The ground rumbled beneath Echo’s feet. The pit surrounding the island, previously dark with unrelieved shadows, began to emit an orange glow like the embers of a fire that stubbornly refuses to die. Another roar sounded from deep beneath the surface, so ferocious that the ground shook with it.
Dorian gently lowered the still-unconscious Caius to the ground. “It appears we have awoken the beast,” he said.
“That room with the lava wasn’t what the rune meant by fire,” Echo said. Of course it hadn’t been; that would have been far too easy. “This is pyromaniac cat-bird.”
“It’s Super Mario,” Jasper whispered as he leaned over the edge, craning his neck for a better look. “I told you. That’s Bowser, and Caius is Princess Peach.”
“Who’s Mario?” Echo asked, just as quietly.
“We’re all Mario.”
Echo reached for the reserves of magic within her, but she felt empty, like a car out of gas. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “So, what you’re saying is, I have to slay a dragon to save the princess?”
“Prince,” Dorian interjected.
“Whatever.” A tongue of flame flickered to life in Echo’s palm. Her exhaustion seemed to double with the conjuring, but she pushed it aside. She could rest when she was dead.
Dorian moved to stand beside Echo. His hand came up and pulled her behind him. A small, rebellious part of Echo wanted to protest, but a much larger and much saner part had little desire to be the first thing encountered by whatever was living deep within the bowels of the temple.
Even the beast below – which Echo was not entirely prepared to accept as a living, breathing dragon – held back its roar, as if giving its audience time to adjust to the impossibility of its existence.
The ground began to tremble again, this time with even more intensity. Echo imagined the great beast rising from its slumber, uncoiling a long, scaly body with slow, languorous movements. Gusts of wind rose from the pit, and the dragon – a real, live dragon – emerged from the shadowy depths. Echo’s brain fought to process what she was seeing. Wings spread wide as the creature stretched, claws brushing the walls of its cave, its scales the pale color of moonlight on a clear night, its tail lashing this way and that. She had always wanted to see a dragon – as any child whose head was full of stories would – but these were not ideal circumstances.
Flashes of memory zipped through her mind. Caius tracing constellations of stars in the night sky, telling her the stories behind them, which gods and other figures from his culture’s folklore they were meant to represent. Dorian regaling a bedridden Jasper with old Drakharin fairy tales, full of dragons guarding troves of priceless treasures and the intrepid young warriors who tamed such wild beasts. All those stories were as good as legend, taking place so far back in history that if there was any truth to them, it had been so thoroughly gilded over by time. The one thing all the tales had in common was that dragons had walked the earth once, but none had been seen for thousands and thousands of years. They were, Caius had explained, considered part of Drakharin history. None, he had insisted, were said to have survived the rise of human dominance.
“Caius told me your people believed dragons were extinct,” Echo said, feeling oddly betrayed.
“We thought they were,” Dorian said. His voice was full of marvel, like that of a little boy who has just learned that Santa is real.
“Does that look extinct to you?” Echo gestured, rather unnecessarily, to the dragon holding itself aloft with indolent flaps of its wings, sniffing the air with a long snout, nostrils flaring. A milky white film – cataracts, perhaps – covered its eyes, though it didn’t appear to hinder the beast much. It could probably smell them.
Dorian shook his head in awestruck wonder. “It’s incredible.”
“Not the word I would have chosen for a thing that’s about to kill us and then probably pick its teeth with our bones, but okay, sure, let’s run with that.” The dragon rolled its neck, a gesture that would have been comical considering just how long its neck was, but it was difficult to find anything attached to the creature the slightest bit humorous.
Never laugh at live dragons. The quote bubbled to the surface of Echo’s brain. Probably Tolkien. How fitting.
The dragon snapped its jaws experimentally, as if testing its range of motion. It looked vaguely hungry. Echo didn’t like that one bit. “How do we kill this bad boy?”
Dorian shot her an appalled glare. “We are not going to kill it,” he hissed. “It is very likely the last of its kind. I will not be the Drakharin held responsible for rendering their species extinct.”
“Okay,” Echo said, keeping her eyes on the dragon. It dipped and twisted, flying around the island. It turned lazy circles, head swiveling to and fro as it rose, higher and higher, until its wings were brushing the roof of the cavern. A long forked tongue snaked out, rasping over lips peeled back from hideously sharp teeth. It was licking its chops.
It was licking its chops.
“Shit,” Echo said, ever the soul of brevity.
The sound of her expletive made the dragon tick its head to the side. Those unnerving eyes narrowed into even more unnerving slits. It huffed and it puffed, raising itself as high as the cavernous ceiling would allow.
A sound rumbled from the depths of its chest, rather like that of a bellows. Gills that Echo hadn’t noticed before opened at the sides of its neck.
But it wasn’t underwater. Why on earth would it need gills?
It didn’t take long for Echo to learn why.
The scales on its neck opened and closed, and through the narrow openings their movement revealed, Echo saw a glow, low and red. It was an angry glow, full of menace.
Echo had half a second to bask in the idea that dragons really did breathe fire before the very real dragon breathed very real fire. Directly at her.
Her own fire responded without conscious instruction from her terrified brain. Her magic coursed through her body, driven by sheer instinct. She felt it spill not just from her hands, but from every inch of her exposed skin.
A wall of fire formed around her, brilliant white chasing away the shadows in the cavern. The dragon’s blazing breath collided with Echo’s own flames, and was overpowered by them. The fire was startlingly mundane, considering it had originated in a dragon’s belly. Echo’s, on the other hand, was pure magic.
The dragon’s fire petered out and Echo felt hers fade in the absence of an immediate threat. Pain flared hot and bright at the base of her skull, so powerfully that in better circumstances, with fewer fire-breathing dragons, she might have vomited.
“Can we kill it if it tries to kill us first?” As it was so clearly trying to do. Echo kept her eyes on the dragon as she directed her question at Dorian. The creature seemed in no particular rush to lunge at her again, but one could never be sure. Most of the dragons she’d read about had been mercurial at best, acrimonious at worst. “Then can we kill it?”
“We are not going to kill it,” Dorian hissed.
Before Echo could argue with him, the dragon roared and dropped its massive body into a dive. And that was when Caius woke up.