Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2) (26 page)

No,
I thought.
Dragons aren’t beautiful.

They’re monsters.
 

“Forget what the thing looks like,” I said, clenching my teeth. “How are we going to get past it?”

“Get past it?” she asked. “I don’t want to get past it, I want to get out of here.”

“We can’t leave now,” I protested, standing up straight again. “We’re too close to finding the book.”

She looked at me as though I had just slapped her across the face.

“How do you know that? How can you possibly know where the book actually is? It could be that it’s nowhere near here. What if this is all just a trick? A mad trick to get us killed without risking the loss of the book?”

“That…thing…is guarding something. And I’d bet anything that it’s the book. Think about it. There are too many signs.”

“No,” she argued. “We could easily be in the wrong mountain. Or even on the wrong planet. What if the thing that dragon is guarding has nothing to do with the book? What if it’s some other sort of treasure? Maybe we’re in the wrong place after all. Maybe—”

“You
know
it’s the book,” I said. “Everything has led us up to this point, including him.” I pointed to Almara’s shaking body, still curled up on the floor. “You know we’re in the right place, you just don’t want to go in.”
 

“I just don’t want to be
burned alive,
” she snapped.
 

“We need a plan,” I said, daring to raise my voice above the roar of the water beyond the wall. “We need to get past the dragon.”

“We can’t get past that thing,” Jade said. “I doubt even Father could do it, even if he weren’t so…so…”

“I know,” I said. “He’s not in good shape. I know.” Almara shifted his weight and tilted his head up at me. I knelt down and removed the blindfold from his eyes. He blinked in the dim light. Desperation lined his face, and as our eyes connected I understood that we were of the same mind. He might be frail and addled, but deep inside the same desire he had carried centuries before still burned. “He wants us to move on,” I said, still looking at him. “He knows that we must.”

She stared back and forth between Almara and I.

“That will be the end of it, then,” she said after a while. “You know that, right? We will die trying to get past that dragon. We will die trying to fix Jared’s mistake. Is it worth it to you? Because it’s not to me.” She looked around the cavern miserably. “I should have known I would die beneath a mountain, someday.” Thin trickles of tears ran down her cheeks. “It’s just not the mountain that I expected.”

“We might die,” I answered, finally ripping my gaze from Almara’s sad face. It was true, and I couldn’t deny it. “But we might succeed. Either way, if we don’t try then nothing will change at all. None of us have anything to go back to. Earth is breaking apart from the pull of the Fold. Riverstone is abandoned and devoid of life. His mind,” I inclined my head towards Almara, “could heal or it could get worse, even stay like it is now with him trying to strangle himself every five minutes. All I know is that if we don’t try, we fail automatically. If we are able to make it past that monster, we might have a chance. A chance at a real life.”

She stared at the floor, slowly shaking her head back and forth.
 

“Do you want to go back, then?” I asked her. “You can go if you want. I’ll understand.”

Her head snapped up. “I told you I wouldn’t leave you, and I meant it. But this isn’t the right choice. No good can come of trying to fight something that can overpower us so easily as that monster can. We don’t have that kind of power. And even if we do make it; then what? We spend years, decades, trying to balance the Fold? Do you know how crazy that sounds? It’s going to be impossible.”

Almara looked at me again, urging me with his eyes to get up, to move forward on this quest.

But what I didn’t see was how.
 

He turned to face Jade, his hand gently cupping her chin and lifting her face until he was looking into her eyes. The look held power, understanding, and…was it recognition? Jade’s green eyes grew wide, unexpectedly faced with the father she remembered. He stared hard at her, taking in every inch of her skin, her brows, running his outstretched fingers across a stray lock of hair that hung down over her forehead. Then he leaned over, kissed her on the cheek, and rose to his feet. She stared after him, her mouth slightly open, unable to put her shocked thoughts into words.

He opened his arms and walked towards me, embracing me as though he had known me for decades. I awkwardly returned the hug, frowning and unsure. When he released me and gripped his old, knobby hands around my arms, I saw, for the first time, the face of a man who was tired and frail, but unmistakably sane. He placed his hand on my cheek for a fleeting moment, and turned from me.

And then it all happened so fast.

He broke away. Before Jade or I could register his movement, he was flying out of the tunnel, across the cavern floor at top speed in the direction of the dragon.

In an instant, his intentions became clear to me, and they must have been to Jade as well. We did not look at each other or communicate in any way, but at the same moment we both bolted after him.
 

I had to catch him. While I had the talent to run at speeds most could never approach, it took me several paces to get up to top speed. I didn’t have that kind of time now. In the several seconds that it took me to start to gain on Almara as he ran toward the unthinkable, I realized what he was about to do. I had to stop him.

But then he raised his arm and cried out the command that would doom my attempt.

“
Torrensio!”
His choked, his raw voice cracked with strain. He ran on.
 

The force of the spell knocked me to the ground. In the distance a cry of fury echoed in the cavern. The dragon was coming now, as if Almara had whistled for a dog in the field.
   

The shockwave of the Torrensai passed, and I heaved myself up from the ground, determined to catch him.

He immediately set another.

This time my back hit the ground first. I rolled and began to push upright.

And another.
 

My head smacked into the granite, and this time when I raised it to see what had become of the ancient wizard, the scene swayed before my eyes.
 

He was almost to the edge now. The dragon had crested over the top of the ravine and opened its jaws, preparing to launch another fiery attack.

They struck at the same moment, the two powerful blows meeting in midair. The Torrensai knocked the dragon backward, but his fire kept moving forwards. It met Almara, still running, and he screamed as it burned his skin.
 

Then he leapt.

I thrust myself forward, desperately still trying to help, to save him. I vaguely registered him vanishing over the side of the wall. I could still get there. I could grab him, maybe. He must be hanging, right now, clinging to the sides of the rock.

But he wasn’t.

I reached the edge just in time, flopping down onto my stomach to peer over. A thousand feet below, the tangled, flaming forms of Almara and the dragon descended recklessly into the chasm. The dragon fought, slashing at Almara’s body with his huge talons, but the old man didn’t let go. Down and down they fell, writhing and shrieking, until at last they hit rocks on the edge of the water far below. With a deafening boom, the two exploded in Torrensai and flame.
 

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t possible. We had just found him not but a week ago, after months and months of searching. I gaped at the smoke that rose up from the floor of the ravine, not willing to believe my own eyes.
 

Gone. He was gone. Our guide, mad as he may have been, was now dead, lost to us and our cause forever.
 

Slowly, my entire body filled with cold, hard dread, and I lay weighted to the ground with the enormous mountain pressing down on me from above. From far below another sound, an impossible sound, pierced through my haze and reached my ears.
 

A dragon’s cry.

How? The dragon was dead, incinerated by its own power, its threat permanently removed by the only man who could have ever faced a dragon and defeated it. My chest squeezed painfully at the thought of Almara, the images of his fall flitting erratically through my mind.
 

But suddenly, new images, nearly just as horrifying, replaced them. From far below, three awkward sets of wings inflated like parachutes, pushing through the smoke from the destruction of their leader, who now lay smoldering at the bottom. Their screams of fury echoed throughout the mountain.

They were coming.
 

No, no, no.

“Jade!” I screamed, not even realizing that I had opened my mouth at all. I turned to find her twenty feet back, splayed out on her back. “Jade! We have to move. NOW!”

But she didn’t move. Her eyes floated back and forth along the stone ceiling, unreachable. I ran to her and hoisted her up, fully dragging her towards the thin stone walkway and the doorway beyond. I pushed her ahead of me, forcing her to put one foot in front of the other, as she stumbled numbly along.
 

Time. This was Almara’s gift to us. Through the calls of the dragons and the rush of water, I heard little but my own breath as I ran for our lives. On the other side of that bridge lay our survival. We were thirty feet away. Fifteen. Then our feet hit the stone.
 

The walkway wasn’t more than three feet across, bridging the gap cut by millennia of rushing water. I swayed as the height threatened to bring me to my knees again. I pushed at Jade’s back. As the highest dragon approached, his burning orange eyes became visible, and he opened his jaws wide.
 

“Move!” I shouted. “They’re coming!” The dragons swarmed painfully closer with every heartbeat as we crossed the exposed arch. Their shrieks screamed up the ravine walls, and I clapped my hands to my ears, more to block out my fear than to protect my hearing.
 

Jade’s feet were leaded, her fastest speed a reluctant shuffle. Was this shock?
 

Please,
I thought.
Please move
.

The three lizards, their scaled skins a horror of knives, got closer and closer. They released their fire, but as it blew by us it dissipated, still too far away.
 

Jade whimpered, but I didn’t relent. I jabbed mercilessly at her back. The other side was close, so close.
 

As our feet crossed the threshold, the dragons shrieked again. I rushed in front of her, grabbing one of her hands and running as fast as I could, dragging her along. A narrow tunnel opened ahead, and I headed for the protection of its walls.
 

Finally, we were in, fleeing the vast open space behind. I pushed her farther, expecting fireballs to be right behind us. But instead of the roar of fire inside the tunnel, I heard explosions back in the cavern. I turned.

The dragons, instead of focusing their attention on killing us, were attacking the bridge. They were trying to cut us off, to block our escape. Fireball after fireball hit the thin sliver of rock that had held the two sides together, blasting chunks of ancient stone to dust, until, finally, the entire thing crumbled. The remaining pieces of the mountain, still attached by either chance or magic, fell to the ravine below.
 

And then, through the opening made smaller and smaller with every step we took, I saw them turn towards the tunnel. The first opened his mouth wide, and from deep within his throat rocketed out the flame I had been running from all along.

 
I felt my hair stand on end as I turned and fled. I yanked on Jade’s arm, hauling her behind me. Off to one side a small crevice jutted into the rock, and I pulled her into it. Just in time. Red heat flew past our hiding spot, the rock between us and the tunnel sparing us the worst of the burns. Again and again, blast after blast, fire flew through the tunnel, disappearing further into the depths of the mountain as we shielded our eyes from the heat.
 

It seemed to go on forever. I pushed Jade down to a low crouch in the tiny space, and I draped my body over hers. My pack protected my back from the heat, but the underside of my arms seared with pain and I cried out.

Let it end. Let it end.

Let me live.

We seemed to exist without time or space. The light of each blaze flickered all around us, turning the mountain molten beneath our feet, and the air to acid that clung in our throats. I wondered if this was the beginning that Almara had spoken of, what the burning of the Corentin would feel like. And in that moment I felt the same fear he had told me of. I didn’t want to die like this. I didn’t want this burning to be the last sensation I would ever feel before closing my eyes to life. I wanted it to stop, and I feared it would never end, that I would never again feel the cool, crisp air at Kiron’s homestead. Or the cold, freezing air of Stonemore. Or the salty, sticky air of the sea.
 

Eventually, it did end. The cries of the dragons faded away as they descended back into the ravine, their revenge expelled for their lost brother.
 

I pulled my weight off Jade, slumping to the floor in agony. The skin on my arms was sticky and crisp, like a potato chip just removed from boiling oil. I held my arms out to the sides, unable to do anything more to ease the pain.

The tunnel was black, the only life in the darkness the hoarse breathing that poured from each of us. Gradually, the air cooled. Gradually, our breathing quieted. Until, finally, we lay side by side, silent, devastated.

Almara was dead.
 

Our escape destroyed.

And our hope lost.
 

Maybe it was hours later. Maybe it was minutes. Slowly, as the imminent threat of the dragons disappeared again into the depths of the mountain, my brain started working.