Chapter 28

The unflinching black I had fallen into eventually gave way to mere darkness, the fringes of it softened by the glow of stars so unfathomably distant that their silvery light had still not reached where I hung, finally free of pain and anger. It felt comforting. Safe. Perhaps I was falling towards those distant stars, a journey that would take a thousand or more of my lifetimes, but that was of no consequence here. I was free. I moved to stretch out my wings and felt something tighten across my back, the sensation magnified by the lack of any other feeling in my body.

I looked over my shoulder and saw a glowing thread that stretched away from me into the darkness behind. It tightened again, as if it were tied to something within me, and with the tightening I felt the ghost of old agonies brush my mind. I finally managed to grasp that gossamer line, and used it to turn myself around. The thread shone weakly, the vibrant reds and golds fading in places to grey, like cooling iron. It stretched away from me, as fine as a hair and as taut as a bowstring, all the way back into the heart of the deepest darkness. It shimmered as I touched it, a single note sounding amidst the silence. A fragment of sound, filling the void around me.

I looked over my shoulder, back towards the soft light of the waiting stars, but with my hands upon the thread their glow now seemed cold and impossibly distant. I hung in the darkness for an unknowable time, then finally put my hands upon the thread and began pulling myself along it, back towards the darkness.

There was no telling how long it took, but finally it loomed large before me, and even as I reached out a hesitant hand it seemed to swell and swallowed me almost greedily. I was falling once more, falling towards the greys and silvers of winter cloud, my body solidifying around me, bringing a thousand sensations with it, all of which tried to rush into my mind at once. Buried memories surged forth as I fought to regain stability, the strain of my extended wings pulling painfully across my back as they fought the thin winter air but finally the horizon became a level line once more.

Thoughts of distant stars faded, replaced by the sure knowledge that I was flying home, back to Draksgard, laden with food for winter. The winter wind was blowing from the north more often than not now, and there was a bite to it that my hot blood felt all too keenly. Most of the herds would have left the valleys already, moving south in search of the sun and grass that wouldn’t be entombed in ice for the rest of the year. We were creatures of sun and fire, but we understood our place in the great cycle and winter had its own charms. It was a time for songs and stories, of sleep and renewal.

The whale-meat I had harvested from the great bays to the south and west would see us through the months ahead. It was hard work, and perhaps there were other ways to build our larder, but I liked the taste of them, especially those I’d left to mature on the salt flats for a few days. Even thinking about it sent a lick of drool oozing through my teeth and I had to force myself not to think about the salty, succulent meat cradled in my arms.

The landscape below me slowly changed, the savannahs giving way to forests and rivers as every beat of my tired wings brought me closer to home. The thought of being reunited with Anakhara fed new strength into them and I gained some of the height I’d lost amidst my daydreaming.

After what felt like an age, I saw the shape of Draksgard take form on the horizon, its fiery summit cloaked in rolling white cloud. I looked towards the sun, seeking her silhouette against the light; her eyes were keener than mine, and she loved nothing more than to swoop on me like a hawk surprising a dove. The anticipation grew, then faded as I drew closer to the mountain and found the sky empty. Perhaps she was pursuing a herd that had been too slow to leave, and was even now adding to our stores. It would be a fine winter.

I was too pre-occupied with holding the whale-meat steady as I slowed myself to land to notice the silence, and too close to it to smell the blood that soaked the ground at the entrance to the mountain. I announced myself with a roar that echoed along the valleys, knowing that there was no chance that she couldn’t hear it. I smelt the blood as the echoes faded, and her scent amongst this sent a jolt of lightning through me. Dragon blood. Her blood, mingled with the iron and salt of mankind.

My tiredness fell from me like old skin and my sorcery hurled me into the sky with barely a thought. I bellowed her name over and over again, each cry louder than the one before, driving what creatures remained in the valley below insane.

I found the first of her scales in a clearing near the far neck of the valley, the golden discs dulled and wedged amidst a cascade of rocks. The scent of blood and discharged magic was thicker here, and the rocks were scorched and blackened in long stripes, a mark of her flame. I landed amidst the bloodstained rocks, forcing my racing mind to slow as I tried to make sense of what the gouges and blood were telling me.

The shallow graves that the jackals had already begun pillaging told me that it had been men who had brought this about. I could not fathom how men, so recently little more than fearful cave-dwellers, could have done such a thing, but worse than that was the realisation that if they had survived to bury their dead, then Anakhara could not have. She would not have suffered them to live, not when they had shed her blood. I stumbled along the mountainside in the hours that followed, my hide smeared with bloodied mud and my mind lost to a growing inferno of rage and grief. I would bring her home while their world burned and their rivers ran red. I would tear their cities to rubble!

You never found her body.

The voice that filled the valley wasn’t my own. I staggered to a halt as the very walls of the valley flexed and rippled around me, the trees that still stood bending as if a gale bore down on them. I could see parts of them flaking away and vanishing into nothingness. I shook my head as the rage in my breast faltered. The edges of what I could see before me were blowing away like sand and I knew then that this wasn’t real. It was a memory.

But this wasn’t how it happened. The whales, the blood, the shallow graves piled with blackened flesh and metal; those were real, or had been. But not this.

You never found her body.

The voice was a whisper now, breathed close to my ear. I spun, but the churned ground was empty save for a taut, golden thread stretching away into a nearby cave. I cut at it with my talons, but it refused to break.

The valleys rippled around me in time with the vibration of the thread, larger pieces of the mountainside shaking themselves loose and bouncing towards me while the colours of the world around me shimmered and began running together, draining from the slopes like ash washed away by rain. I felt the thread pull me towards the cave, and I knew then that only inescapable pain and grief waited within it. I roared my defiance and dug my claws into the bloody ground, but it too dissolved at my touch. I cried out as the last of it peeled away and the thread pulled me into the cave, followed by a landslide of bloodied earth that stifled my cries.

Blood. The smell of it came to me first, or at least the awareness that I was smelling something. It was in my mouth too, thick and bitter, but my tongue was too swollen for me to spit it out. I blasted mud and worse from my nostrils and drew in a lungful of the moist and mud flavoured air until my thoughts were no longer fogged and distant.

My body felt wrong. Broken. I heard bones click and groan as I moved one arm, then the next, forcing dirt and rock away from my face. I turned my head, the sound of it a cascade of gristly noises, and spat dirt and blood from my mouth. My hearts lurched and staggered, then slowly settled back into a synchronised rhythm.

I laid there, simply breathing, as the fractured memories of what had happened attempted to arrange themselves into a single whole once more. I remembered the stars, the bloody valley where she had died, and a golden cord, but the images were jumbled, as fragmented as a dream after a sudden awakening. Which came first, and where was I now? Was I awake, or was this some new nightmare? It smelt and tasted too foul to be anything but real. The darkness had come first, I remembered that, and with that memory came what I remembered of the necromancer’s spell.

The images in my mind turned, their rough edges meshing together into a new whole. Their magic had collapsed on itself, the purpose and intention to separate the spirit and restore the flesh warping and reacting with the enchantments laid so deep on my flesh. Phantom agonies flickered through my body at the memory, reminding me of the first time I had reshaped my flesh.

And as it had then, something had gone terribly wrong. Even laying immobile as I was, I could feel the changes in the pressure on my back and the unfamiliar play of the muscles as I tried to move arm and leg. More dirt and small stones fell onto my face, making me cough and splutter as they closed much of my breathing space. Why was I laying here in dirt that reeked of human blood and pressed by piles of broken stone?

The cave must have collapsed from the wayward pressures of their magic, burying me. My side was pressed against the table I’d been thrown against, a much needed stroke of luck in retrospect as it had saved me from being crushed or smothered outright. However, it didn’t change that I had been buried alive and that the air was already thickening around me. I’d be gasping before long, my lungs demanding air with increasing but hopeless desperation, assuming that the hole didn’t collapse before then, filling my mouth and nose with its earthy taste while the worms closed in to taste my cold flesh. This hole would be my tomb, and I would rot here, forever forgotten and alone. I would never find my love and bring her home.

I would never find Anakhara.

The thought burned through my fogged brain and made my limbs tremble and twitch as life returned to them. I had been forgotten and alone for over seven hundred years and had long since stopped caring whether anyone would mourn me, but I had sworn an oath in her blood and mine that I would never rest until I found her and brought her home. Then, and only then, could the worms have their feast.

I spat dirt from my mouth and bared my teeth as I fed the anger the thought had kindled, drawing the strength it lent deep into me until fear and exhaustion lost their grip on me. I braced a shoulder against the stony floor beneath me and began to push. This was a combination of soil and broken stone, a fractured mass rather than monolithic slabs and I’d barely begun cursing the birth of mankind when I felt it begin to shift. I snarled with the effort, barely aware that my draconic teeth had emerged of their own accord and had pierced my still human lips. I pushed, then pushed again until I heard and felt the rumble of the stone above me.

Angry or not, I knew my strength was finite and I reached out for my sorcery, more in hope than anything else, and that snarl became a bark of triumph as I felt the Songlines swell in reply. The flow stuttered for a few heartbeats before the final dregs of the wizard’s spell were eroded and the energy flowed into me.

I took a moment to enjoy the sensation, then sent fine slivers of shaped energy worming their way into the cracks around me, letting them pulse with my heartbeat at first, every thump widening the gaps and voids between the heavier pieces by the tiniest measure. I steadily fed more power into it, until the slivers became strings and finally ropes that shivered too fast for even me to follow. The vibrations spread until the compacted earth around me rippled like the surface of a strange pond. I felt the pressures around me shifting and took a moment to gather my will, then increased the vibrations tenfold. The grip of the dirt around began to collapse, the tension between the stones and grains of soil lost. I released a single, more powerful blast of energy upwards, blasting a cone-shaped crater open around me in a geyser of broken stone and dirt lit by arcs of raw sorcery.

I stood in the newly created void, stretching out limbs that were no longer as smooth and shapely as black marble. The collapse of the necromancer’s spell had ravaged me like some terrible acid, puckering my hide with craters and leaving seams of rough tissue where the skin and flesh had been stretched and left to set into new patterns, as if I were some wax idol that had been left too close to a fire. The muscles on my right leg were withered, the skin over them gnarled like bark and its girth barely that of a man’s arm, but it was the twisting in my back that truly gave me pause. It felt as if two great knives had been stabbed into my back, one behind each shoulder, forcing me to stand and walk like an old man. I strained my neck as far as it could go but could see little more than a bulge of knobbly bone, the skin across it stretched as taut as a drum’s.

My teeth were a mess too; I’d always had too many to fit in this small head but now it seemed they had all decided to try and share my mouth at the same time, tearing my mouth and lips to tatters and fixing my face in what I could only assume was a demonic leer. I tried forcing them back into my skull as I had before, but barely a third of them shifted, and even then the pressure and feel of them retracting was acutely uncomfortable.

His magic had collapsed part of the enchantment binding me to my human form, and the stars only knew what might have happened had the transformation spell been intended for me directly, rather than Tatyana. I tested my newly deformed limbs, wincing as new aches and limitations announced themselves, but I was alive. I could still fulfil my oath, and if I had the chance to kill a few more men and save my friend, it was all the better.

I punched my curved nails into the wall of dirt and pulled myself from my almost-tomb, feeling clumsy and awkward but buoyed by an anger that was burning brighter with every moment. I was tired of humanity. Sick of them.

I reached the top without too much difficulty and was prying a loose tooth from my mouth when a wizard came stumbling out of the dark. He stared at me dumbly in the ruddy light emanating from his staff, and only managed a single step backwards before I sprang on him. I almost fell short as my withered leg buckled, but the combination of his surprise and my long arms let me succeed. I grabbed a handful of his robe and pulled him towards me.

He flailed desperately as I fell back into the hole, dragging him with me. As we crashed to the bottom, a wild blow saw him cut his fist on my jutting teeth. The scent of his blood drew an involuntary growl from deep within me and I felt the agony of the rest of my teeth scraping their way back into my mouth.

My vision went red as I tore into him, the savagery of the attack costing me a few of the more precariously protruding teeth on the edge of my jaw, but I had more than I needed and paid them little heed. The first gout of blood washed the taste of the dirt and filth from my mouth, waking my hunger anew, and I gorged myself on the warm meat and felt a new, more wholesome strength course through me. I’d been using my sorcery without decent food and rest in between, and it had taken its toll.

I felt much better after I’d eaten, and my mind was calmer. I stood and rolled my shoulders, testing the range of movement they now offered. The bulge in my back was pulling my right shoulder back, shortening my reach with that arm and narrowing the range of movement that didn’t send sharp pains stabbing up along my neck. Taken with my shrivelled leg, it left me with a strange, bobbing gait, as if I was walking on a tilting floor. I wouldn’t be sprinting anytime soon, but the leg could still thankfully hold my weight when I wasn’t trying to leap about, and that would have to do.

I climbed out of the hole and paused, waking my night vision and tasting the air until I found what I was looking for.