Stars! What Inyene wouldn’t give to get her hands on these! a part of me thought out of habit as much as anything else – and then the next worried thought followed on naturally enough. Was I wrong in my belief that the Stone Crown would be safe down here with Fargal, if worse came to the worst? What sort of mechanical monsters could Inyene fashion if all she did was creep down this far to get at the magical gems of the earth that she used to help power them!?
But then, there was another flare of crimson fire from below me, from terribly close by. If Inyene wanted to pry these great treasures from the bones of the mountains, then she would have to also contend with what was causing that fire—
Fargal.
By the glow of the Earth Lights (which were now bright, as the small egg of daylight had become a child’s fingernail or a second, tiny moon far above us) I saw it was Fargal the dragon who was creating the flame.
Ymmen landed before a massive cavern in one of the walls of the well, and still the shaft went further down, at our backs. There was another flash of red, and I saw that the cavern wasn’t long – but it was wide and deep enough to easily hold an ‘entrance hall’ that could accommodate three of Ymmen. Tongues of flame appeared every now and again at the end of this entrance hall, illuminating a bulbous cave at the end of the truncated hall.
And that cave, lit by the occasional flame-snore, was filled with a wall of scales. It was hard to tell where Fargal began or ended in the complication of so many scales – all of which was only made even more confusing by the fact that Fargal did not have any scalar color scheme that I could recognize. If there was any color in the majority of her hide, then it would have to have been a dusty faded sort of gold, but the colors did not stop there. With every slow, and rhythmical breath that swelled and moved the blanket of hide on Fargal’s back, there was set up a shimmer of those same almost-pastel hues that I had seen coming from the Earth Lights above us. Jade greens and ephemeral blues. Dawn pinks and dusk-red sunsets.
“Come closer, Little Sister, Ymmen,” said the voice of the giant dragon in my mind, disturbingly echoing within Ymmen’s as well. The wall of shimmering scales moved, swelled, breathed, and there was the rasp of her scales on stone.
My heart fluttered, but strangely enough I felt no anger or fury coming from that voice. It went some way to putting me more at ease – until I wondered at the cunning of ancient dragons. Even Ymmen told me that he did not understand the ways or the thoughts of the First Brood. What if they were expert liars?
Ymmen huffed a little steam, his own form of anxiousness as he raised his neck to turn to look at me askance with one eye.
“Well, we’re here now anyway—” I whispered, undoing the belt strap that the Master Johannes had showed me how to affix to the molded saddle, and slid from Ymmen’s back in one smooth movement. Suddenly, down here on the floor, the perspective I gained made me realize just how enormous the creature we faced was. If she filled that cavern, she would be three times the size of Ymmen – which made her almost twice the size of Inyene’s monstrous dragon that she had flown against us.
The air down here seemed to grow even more still than it already was somehow, as I took a slow step forward, and then another, and another—
RASSSP! My hair was lifted back by a sudden blast of sooty air, laced with sandalwood and cinnamon. The scales before me were moving far more rapidly, becoming a blurring wall of shifting colors, flashing as they momentarily caught the light—
And I realized that there was suddenly a space before me as the great and ancient wyrm had somehow pulled herself tighter – or that the cavern she had been slumbering in was even larger than I had thought.
It boggled my own perception for a moment as I tried to understand the scale of what it was that I was seeing. That deep shadow was the line of a jaw, I thought, recognizing familiarities with Ymmen’s own biology. It was frilled along the edges with toughened strips of leather skin, like the whiskery edges of beards. The line stretched a long way to a knot of hardened, callused scales that curved upwards by the meters, folding in on themselves to reveal great pillars of yellow and white. Fangs, from which thin rivulets of steam were constantly dribbling outwards. And then, I saw where that curving line of the dragon’s lips stretched a long, long way back to the bony outcrops of a jawbone, and, after that—
An eye.
As my own gaze met it, the eye flickered open, and I was looking into an eye unmistakably a dragon’s, filled with the clearest, lightest blue that I had ever seen in all of my days. But it wasn’t just blue, was it? I thought. It was also shot through with lines of silver and gold, as if a goldsmith had spent an entire kingdom’s fortune gilding just this one part of the creature.
There was a flicker of movement, a momentary shadowing of the eye, as I saw an inner eyelid, almost transparent, wash upwards and back over the giant orb.
“Fargal,” I said, and something in me made me drop to one knee, instinctively.
“Eldest Sister,” Ymmen murmured, his voice directed at Fargal but clearly audible to me. His claws rasped on the ground as he moved, and I could sense him pulling his head up and back, exposing the slightly lighter scales of his long neck to the oldest dragon – a sign of dragon submission.
It wasn’t that we were scared of this Fargal – Okay maybe that was a lie. I was terrified – but more than even that, was this irresistible sense that we were in the presence of a being so ancient and so powerful as to be as close a god as any of us mere mortals would ever lay our eyes upon in this life—or the next.
“Flame keep you, wind rise under you,” the voice of the Eldest Sister of all dragon-kind intoned, and a wave of something – a new type of emotion, and one that I had never felt before – washed through Ymmen. Humility.
“Little child of the Western Wind. You are a dragon-friend, and that is one of the reasons why I can taste you so clearly.” The draconian eye flickered once more. “And that is also the reason why I will not squash you for even daring to disturb my slumber!”
“I – I am sorry, Eldest,” I stammered over the words, immediately fully aware that I was a very small human talking to a very large dragon. “I did not mean to disturb you—” I started to say, before there was a sudden cough of super-heated air, and another rasping sound as the dragon started to move once again.
“DO NOT lie to me, Child of the Western Wind!” the voice of Fargal hammered through my mind, making Ymmen hiss beside me and me quail, shake, and tremor where I knelt.
“But…” I did not think that I had been lying, had I? I surely had no intention to wake this ancient beast – and indeed, it was she who had started to talk to me. No sooner had I thought this, tinged with the arrogance of the Stone Crown, than Fargal’s voice, deep and sonorous and laced with aromatic spices once, again hit me.
“You came here to talk to me, did you not? Do you think that I cannot read what you want in your every breath? In the way you hold yourself? In the way that your heart beats?”
I shivered once more. This wasn’t the same thing as the easy sharing of minds that I did with Ymmen. This ‘reading’ was almost something that I could understand, given that it was an animal type of instinctive ‘reading’ that every predator does as they observe and predict their prey. The wolf understands the doe almost as well as it does itself, as my mother, the Imanu, might have said.