Chapter Text
I hear the very sky above me shift, then feel what I would so very much like to be just a raindrop from a regular sky—instead, it is the first of several pebbles to bounce off my shoulders and head in the next few seconds, falling from a ceiling too unstable to call such. I avoid looking up so I don’t get dust in my eyes, though it’s tempting to stare in the face of oncoming demise.
The daggers that I came here to deliver lay at my feet, a couple of months’ worth of work on the Basgiath side, and of protection on the fliers’ side. I gather them up into their sack and throw it over my shoulder again, looking around for an exit. Even being used to darkness, the overwhelming lack of light down here has me a little stumped. I spread my feet on the Aretian hilltop in my mind, bending and reaching into the grassy earth with my fingers, feeling for Sgaeyl’s power. As her blue and silver energy streams into my veins I close my eyes and focus, and as if in an exploding burst, suddenly not only can I feel the power I hold, I can feel every square inch of the space so covered in darkness. It’s as if the rocks of the cave wall, the falling pebbles, the cold floor are all pressing lightly on my own skin. The shadows in the cavern all respond as if just extensions of my own body, my own nerves. Not that I can do anything with them. Carr won’t let me do anything but “feel” them “for now.” Yeah, I can feel them. I can also f—ing feel that I can do more. I just don’t know how.
The shifts and cracks above me get louder, more reactive, and the shadows whisper to duck, though I don’t know how that would help me if the entire cave’s ceiling crashes in atop my head. Either way, I think instinct takes over, because next thing I know, I’m crouched in a little ball, and a whoosh of energy and wind swim over me, cutting me off from the shadows above me and making the space I occupy much smaller. All I can “see” in my mind’s perception of this new space is a muffled, muddled shape of warm, if cramped, stillness. And I’m in the middle of it.
Although when I crouched I covered my head, I still got a rock to the back that knocked the wind out of me. The second I’m not in immediate peril for whatever reason, I’m knocked all the way to the ground. And then it hits me— the protective bubble— I’m under a shield. Sgaeyl. Her wing crooks above me, shielding me from the falling debris.
“Sgaeyl?” I ask, my mind’s voice much more timid than I’d like it to be. Dragons respect ruthlessness. They respect courage. What the f— is wrong with me? I clear my throat. (Yeah, I do realize that won’t help my mental voice.)
I feel Sgaeyl lower her shields and something completely foreign startles me upon the wave of her royal blue energy in my mind— is that… worry? It’s something I haven’t ever felt from her. And as soon as it’s there it’s gone. I try not to think about it. I try to think of anything else so she won’t know I noticed. Hmmm… Chocolate cake. Yep. All that I’m thinking about is cake. Chocolate cake.
“Dragons respect riders who understand self preservation.” She says, ignoring my last realization, if she even heard it, and responding sassily to the one before that.
“I…” I fight an urge to apologize. “I had to find the drop point.”
Sgaeyl shifts her wing and I can hear the stalactites she kept from coming down on me shift over the bones, some of them rolling to the ground with a thundering chorus. Now, a pang of my own worry hits my chest. What if she’s hurt?
“Take shelter closer to me, human.” Sgaeyl hisses. Without waiting long, she moves her wing and makes to stretch it out, a monstrous crumbling sound rumbling through the ground and air in the cave. She lets out what I could only describe as a yelp and I gasp, moving to help her as if there were actually anything I could do.
I work my way along her side, still under the cover of her wing, until I reach her foremost joint that connects her wing to her back. Dragons have so many shoulders I’m never quite sure what to call this one. The boulder here is stable enough for me to climb up, since it touches the ground. When I get up there… there is nothing more to see. Just more darkness. The only illuminant is Sgaeyl’s golden eyes. And as mesmerizing as they are… they aren’t exactly mage lights. I take a deep breath and reach again for her blue strands of power, relishing the invigorating feeling when the buzz builds up and explodes back out, giving me access to feel and “see” everything the darkness touches.
Sgaeyl shifts her head slightly towards me, but her neck is pinned down by a pillar-like stone that must have fallen when she shifted her wing the first time. The precursor to the yelp. But if I were to move the stone, there’s a possibility that shifting it could bring this whole place down. That is, even if I were able to move it. It’s f—kin massive.
Suddenly I have an idea. A stupid idea.
“Yes.” Sgaeyl says immediately. Of course, she heard my stupid idea, too. Just like she hears all of my stupid first-off ideas.
“It might not work.”
“We will be buried either way, yes?” She reasons.
I nod, shrugging my shoulders and swallowing the pit in my throat. If we can get all the loose material to fall— assuming it doesn’t kill us— then we can move the rest of the rocks without having to be concerned about setting off a chain reaction. We will have already triggered the whole series of dropping rocks.
“Take cover. This could go badly.” Sgaeyl huffs and takes a deep breath as I dive down the boulder I had scaled, ducking under her shoulder and getting as far from open air as I can. The fact that this cavern is too small for Sgaeyl in any sense is actually perhaps a good thing at the moment— because there’s not a long way for any rocks to fall and do damage from gravity.
After another deep breath which squeezes my little perch between Sgaeyl’s front leg and her ribs, Sgaeyl lets out a deafening roar. The pebbles at my feet dance with the vibration, and I hear and feel stalactites dropping further over in other parts of the cave. Only one drops near us, and Sgaeyl merely flinches. I hope she’s not just under-reacting and that it really wasn’t a bad hit.
I wait another few seconds for good measure before emerging, re-gaining control of my perceptions before climbing my boulder again. I slide down the other side of it and approach Sgaeyl’s head from her right side. She is heaving slightly and her eyes are closed, her serpentine neck held down in an uncomfortable, almost unnatural shape by the monolith.
“Sgaeyl…” My eyes widen, but I try to flush all thoughts of weak moral fiber and piteous holding from my mind and emotions. Dragons don’t bond people for pity. Sgaeyl opens an eye and watches me approach and I suddenly regret letting her name escape my lips at all. I steel my expression.
“Dragons,” she starts, pausing dramatically and somehow also sarcastically after the singular word. “Choose their riders for many facets. I chose my rider for his every facet. What you call pity I call a protective instinct.”
I nod, ready to process that later.
“I’m going to try to lift this, okay?” I ask.
She makes a sound reminiscent of a cough that I take as a form of agreement.
I expand to feel the ground, her scales, the rock, everything around her neck, looking for the best approach. I can fit under it, if I go close enough to her body, but who’s to say I can even lift it myself? In fact… the closer I get to it, the more sure I become that I can’t.
“You do not have only your own strength to rely on,” Sgaeyl says. She sounds strained. Or maybe my mind is making things up from context the same way I try to clear my throat to make my mental voice stronger.
I slip underneath the rock placing myself in the triangle that forms between her neck, the rock, and the ground of the cave, putting my back against the stone to assume a position to lift. I have not only my own strength.
She wants me to use the shadows. They want me to use them, too. They writhe with something I almost feel foolish enough to call excitement. Emotion. Maybe I am projecting, but they certainly seem to want to be wielded. Only issue: I don’t have the slightest f—king clue how to reach out and take their reins.
“Close the flow. Start with a trickle, work up to a stream. Why use the ocean to wash your feet when a creek would do?” Sgaeyl is being uncharacteristically guiding… and gentle. Maybe she’s more hurt than I thought.
“I am fine, human!” She doesn’t sound fine. Though that outburst is more characteristic. “Now learn to pull but a hair’s breadth, or you will never control the rapids of this power we share.”
I nod, as if she could see me, and put my feet on the ground of my hilltop. I force the sun to set over my horizon and then pull it back up just slightly. As the red-orange tip of the sun’s sweet sphere crests the edge of the ocean, I pull on the strand of power lining the dewy grass. Her swirls of darkness and blue and silver wind up my arms, just enough to remind me of the wisps of relic along my left side. Enough for me to see everything in the cave in a broad sketch of understanding. The sun raises just slightly more and she gives me more humid strands of power, pulling from the dew and the creek over the next hill. Now I can see everything in the cavern in minute detail and feel my heart rate raise in semblance of danger, and excitement of adrenaline.
The mental sunrise progresses just a fraction more, and suddenly not only do I feel the cave’s walls, floor, and ridges pressing in as if onto my skin, I also feel the expansion of Sgaeyl’s ribs as she breathes. The warmth added to the shadowed air as I exhale. The taste of the sweat I’ve spent concentrating on our escape. The tension Sgaeyl holds in her neck to keep it from straining further, and the tautness of her shoulders in their awkward, cramped position. I can hear the beating of my own heart as if echoed through the space like Sgaeyl’s growl. It repeats back to me in tune with the thumps inside my chest.
Not only can I feel all of that, but it is as if I could run my hands— no, not my hands… my… extensions of myself? The shadows— over the rough rock surface, or Sgaeyl’s majestic scales or even all the way to the sunny exit of the cave over towards the east. I can… caress the surfaces of the rocks. I can press into them to feel their grain. If I can do that… can I not also press into them to move them? To feel them shift?
With an inhale, I let a fluttery instinct that cools and tickles my spine to call the shadows into me, then I lift. I push up with my own strength, yes, but what I lack (and it’s a f—king huge rock), the shadows supplement. I push, and they push, until the grinding sound the monolith has made as we move it stops.
It only stops for a second. A second later, it falls to the other direction, away from Sgaeyl, but my early warning system of negative space tells me something isn’t right. As it falls to lay flat behind me, it takes me too long to understand what the shadows predicted— and the last thing I feel is a solid whack to the back of the head.
…,,,…
I come to with a humid breath of hot steam on my face. It warms my hands and creates a condensation that is almost gross on my cheek and neck. And don’t get me started on the smell… I can’t even identify it in my addled state, but… Fish comes to mind.
And the most forefront thing on my mind is…. Pain. I can all but see the lump on the back of my head near the base of my skull. I suppose, then, the pillar went over, its base acted as a fulcrum and swung up, hitting me square in the occipital. Guess that’s why we have physics classes every godsdamned day.
“Awaken,” Sgaeyl commands.
“M’awake,” I say, coughing before I sit up. Sitting up compounds the pain. Somehow it makes it a thousand times worse, shooting bolts of agony into my frontal lobe and the space in front of and above my eyes. I wouldn’t be surprised if my skull were to split open.
Sgaeyl stays silent. Probably because she can feel the pain I can’t quite keep shielded shimmering down whatever my bond with her looks like from her side. Grabbing onto the offending column of stone, I slowly get my feet under me to stand, controlling the wobble as my head releases a new burst of pain that seems to travel all the way to my heels. My sigh releases the jittery energy from my pent up shoulders, and I hope it gets rid of the shakiness in my breathing.
“Ready?” I ask Sgaeyl, not sure, even myself, what exactly I’m saying. I’m just… talking. Talking to talk. Talking to let her (and myself) know that I’m still upright; still human; still functioning.
“Ready to return home, Neo-Throcaireach.”
I don’t have a clue what that last word meant, but I am gonna guess it was some smartass nickname for me. Whatever it was, the first part rings so true it doesn’t matter. I nod. I know she knows.
Light shines in to my right— evidently I slept through the rest of the night— and now it is much easier to see a way out. Sgaeyl entreats me to go ahead of her so that her movement won’t cause a chain reaction and get me stuck again. As much as I want to disagree and stay wherever she is, her suggestion does seem the most logical option. As I’m climbing through the boulders that make up the tunnel to our exit, I can’t help but feel that there’s no way Sgaeyl will be able to fit through, but a grumble from her at that very thought shuts me up.
Stepping out into the sunlight is tantamount to hosing down with bathwater. Controlling shadows? Great. But the warmth of the light seems to melt my muscles’ tension and still my racing heart to a comfortable rhythm. I clear the area, expecting an earthquake of devastation as Sgaeyl comes through the same small snakehole I exited through, but instead, I hear a far off rumbling and a powerful puff of dust and cold air blows me back from the hole, putting me right on my ass. My jaw drops as I stagger up to my feet. Did that just happen? Did the cavern just… just collapse? What about— Wouldn’t I feel something from—
A shadow encases me where I stand, and looking up I see the familiar underbelly of my saving grace. My saving shadow.
“Sgaeyl!” I gasp. She circles and lands in front of me, her back claws up to the ankles in a rushing spring we saw on our way in.
“How do you think I got in there in the first place?” she asks, somehow sounding proud, condescending, and bored all at once. I crack a grin and the ice in my veins dissipates.
“You’re unbelievable,” I mutter. She can take it as a compliment, a joke, as praise, or as an insult. Whichever she chooses.
“I choose praise.”
“Of course,” I jest.
…,,,…
Not long after, we’re entering Basgiath’s airspace, my flight goggles fogging because of the contrast between my fever and the cold of the late February chill. Still haven’t figured out how the f— we are going to explain what we were doing out. First years aren’t allowed to go on little f—ing side missions.
“We will not be having to explain anything,” Sgaeyl corrects me.
“Wait wait, do you mean that you won’t be helping me explain, or that we as a unit will be above reproach and won’t have to explain?”
“Either way, no one will be asking me to explain myself.”
Yeah, that’s real helpful.
She does a motion I swear is a shrug, even though we are still flying. It jostles me a little but the chuff she makes with her snout tells me it was definitely on purpose. She’s messing with me. How the f— did I end up with this dragon again? I roll my eyes and can’t help a little smile at the rush I get when we dive towards the flight field.