especially not after we fought for it!”  There was general agreement from the rest of the group, especially from Wally.  I was quiet, and I noticed Abie and Peter were too.

Auntie looked about, and seeing she was outnumbered, shrugged and said “Have it your way then.  It’s probably just a superstition after all.”

We wound up taking it with us.  Wally carried it proudly, replacing the hatchet he’d brought from home.

 

As the following day dawned, we left the path of the Track, now using the silhouette of the mountain as our guide and travelling northwest.  The land became drier and rockier as we progressed, the scrubland giving way to cracked earth and orange pebbles.  The little stones slid when they were stepped on, making the going slow and slightly treacherous.  There was little vegetation here and little respite from the burning sun.  At midday we found a cliff face that offered some cover and decided to camp there rather than risk heat sickness.

We continued our journey as the moon rose, bright and near full, wrapped with a wisp of cloud that made the middle of it hazy, a little like the heat mirages that had rippled the air the day before.  We traveled during the night the last couple of days, and finally came to the blasted land that marked the perimeter of the forbidden mountain: the Quiet.  We knew we had come to its border when we saw the first of the huge stone blocks.

These were enormous pieces of stone, much too regular to be natural – cubes, or triangular or pentagonal prisms standing upright, gigantic black rocks looming over us, each ten to thirty feet tall, with matching depth and width.  Each one was a singular mass of ebon granite.  At first they were sparse, maybe fifty or sixty feet from each other, but as we went deeper in they became more and more common, until we were picking our way through a maze of stones, the forbidding masses forming a labyrinth through which we moved.  It felt ominous there, among those stones.  How had they come to be there was a mystery – there was no rock like it for miles and miles in any direction that we knew of, and they were so huge no one knew how they might have been brought together to make these sinister passages.

The stones clustered closer and closer together until we had to move in single file.  The rocks threw dismal shadows in the bright moonlight, and it seemed as if everything was engineered to make us turn back.  But Jake kept pushing ahead and Peter kept herding us along from behind, and finally we came to a great clearing. The mountain rose before us from the center of this network of baleful slabs.

We could see that the base of the mountain was girt with the same black boulders that formed the labyrinth we had just passed through, a sable belt of granite around the gloomy peak.  Then Jake spoke, his voice confident, breaking the silent spell that had gripped us.

“Well, Auntie, can you work magic here?”

Auntie tilted her head to one side and swayed, her hands and fingers extended in rigid, unnatural claws as she made a sound.  A globe of light appeared in the air beside her head, bathing the black rock behind us and sand and pebbles in front of us in a white glow.

That was answer enough for Jake, who said, “OK.  We stop here while Auntie scouts ahead.”

Again, Auntie Scrutts locked her wrists and fingers into a gnarled configuration that reminded me of an old tree, and she swayed slightly as she intoned a word that started in a low pitch and rose quickly.  The sound stopped abruptly and as it did, the light and Auntie both winked out of existence.

Green Jake wouldn’t let us have a fire, and the night air was chilly.  This part of the land didn’t hold moisture and though it got hot during the day, nights were cool or even cold.  We set up a watch, and those of us who could do so got a little sleep.  I couldn’t fall asleep myself, and I noted that Jake and Peter never even laid down.  Jake kept pacing around, and Peter leaned against one of the ebon slabs, humming to himself tunelessly now and then.

The sun was not quite over the horizon when Auntie suddenly reappeared in our midst, face grim.  Jake immediately started interrogating her, but she raised her hand palm out to stop him.

“Breakfast first.  Then we’ll talk.”

Jake roused the rest of the camp and we ate.  I didn’t have much of an appetite, and I wasn’t the only one.  It was such a daunting place, there among the dark sarsens.  They felt like cenotaphs without graves, purposeless menhirs, tombstones for the unknown.  I forced myself to eat a little of the smoked meat and hard tack.

After breakfast, Auntie spoke.

“I found the entrance.  There is a warning.  I don’t think it is a good idea to ignore the warning,” she said.

“Well, what the hell is it?  What has you spooked?  It’s obvious that there’s nothing living here.”

“That’s just it.  It’s hard to translate, but I think I managed it.  There is a huge stone just outside the entryway I found, carved with a message.  I believe it is from the ancients, the same ones who made the Useful Mist.”

“Well, what the hell did it say?”

Auntie took a deep breath and closed her eyes.  Then she spoke, and her voice had an odd, neutral quality to it, almost as if she was channeling the message rather than simply reciting it.

“This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!  Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.” *

She stopped, abruptly, and then said, “There’s more but…that’s as much as I could translate.  The rest of it is too faded to read.”

We were all silent for a moment.  But then Jake exploded in laughter and laughed long and loud.  When he finished, he exclaimed, “Bullshit!  I tell you what, there’s something in there, something that will make us rich, and this ‘warning’ is nothing more than a way of scaring folks off.  We are going in there.  We will be careful, of course, but we are going to take what there is to take, and we will live lives of luxury after we do!”

After that, we knew we were going in.

We followed Auntie to the base of the mountain.  Sure enough, there was a slab there engraved with the odd symbols the ancients used.  They were worn shallow with time.  Nearby, a massive set of double doors.  Jake took a long metal bar from his pack.  He pushed the tip of it between the doors and worked it back and forth until they were spread apart just enough for a man to slip through sideways if he held his breath.  Jake wiggled through and the rest of us followed.

It was dark inside, and Jake had Darrold, Wally, and Steven Ermingild light lanterns.  In the light we could see we were in a room that was made entirely of the odd, smooth, grey stone that the ancients used so much.  What furniture there was had rotted away to the point of being unidentifiable  There was another set of double doors on the opposite side of the room.  They had no handles and looked like they should slide open.  Jake tried the bar again, but he couldn’t get it in far enough.  After sweating and cursing for fifteen minutes or so, he threw the pry bar in frustration and it clanged loudly off the ground.

“Pete,” he said, “get over here and get this thing open for us.”

Peter glided up to those doors and took out a little wire.  He pushed the wire between them and started fishing around, head cocked like he was listening for something.  He took the wire out and bent it into a funny hooked shape, then re-inserted it and moved it slowly up and down.  I was close enough that I heard a little pinging sound.  Peter must have been listening for it because as soon as I heard it he jerked on the wire as hard as he could.  The doors retracted into the walls faster and slammed to a stop with a loud bang.  A dark hallway was revealed behind them. 

Then we all heard a new sound, a sort of rumble like far away thunder.  It seemed to come down the hallway at us, echoing off the walls.  It was a fearsome sound, and it seemed to us that the manmade stone trembled a little as it passed.

Auntie looked real hard at Jake.  “Are you sure about this?” she asked.

“Sure I’m sure,” he answered.  He still sounded confident.

 

 

III.

Awakened, its roar has been unleashed.
All that is left is for its breath to be released.
Comrades close, you close your eyes,
but x-rays projected from the gathering fire
shine through your eyelids and their skin
so that you are forced to see within
their bodies for a moment in time as the flash
hits like the crack of the lash and turns their flesh to ash.
The thermal energy melts all:
muscle material splashes against the wall.
marrow boiled instantaneously,
explodes bones simultaneously,
the total dissolution of form
in the path of this nuclear storm.
The drake leaves a memory of atomic rape
formerly human, now just a shaded shape
that absorbed light and heat from the blast
which bleached the concrete

leaving only a shadow to contrast.

 

We pushed on into the next room.  It was a little bigger.  The middle space was filled with walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling, on which there were plaques with funny symbols.  Auntie looked these over curiously.  Jake wanted to hurry on, but Auntie wouldn’t budge.  She moved slowly around the walls, looking over all the symbols.  Finally she came to one, a large one, a trefoil around a small central circle.  It looked ominous.  Like one circle in another, with equal parts of the outer circle missing and present.

Auntie pulled out a leather-bound book she always carried and which she scribbled notes.  She paged through it.  I looked over her shoulder as she came to a page with the same symbol on it.  She swore softly.

“What’s it mean?” I asked her.

“It means dangerous energy.  Like a fire or a light that can also make you sick.”

Jake overheard her.  “Can’t you do something about it?” he asked.

Auntie squinted at him.  “No,” she said acidly, “This one I can’t do anything about.  If we go in there, we take our chances with it.”

Jake nodded solemnly, then grinned.  “Well, never hurts to ask,” he said.

He moved to the far end of the room.  Another door.  This one was also made of metal, but it was a single door, and it had a handle as well as a steel kickplate at the bottom.  When it didn’t yield immediately, Jake put his shoulder into it, and it popped open, crashing against the wall in the hallway it opened into and rebounding.  Jake stepped through and just a moment later I heard the sigh of steel sliding on steel as Jake drew his sword.  “Peter,” he called, “get up here.”

Peter had already been moving and he, too, drew his weapons as he stopped side by side with Jake.  I was just behind them and could see they were staring at a pair of oddly lit globes.  They were about the size of a human fist, and danced around each other, swooping and occasionally disappearing for a moment only to wink back on a little later; they shed an eerie, pale blue light.  Jake stepped forward and was about to strike at one of the lights when Auntie’s voice rang out.

“Stop!” she cried.

Jake did his best to check the swing, but momentum had carried his blade very close to the globe, no more than a foot away.  As I watched, a crackling, jagged line of light leapt from the globe and connected with Jake’s sword.  There was a flash that illuminated everything and immediately Jake’s whole body tensed, every muscle going rigid, his face frozen in a taut grimace.  The line of light remained connected to the sword, and as Auntie rushed forward, I saw it pulse horribly and Jake’s body stiffened even further, his eyes bulging from the sockets, limbs trembling with tension.  The other globe started to swoop in a flight that brought it ever closer to Jake.  I could smell his skin burning.

Auntie had moved into range at this point, and she again made odd gestures with her hands, before saying three words with a rising intonation and pointing the index finger of each hand towards one of the globes.  Something like silver or polished steel shot from her fingertips with an earsplitting bang and instantly both globes went dark, exposing a metallic core of some kind which clattered to the floor.  Mixed with the burning odor was something else now, something like the smell of a big storm.

Jake, free to finally move again, bent double and took huge gasps of air.  He stood that way for a couple of minutes, heaving, before finally standing up rubbing his hand.

“What were they, Auntie?” he asked, indicating the smoking metallic cores with his sword.

“Eel globes,” Auntie replied, “devices of the old ones.  They had different behavior depending on who was around them.  If they recognized you as a friend, they could be ordered to follow you and used as light sources.  But if they didn’t…”

“If they didn’t, then they’d attack, huh?  Gods!  I thought I was going to die!  Every muscle in my body was tensed, and I couldn’t do anything!  It felt as though even my heart and lungs were stopped!  And my hand – have you ever seen anything like this?”  He held his hand out and I could see that there was a small black hole surrounded by a burn mark on the palm.

Auntie nodded gravely.  “That’s the attack.  It’s lectrical.  You have to watch out for lectrical energy.  Be careful with that hand, Jake.  It could get infected.”

“I’ll be alright.  Let’s keep going,” he answered.  But I could tell he was in pain.

After we gathered ourselves, Jake walked further down the dark hallway and we followed him, stepping gingerly over the corpses, or cores, or whatever they were from the eel globes.  There was another door at the end and several on either side.  Jake opened the door immediately to his right.

The first thing that caught my eye was the skeleton seated at the desk.  The place was a study of some kind.  Jake and Peter started rifling through the desk, and Auntie took a close look at the skeleton.  It was clothed in the remnants of some uniform, it looked like, I could see a couple of yellow stripes on one of the arms – it looked military.  Auntie took something off the man’s chest.  I saw it was a picture of a face.  It had some of the funny symbols we associate with the old ones on it too.  Auntie studied the badge carefully.

Jake’s low whistle broke the silence.  They’d finished going through the desk, and had started looking the skeleton over themselves.  What Jake was holding looked like the giant business end of a wasp, the abdomen, set at ninety degrees to a sword handle.  It was jet black and shiny and there was something like a stinger jutting from the thing.  There was a little switch on the side of the segmented abdomen part, and Jake flicked this.  A couple of dim red lights flickered on and there was a whining sound.  It was soft but it set the bones of my skull vibrating against each other so that I could feel the sound in my teeth, and there was a taste like biting aluminum foil.  Auntie and Pete both took big steps back.

“Careful,” said Auntie, and there was a note in it I didn’t like, almost a pleading.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The old ones called them dews, but we don’t know why – they used that word to mean the water on the grass in the morning,” answered Auntie, “it’s a kind of weapon.  You can think of it like a crossbow, but more dangerous.  A LOT more dangerous.”  She shrugged.  “Maybe dew is meant to be poetic.  Some metaphor that doesn’t make sense to us now, or maybe it had another meaning.  Lots of the cultures of the old ones had poetic names for their weapons.”

“Dangerous how?” I asked.  My curiosity was piqued.

“It’s hard to describe if you’ve never seen it,” said Jake, “Pete and I only saw them used a couple of times.  There’s a line that comes out of it, a line of light, a little like the eel globes just now, but much more powerful.  It’s so bright that if you look at it too long you can go blind – like if you look at the sun for too long.  It’ll go through anything.  The first time I saw one of these used was on the battlefield, and the enemy was in ranks at least ten deep.  The line went through all ten guys and then keep going.  Guys who get hit with a thing like this die.  Always.  Even if they only get grazed.  There’s something in the light that gets into the body somehow and makes it kind of… dissolve,” he paused for a moment.  “You know how when you drop a piece of day old bread into your soup, it kind of swells up and gets soft and soggy, and if you wait too long it’ll just kind of come apart?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

 “OK, it’s like that but with a human being, and it happens fast.  Like in a few seconds.”

I didn’t like the picture that formed in my head then.

Auntie scowled. “We should just leave now.  We can take that thing to Stair and sell it for a fortune.”

Jake grinned.  “We aren’t leaving quite yet.  I bet there’s a few more of these around.  We may as well get a few fortunes while we’re here.”

We returned to the hallway and investigated the rest of the doors to the sides, but they didn’t yield anything as amazing or valuable as the dew, mostly just bones and dust, and old rotten furniture. 

That left just the door at the end.   We approached it.  It was made of metal, silvery, and seemed to slide shut from the top and bottom.  It was almost as large as the doors that had led into the place.  It didn’t have an obvious handle.  There was a piece of glass on the righthand side of the door about head height, the same size and shape as a coin, and underneath that were a couple of buttons.  Auntie studied this for a little bit.  She pushed one of the buttons, but nothing happened.  Pushed it a few more times.  Nothing.  She scowled and scratched her head.  She got out the picture of the man and studied it for a while.  I started to ask Jake what was happening but he shushed me. 

Then she held her arms as if she was about to dance, one palm face down with the forearm parallel to the floor, the elbow of her other arm almost touching the back of that hand and the fingers of both twined in odd patterns.  She spoke a few words – I couldn’t tell you what they were because they were so strange – and she snapped her arms so that they were suddenly a mirror image of her previous pose.

Only now, she was he.  A bearded man stood where Auntie had once been, dressed in a navy blue uniform with a couple of golden stripes circling his arms.  Her glamer!  I thought.  But I didn’t know why she was using it here, at least not right away.  The man that Auntie had become took the picture and pinned it to his chest, then looked deep into the piece of glass at the side of the doorframe and pushed one of the buttons.

The doors slid open and we could see a room with no exits. 

Darrold groaned, “A dead end.  Of all the luck.”

Jake shook his head as he stepped inside, grinning, “No – it’s not.  You’ll see.  Come on,” he waved all of us to come into the little room.

We crowded in, and I saw that inside were a bunch of other buttons. Auntie examined these and then selected one.  The doors slid shut.  The next thing I recall was a funny sensation in my stomach.

“What was that?” someone asked.  I think it was one of the Ermingilds.

Auntie ignored him.  Jake said “This room goes up and down, and we are going down.”  After a minute or so, there was a soft bumping sensation, and the door opened, only it didn’t open back up into the hall.

It opened up into a vast and dark cavern, so huge that the lights we had didn’t reveal the walls or ceiling.  Stacked inside were thousands of yellow barrels.  Each barrel had that funny trefoil around a circle symbol on it in black.  I didn’t like it – it was like a thousand eyes staring at us.  There was a wide open spot in front of us, which looked like a deliberate pathway.  It was three times again as wide as the main road of our town.

As we came out of the room, I looked back and saw that the doors to the little room had closed again.  I saw too that the room we had been in was contained within a set of steel pillars that went up and up and out of sight and we were at the base of those pillars.  It looked like the special room must go up and down traveling along those pillars.  To the left and rear of them, I spotted one of the odd iron carriages that the old ones had used.  They were common enough that even us lads from the village had seen a couple before.  But they were mostly rusted out hunks of junk.  This one was in absolutely pristine condition.  

I tapped Jake on the back and excitedly pointed it out to him.  His eyes got big and he began to approach it, the rest of us in tow.  Auntie and he looked it over for a while and then she touched a part of it.  There was a little cough and a humming sound as the carriage began to vibrate slightly.

Jake let out a loud whoop.  This was what he had been after – selling this thing in Stair would make us all richer than our wildest dreams for the rest of our lives, and even I knew it.  As the echoes of his joyful cry died off, out in the darkness somewhere I heard an answering sound.  A kind of heavy clank.  For some reason the idea that there might be something moving around down here besides us after all filled me with fear.  I wasn’t the only one that had heard it either.  The rest of the team was looking around with worried expressions.  It came again.

Clank.

It might have been my imagination but it sounded a little louder this time.

Clank.

It wasn’t my imagination.  The sound was louder.  And it sounded deliberate.  It’s hard to describe, but I could tell it was on purpose. 

Clank.

It was coming from somewhere beyond the perimeter of our light, from the opposite direction of the pillars than the carriage was parked.

Clank.

The sound came again, and this time, just preceding it, I had detected the sound of metal straining against metal.  There was no mistaking it this time, whatever it was out there in the dark was getting closer.  My heart started hammering in my chest and I felt a freezing sensation in my stomach.  I expected to hear it again, as it had acquired a sort of rhythm but there was only silence.

Jake was staring in the direction of noise, face curled into a disdainful snarl of anger.  The sight quelled my fear somehow.  He pointed the stinger into the darkness, stood totally defiant and roared.  It was primal.  Even in the low light I could see the spittle fly from his mouth as he put everything he had into has answering scream.

There were a series of clanks and the floor … shook slightly.  That’s what I remember.  And I felt I could see something at the edge of the light, something huge, something that towered over us.  I got the sense of movement and reflection, and suddenly a huge serpentine head, gleaming in strange blue metal, broke the liminal darkness.  It was something like a cross between a snake and one of the mountain lions who hunt the wilderness, only ten, fifteen times as big, easily. It stepped forward, covered in armor, cobalt scales polished to a mirrored sheen, staring at Jake.  The eyes, or maybe I should say the eye, was strange – it looked like a single glowing red band of glass across the thing’s face, but I could tell it was focused on him.  It spoke, but not through its mouth.  It said something no one understood from black circles that were mounted above its shoulders.  It sounded threatening.  Whatever it said, as it spoke, I became aware of Auntie behind us, jabbing away at the buttons to open the door to the strange room that brought us here.  Later on she told me that hearing the sound from the black circles was the moment when she had become truly afraid.

Fear is a gift.  Whenever your instincts tell you something is wrong, you should listen close.

There was a moment then where everything was sort of suspended.  No one moved and neither did the thing.

Then there was a clatter behind us as the doors of the room slid open.  Jake activated the stinger.

Just like they had described, this line of light poured out of the stinger and hit the thing in the chest. But then… then it bounced, reflecting off the weird blue metal.

The reflected beam struck Peter center mass and went right through him.  It was strange – I expected it to have weight, to push him back somehow, but it didn’t.  He didn’t even jerk.  He just sort of came apart in a shower of blood and bits of skin.

I had been backing away, even as the dragon, for now I realized that is what it was, reared up to its full height as if it was gathering energy.  I didn’t even realize it until I tripped over the lip of the door to the odd room.  I feel backward into Auntie and we both went down behind the doors as they began to close.

Being behind those doors.  That’s what saved us.

The dragon opened its mouth and breathed at us. I closed my eyes as it started but I still saw the flash.  The fire that came out was pink and white, and I could see not only right through my eyelids, but in that moment I could see through everyone’s skin.  I could see their bones, their blood vessels, everything, but only for a moment.  Then the human shapes in front of us began to deform horribly.  Their eyes came out of the sockets – I don’t know why.  Auntie said later it might have something to do with pressure, or it might have been that the dragonfire boiled some fluid in the eyeballs and made them pop.  Before the doors slammed completely shut and ended the terrible vision, I saw them reduced to blacked, skeletal things, withered arms curled to their ribcages, the flesh and muscle all melted away.  It was even worse than seeing Peter come apart.

Next came a sound that took my breath away. It started like a low rumble, and gradually grew in volume and pitch.  It got to the point where it sounded like a thousand cattle stampeding, and it kept getting louder.  Auntie had begun hitting the buttons inside the door to the little room.  As I watched she opened her mouth and began to scream, but as the sound rose and rose in volume I realized I couldn’t hear her.  Everything else was rendered silent in the face of the sound that now poured from the direction of the fire like a physical wall.  And still it grew.

As the noise approached the edge of sanity, I thought to flee into the dark, to run, to get anywhere else but where the sound was, but there was nowhere to run to.  Just as I thought I could bear it no more, the sound finally ended, the echoes bouncing off the cavern walls, slowly receding, now it sounded like the rush of waves and water, but still louder than anything I had heard in my life.

As the noise died away, Auntie stood and jammed the buttons on the inside of the room.  She was breathing fast.  I think there might have been another kind of funny sensation in my stomach, but I can’t recall clearly, because suddenly I realized that the surfaces in the room were burning to the touch.  I leapt off the floor and jumped from one foot to another trying to stay off the tiles.  The heat was suffocating, I could barely breathe, it felt as though the air scorched my lungs with every inhalation.  I looked over at Auntie, she had dropped the glamer at some point.  Her exposed skin was red.

The doors slid open and I recognized the hallway that we had come down.  There was no need to speak.  We knew the others were lost to us. 

Everyone was dead.

We bolted down the hallway, fleeing out of the strange structure.  Neither of us stopped until we got back to our camp, and we only paused there briefly.  Auntie found that part of my shirt where I had not been fully behind the steel doors had melted to my shoulder.  There was no pain – I believe in hindsight that the nerve endings had been completely burned away.  There was no blood either – I think it had been evaporated.  She did the best she could to remove the blackened, hardened cloth, and patch the wound.  Both of us were scorched, but we had been extraordinarily lucky, and we both knew it.

We didn’t stop to rest at the camp.  We gathered our few things and got away from the mountain as fast as we could.  We didn’t talk.  For several days we just moved as fast as we could away from the mountain.  Three days later, we saw a shape in the air above the black peaks and I heard the roar, again.  Even at that distance, miles away, it was loud. 

It was a statement: “I am here, and I am invincible.”

We spent the first few days constantly moving, only stopping to rest for a few hours here and there.  Once we judged we were far enough away, Auntie looked at my wound again.  She herself was miraculously unhurt.  She told me to be careful.  She said the dragon was a machine of the ancients, a weapon of last resort that they had built, and then, realizing the insanity of such a thing, had locked away.  After everything was over, she looked at the spot where the cloth had melted to my shoulder, and she gave me one of those little tubes that Jake used, and told me to break it if I saw any brown spots on that arm later.  Mellow gnomes, she called them.  She was very worried about them.  Said that the dragonfire was a special kind of fire, a fire that carried sickness and that it could make me sick even years later, and the mellow gnomes would probably be the first indicator that I was getting sick.

Well, it’s been a number of years since all this happened.  And I think I’m lucky.  Certainly that day I was lucky.  But right there, right then, that dragonfire killed all of us.  You see, a couple of years ago, I ran into Auntie.  A chance meeting in Stair.  She didn’t look so good, and it wasn’t just old age.  She was no longer plump.  He cheeks were sunken in and she didn’t have much of her hair any more.  She told me she didn’t think she’d be around much longer.  She was sure the dragonfire had made her sick.

About three months ago I started to get those little brown spots on my arm.  No, I don’t want to show you, and now you wouldn’t want to see it either.

It’s gotten a lot worse, you see.  It’s not just brown spots any more.  The skin there is falling away and most of my shoulder has turned black.  And there’s these lumps there now, these ugly lumps.  I’ve been losing weight.  And I haven’t been feeling so good.

But I will show you something else.

See?  The little tube.  You ever see anything like it?  No, I didn’t think so.  Not many people can make these.  Auntie was one of the only ones.  And when I took it out and broke it, even after all that time, it made that same sound, like a deep bell, which reverberated into the air like a ghost from all those years ago, reaching out to find her.  I broke it three months ago, when I first saw the mellow gnomes.  If Auntie could have come, she would have, and she would have been here by now.

But Auntie never came.

And now, I suppose, the fire will finally have me, too.

When I first started telling you this story, I thought I would end there.  I thought I would let this be a cautionary tale.  But I’m not sure I can, and not sure it is.

I paid, and paid heavily for allowing the fires of my youth to burn so brightly.  But I’m not sure I could have done otherwise, and not sure I would, even had I a chance to go back.

It is the nature of youth and dragons to burn, after all, and all of us – even the dragon – were just following our natures.  So I’ll leave you with this one thing to try to remember, even as you follow your own nature.  Earlier I said you should remember that the fire which warms also consumes.  But the reverse is just as true.

You would do well to remember that the fire which consumes also warms.

 

 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages