Draka

“I cannot help but notice that we are not in the northern forest,” Herald said drily after I’d landed outside a crack in the rock many miles north of my mountain. “Is that not where the Nest Hearts were?”

“The two I’ve eaten were, yeah. And there’s more of them there, and they get denser the farther north you go. But do you remember when you camped out at the lake, waiting for me? And I told you how I’d gotten lost in the tunnels?” I waved to the crack in the wall. “That’s where I came out. There’s gremlins in there, and a Heart. I can feel it.”

“Ah!” She nodded in understanding.

“Yeah. I’ve been meaning to do something about them for ages, and now I have the perfect reason to take the time. Want to help me make sure that they never make it to our part of the mountains?”

She gave me a vicious grin and started walking. “What are you waiting for? Come along, then!”

After passing through the long, narrow crack, the passage slowly widened enough for us to walk side by side. “If you would have told me when we left the Favour I would have taken my armor,” Herald chided lightly.

“I don’t see you needing it, but you’re right,” I admitted. “If some of ‘em sneak up on you, let me know and Shift. But with any luck they’ll never know that you’re there. We’ll find their nest, I’ll cut loose, and you can take shots at anything that tries to get at me while I eat the Heart.”

“What about…” she reached out and scratched around the bump where my left horn was growing back. She couldn’t hide the worry in her tone. “Gremlins have hurt you before.”

“That was ages ago. I’m bigger now, with an Advancement that lets me shrug off swords and arrows—” I faltered at the look she gave me. “Fine. Most swords and arrows. I don’t see the gremlins bringing anything to the table that can threaten me.”

“Do you think that we will find any treasure?”

“Hopefully? I was not in the best state of mind the last time I came through here, so I don’t remember smelling anything. But they do seem to love shiny stuff, so with any luck they’ll have collected something over however long they’ve been here.”

Soon we entered the larger cavern I’d found on my way out. It was nothing like so grand as the one we’d found by the mines, but patches of glow slime shining on the walls and lighting up a few shallow pools of water gave the place an otherworldly appearance.

We stopped there. This was also where I’d found the gremlins, though they had wisely kept their distance. And as we looked and listened, there was the dripping of water but also, in the background, a distinct scrabbling on the stone and hushed chattering from deeper into the cave. The same direction as the pull of the Nest Heart.

“Eyes open and head on a swivel,” I told Herald. “Perhaps you should even Shift. Can you shoot your bow when you’re shifted?”

“Sure. Though the arrow becomes visible the moment I loose.”

“That’s still awesome,” I muttered. “Real life stealth archer, invisible in the shadows…”

Herald preened theatrically. “I am rather amazing, yes.”

We both Shifted, her for safety, just in case, and me so that I could see where she was. The uneven cave floor made the going slow. Herald had no special advantages when it came to mobility, and had to go around and sometimes over obstacles that I could practically ignore. The sounds of movement and hushed conversation in the gremlins’ chattering language became stronger, until we were suddenly next to a couple of the creatures who were straining to see back the way we’d come, completely unaware of our presence. Herald’s Shifting did strange things to any sounds she made, which might have thrown them to our benefit.

Herald carefully loosened her sword in its scabbard, then turned to me. I couldn’t see any details on her face, since her entire form was radiant when I saw her like this, but the question was obvious. I nodded with great exaggeration and turned to the gremlin closest to me.

We’d discussed fighting like this in passing while planning our ambush of Tark, and she’d done well even if our plan hadn’t worked out as we’d hoped. Since we couldn’t speak while we were both Shifted, the idea was to position ourselves, so that we could see each other. Then, since Herald could strike while Shifted and I couldn’t, I would attack first.

We each circled around our targets. Herald raised her sword like an executioner, and nodded my way.

I Shifted back. The moment I was solid I grabbed my gremlin and twisted its head half-way around with a pop and crackle of tearing cartilage. At the same time a shadow moved, and the other gremlin’s head jerked off its shoulders.

There was a dull thud as the head hit the stone and rolled, and the sound of liquid spattering. Then there was only the water dripping from the stalactites, as Herald silently Shifted back to being visible and sat down on a mostly flat stone, away from the blood spray.

“That was—” she spoke quietly, pausing for a few quick breaths “—surprisingly strenuous. No extra resistance when the blade struck, but it drained me quickly.”

“All right. Let’s take a second for you to catch your breath, then we’ll continue.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

As Herald rested for a few heartbeats, I noted that both gremlins had belts. A quick inspection didn’t reveal anything fancier than a few bits of rusty iron and what might have been native copper, but I stayed optimistic. These were the poor sods who’d gotten stuck with the worst job, so they couldn’t be expected to have anything nice. Then, when Herald indicated that she was ready, we both Shifted and continued into the depths of the caverns.

We were death on black wings as we moved. We encountered another three groups of gremlins in twos and threes, and dealt with them just as effectively and silently as the first two. We found an easy way for Herald to save energy: while she could strike from the shadows, it was far more efficient for her to simply position herself so that she wouldn’t be seen, then Shift with her sword ready and strike. It was unfortunately also the messier option, though she didn’t seem too torn up about it. When one of the gremlins sprayed her pretty bad after she cut its throat, she just grimaced and wiped her face the best she could on the short sleeves of her tunic.

“Starting to wonder if it would be worth losing your gear to get clean when you Shift?” I asked, and she rolled her eyes at me.

“A tunic like this is cheap. And I’d never be able to show my face again in the city if I Shifted in the wrong place, so, no. I am quite happy as it is.” She followed that by scowling unhappily as she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I just never expected such a small creature to bleed so much, or with such pressure.”

As I looked at her, it struck me how completely unconcerned she was about killing these creatures, compared to how annoyed she was about the mess they’d made of her when they died. Back when we first met she had killed a bandit on the road, and at least one more when she led the Wolves to attack the bandit camp, and it had haunted her for weeks. Recently, though… I didn’t see what happened after I grabbed Simdal off the street, but according to Ardek she had killed his guards without hesitation or remorse. It had been the same with our ambush of Tarkarran. She had discussed killing one of his guards from the shadows almost casually, as though she were talking about going to the market or something. When that failed due to one of those guards smelling danger, she had killed one man and crippled another, and I’d never heard a word of regret from her. She’d been an emotional mess for a while after killing Tarkarran himself, but as far as I could tell it was not killing him that was the issue. If anything she’d seemed upset that she couldn’t kill him more.

I was so proud of her. You shouldn’t be, Conscience insisted. This change in her, it isn’t healthy. It’s not good for her. You should be worried, not proud. But she didn’t sound convinced. Who could say that this wasn’t who Herald was always meant to be? She was my little dragon; strong, confident, and free of doubt. I had seen a glimmer of that even at the bandit camp. The wild joy in her eyes had been unmistakable. Wasn’t that better than being wracked with guilt over every life she took? Would she be able to hide away and be left in peace if she didn’t want to fight? I doubted it.

She couldn’t have ignored what was being done to those poor people we’d rescued from the valkin any more than I could, and all of our current problems stemmed from that. She hadn’t chosen violence; she and the others had simply refused to back down when violence came to them. If some of the Blossom’s people died that was on her, and if Herald could play her part without guilt or unnecessary pain I would smile and praise her for it.

“You have been staring for a while,” Herald said quietly, breaking me out of my thoughts. She wiped at her face again. “Did I miss anything?”

She had missed plenty. The situation with her face was not something that wiping would fix. But I didn’t tell her that. There was no point, and she looked appropriately fearsome with blood smeared across her face. “I was just thinking how impressed I am,” I said instead.

“Impressed? What with?”

“With what a warrior you’ve become.”

She looked away with a smile, clearly pleased. “Where did this come from, all of a sudden?”

“It’s not sudden. I just don’t say it enough. Now come on. We’ve got a nest to kill, on the other side of that wall and down a bit.”

“Yeah. I think I can feel it. Mak always described it like standing near a fire, feeling the heat of it on your skin as you move around it, but I think it is more like… pressure, I would say. Or as though there is a gentle wind coming from it, through stone and all.” She pointed, and I snaked my head around to sight along her arm. She was pointing almost exactly in the direction that I knew the Heart to be. “There, right?”

“Right! Can all magic users feel the Hearts?”

“Not all. Mak can, but Tam cannot, for whatever reason. Perhaps it is because his magic only affects himself. I never bothered to find out more about it, but it is a well known phenomenon, so information should not be too hard to come by. I could ask at the Guild, maybe?”

“Please. It would be interesting to know, if nothing else.”

The Heart was close enough at that point that I could feel its exact location, no more than three hundred feet away. It ended up being more like twice that, since the caverns twisted and split, but soon we were looking at the nest. Due to how the caverns had turned we ended up looking up at it, with crude dwellings lining a wide incline, a hundred and fifty feet long, bathed in the faint light of the glow slime and with the Nest Heart swirling and flickering at the top.

We sat still and silent and observed for a while. There were about two dozen gremlins that I could see. The ceiling was too low to fly effectively, so I’d just have to slog through, dealing with anything that was crazy enough to come at me. There was no way of telling how enthusiastic they’d be, considering how much bigger I was than the first time I fought gremlins, but the one that I’d have to fight for sure was the brute leading them. Standing almost five feet tall and thickly muscled, it was much like the one that had taken my horn, though this one was female. It lounged near the Heart, open and visible while tearing meat from the bone of some unidentifiable creature. Goat, perhaps. Or gremlin, for all I knew.

“Want to do the honors?” I asked Herald, who had already strung her bow and taken out one of her one-month’s-profits-for-a-successful-inn arrows.

“Whenever you are ready,” she answered, her eyes shining as she drew back and sighted along the arrow.

“I’m good to go. Let’s see how many shots you can get off before they realize what’s happening!”

Herald grinned, and loosed. Some gremlins turned their heads at the snap of her bowstring, but the brute wasn’t one and she ignored them. She immediately nocked a second arrow, drew, and loosed that one as well before the first struck home, taking the gremlin brute high in the chest and followed a second later by the second arrow, which hit close enough to the first that I couldn’t distinguish them from the distance we were at.

The brute stared stupidly at the two shafts sticking out above her breast. She pawed at them, stood unsteadily, stumbled, then fell over, all in complete silence. She rolled and slid twenty or thirty feet, then lay still.

While that happened Herald had put five arrows in the air, hitting three gremlins. I was just watching, silently impressed and starting to wonder if I would have to do anything, when eight of the bastards screeched and charged down the incline towards us.

Two fell to Herald’s arrows as they came. That barely slowed them down, but the fact that they’d only seen Herald and not me became abundantly clear when they immediately screamed and tried to reverse course as I leapt out. They scattered, so I ran down the ones I could, confident that Herald could deal with the rest if they made another attempt. Then things got hazy.

I had a tendency to simply cut loose and let Instinct take over completely when a fight felt entirely one sided, and that was what I did now. It was barely even a fight; it was mop-up. I was a dragon, with Strength and Fortitude, faced with gremlins who were armed with, at best, stone hammers, small picks, and crude knives. I let Instinct take the wheel, and when conscious thought faded back in the cavern was full of the smell of blood and the screeches and whines of the dying, the voice growing fewer as Herald moved among the scattered bodies and silenced them.

Looking down the slope I saw fresh blood spattering my friend, and several small bodies lying where she had stood at the bottom. They’d made another attempt to attack, after all. Or perhaps they had just been trying to get out. Either way, they had met Herald, and it hadn’t gone well for them. As she moved between the bodies, using her dagger to make short work of any that were still breathing, it again struck me how casually she was acting.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Hmm?” She looked up from cutting a throat, then looked down at herself. “Oh, yes. They came at me practically in a line. No trouble at all.”

“You’re looking pretty relaxed with all of this.”

She smiled. “Why should I not be? They are gremlins. Or, well, they were. And I am with you, so it is not like there is any danger. If anything, this all reminds me of how we met. Fighting gremlins under a mountain, you keeping me safe… Not sure if the payout here will be as good as back then, but we spent most of that on freeing Tam, anyway.”

She stood, wiping her dagger on a rag. “Now, I have been dying of curiosity. Will you eat that Heart?”

“I guess.” I looked around. There weren’t enough bodies. Something like a third or a quarter of the gremlins were either hiding or fled, but I didn’t see them trying anything after this massacre.

“Have you heard of anyone else absorbing a Nest Heart?” I asked Herald as we approached the swirling mass of shadow, brilliantly bright in my shadowsight. “Did Mak ever try, for example?”

“I have not,” she said thoughtfully. “And I do not think that she ever tried. But it seems to me that it should be known if it were something some people could do.”

“Well, you’re different, right? Your magic is like mine. Do you wanna try?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“But you need it, do you not?”

“Nah, yeah. But I can find another one. Shouldn’t take too long. Go on, give it a shot!”

“But… what do I do?”

“I just put my hand in it and focus on pulling it in. Like the opposite of pushing magic into a lightstone.”

“Oh, like when you switch them off?”

I looked at her, embarrassment slowly creeping in. “You can switch them off?”

There was a silence. “Yes, Draka,” she said finally. She was grinning, very carefully not laughing but not hiding her amusement nearly well enough. “You can switch them off.”

“Right. Yeah. Good to know. You may feel some heat, from inside you, as you take it in. If it works, that is. Just try it, all right?”

“All right.”

She approached the heart with her left hand out, moving tentatively. She looked at me and I nodded encouragement. She steeled herself, then plunged her hand into the outer layer of the Heart.

She didn’t gasp. It was more controlled than that, a long, sharp but even inhalation. “I can feel it. It is streaming over my hand, hot and cold at once, and it is… Like it wants to stick to my skin, almost.”

“Try to draw it in,” I said. There was a short pause as she focused, and a thin stream peeled off the heart, a trickle of magic that flowed into Herald, to her heart and from there out into the rest of her body.

“It resists me,” she said with some strain. “It does not want to come. Was it like that for you?”

“No. For me it just flowed in.”

“Not for me. But the fact that I can do this at all is amazing. We have to have the others try this!”

Her face twisted with concentration, and the streamer grew a little thicker, but not by much. Suddenly Herald stopped, withdrawing her hand. The Heart was barely smaller at all. “I cannot take any more. I have nowhere to put it!”

“How do you mean?” I hadn’t felt anything like that. I wanted more and more, no matter how intense it got.

“Just what I said. I feel full to bursting. Painfully so. I cannot take any more because there is nowhere for it to go.” She took a deep breath and swung her arms. “I do feel marvelous, though!”

“We’ll have to see what it does for you. Now step back, and I’ll finish it off.”

I stuck my hand in the slightly diminished, swirling mass and started drawing on it as Herald took a few steps back, watching with interest. It was pretty much the same as the previous times, if perhaps a little quicker. I lost myself in that feeling of fulfilling a need, in the growing heat, and in the hypnotic swirling of the Heart as it shed layer after layer, which flowed into me. The heat reached the same intense peak, the same explosion—