‘Dev.’ Kheda’s voice was puzzled, pleading, even though he had no notion what to say or ask of the wizard. He shivered as a sudden chill shook him, gooseflesh raised on his bloody arms. His bruises and lacerations ached viciously and his damp and foul clothes clung coldly to his shrinking flesh. The flame in Dev’s hand burned taller and brighter and the light filling the cavern turned to an ominous scarlet. The golden flame within the egg glowed more fiercely, writhing and twisting. Dev’s flame spilled over the edges of his hand and flowed across the egg, dimming that inner radiance. The scarlet fire ran around the mage’s face, still pressed to the surface of the ruby, and down the sides of the egg to pool around the wizard’s knees. His dagger was melting in its scabbard, drops of metal burning their way through the wood and leather. Stray diamonds and sapphires cracked and shattered where the burning magic touched them. Dev didn’t react. His eyes were open but fixed, as if he stared into some unimaginable distance. Scarlet fire burned in his pupils and the rapturous smile on his face widened. Kheda shivered. All around the chill was deepening, biting deep into his bones. Ahead, the egg burned with a ferocity that he could feel drying his lips and eyes, scorching his exposed skin. He tried to take a step backwards but could not do it.
I cannot leave him. I must see this through. The golden flame was filling the egg now, expanding from its white heart. Dev’s scarlet fire was still pouring from his hand, coating the ruby, stifling the incandescence within.
‘Dev!’ Kheda took a pace forward and the scarlet fire flared, heat striking him like a physical blow. He winced and stepped back, rubbing at tears provoked by the piercing light. He squinted painfully and saw a horror that froze the breath beneath his breastbone.
Dev’s hand was burning: not merely holding the blood-red magic, but being consumed by it. The skin of his palm was gone, revealing the white bones beneath. As Kheda watched, his hand became a skeletal lattice wrapped in scarlet flame. The skin of his wrist began to peel back, tendons shrivelling to nothing, fibrous muscle laid bare, glistening, before the creeping tide of magic devoured it to leave blood-smeared ivory. The twin bones of his forearm were revealed, finger-width by finger-width.
It’s like some nightmare of ulcerating rot in a wound. Can I save him, if I can get to him? If I cut off the arm before it devours the rest of him? At the elbow? At the shoulder?
Kheda stepped forward again but the heat was a physical bather now. Bathed in ruby light, his hands and face ached ferociously. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to force his way any closer through the excruciating pain. In the shadows behind him, his back was colder than he had ever known, knotted with fierce pain to counterbalance the searing agony before him.
Is this all I can do? Just watch?
Dev still smiled with that beatific stillness. Where his face was laid against the surface of the egg, the skin had burned away and the flesh beneath with it, his jaw and teeth exposed in a deathly rictus. The fiery glow spread, consuming his weather-beaten cheek and his thin lips, peeling back his eyelids to expose the socket beneath. In the hollow of bone, his eye was a ball of sweating flame. His other eye, as yet untouched, glowed ever brighter with scarlet fire.
The fiery gold within the egg pulsed, its brilliance fading with every labouring beat. The flame still flowing from the calcined bones of Dev’s hand darkened to a clotted crimson even as it burned ever more fiercely. The air in the cavern was throbbing and somewhere on the very edge of hearing, a piercing note was building.
Dev drew a long, shuddering breath. The fire had devoured his nose, leaving a ragged pit in the middle of his face, and his mouth was entirely gone. What little remained of his expression was still euphoric but that might just have been the curve of his naked, charring jawbone.
There’s no saving him now.
The wizard spoke, startling Kheda horribly. His voice was no different, no trace of the barbarian in his mocking tone as he spoke, his eloquent Aldabreshin speech unaffected by the grotesque min of his face. ‘I really think you’d better get out of here, my lord.’ His words were slow and languorous and the breath rasped in his throat. As Dev blinked his remaining eye, the burning of the other socket was momentarily quenched. He shuddered like a man trying to hold himself back from the cataclysmic throes of passion. ‘This really doesn’t concern you.’
Never underestimate the wisdom of a dying mans words. With that long-held truth forcing him back, Kheda retreated in what he hoped was the direction of the tunnel out of this inferno. He tripped and stumbled but could not look away from the sight before him. The crimson flame was spreading outwards now, wrapping Dev entirely in its lethal beauty. The mage twisted this way and that as it consumed him with its incomprehensible delights, greedy crackles stifling his groans of ecstasy. Slowly, resolutely, the blackened bones that were all that was left of the hand where this deadly fire had first kindled began to close into a fist.
Kheda saw the fiery gold within the egg crushed to a dull thread writhing at its heart. With every breath, it shortened, halved and halved again. He looked for the way out. There was no way he could reach it before that tarnished light died.
And that’s going to do something horrendous.
He flung himself behind a ridged conglomeration of stone flowed from the cave’s roof and grown from its floor. He buried his face in his hands and drew up his legs like a cowering child.
With a soft sigh, the crimson fire exploded outwards, setting the very air of the cavern ablaze. The whole crag shuddered with the anguished howl ripped from the tormented dragon outside. Stone tapers crashed from the ceiling to smash the ripples of the floor into ruin.
The darkness was total. When Kheda opened his eyes, he could see no difference. He could not see his trembling hand in front of his face. All he could feel was his shaking breath on his scored and bloody palm. His ears were still ringing from the deafening noise. If anything else was going on outside, he couldn’t hear it.
If you can’t see and you can’t hear, you can still feel. You haven’t come this far, at such a cost, to give up now. Move!
He got to his handstand knees and felt shards of stone viciously painful under his tender skin. Slowly, he knelt upright and waited, eyes instinctively closed the better to concentrate, rejecting the darkness all around.
Just a breath of movement in the air, that’s all I ask for. There it is. And a green smell with it, of life and hope, among ill this hideous reek of scorched death. And swords to fight with, if there’s still an enemy out there.
Sheathing his dagger, he fumbled around in the darkness where his sword had fallen, as best as he could tell. He found a blade and won a cut across his thumb for his pains. Clutching the naked sword, he crawled towards that wisp of air promising escape. Carefully, he swept his empty lacerated hand across the mute stone, shuffling to protect his knees. After every few paces, he halted, waiting until his heart was calmer, trying to ignore the dreadful echoes still reverberating in his ears. His head throbbed, the pain somehow worsened by the strengthening scent of normality waiting for him beyond the confines of the cavern.
Finding the wall by grazing his knuckles against it, he clambered awkwardly to his feet. He flattened his free palm against the water-smoothed stone and eased himself along, stubbing his toes here and there against the invisible malice of the floor. Finally, his hand slipped into a void and the fresh scent of the forest outside steadied him as he stumbled. He rounded a corner and light forced its way down the tunnel to draw him on. Kheda blinked and squinted as the light strengthened, stabbing at his eyes. He reeled out of the cave mouth and collapsed against the cliff face, mind and senses in turmoil. The light had seemed so bright but there was no clear sun above him, only the cold grey of the storm clouds he had left behind earlier. The punishing pain in his ears wasn’t merely the echo of the fighting dragons. They were still roaring high in the sky above, tearing at each other in frenzy. Kheda looked up, appalled, despairing.