Draka

As the afternoon turned into evening the light began to fail, and the heavy clouds were a great help. Finally, I decided that with some effort I should be able to make it dark enough, at least right in front of the gate, to try and make it through that hole. That, and Herald’s mood was falling while I was getting bored and impatient. And I wanted to show off. I've never been perfect.

“Are you sure?” Herald asked doubtfully. “It was much darker than this last night.”

“Yeah, this should be fine. You might want to step into the rain though, so you can get a good look.”

She looked at the sky with a small frown, then at me. “Okay. But this had better work.”

“Bet,” I told her and gave her an all-teeth grin.

I shook myself, getting the stiffness out from sitting for so long. It probably didn’t make any difference but it made me feel better. More focused. Then I blinked myself over to using my shadowsight, and everything briefly became a barely distinct blur, before clearing up. It was still hard to see anything. It was a little too bright. But, this way I’d be able to tell much more easily when it was dark enough to go shadow mode, and I didn’t really need to see anything except the hole in the gate where a corner of one door was missing.

Clearing my mind, I tried to focus on the shadow around the gate. There was no single, defined shadow, of course, but if there had been it would have been the shadow of the stone above the recessed gate, and with effort I could almost distinguish it. Once I had a good idea of what I was working with, I put my will to it. It needed to be darker. I wanted it to be darker. I demanded that it should be darker, and I was a shadow dragon, dammit. I was shadow, I was darkness, and it would do what I told it to do. It would become as deep as it needed to be for me to change, because that was the only thing that could possibly happen. I commanded, and it obeyed. That was just how it was.

I commanded, and it obeyed.

Even over the sound of the rain I heard Herald gasp slowly, as I commanded, and the shadow obeyed. Dark tendrils flowed from me, grasping and merging with the shadow, and the shadow around the gate became deeper and darker until it was outlined clearly against the stone and the alcove was plunged into almost complete darkness. Even I was a little surprised. That had taken a lot out of me, and I actually felt a little winded. I might have overdone it, but hey, I had wanted to show off, and Herald sounded and looked appropriately impressed. She was actually bouncing excitedly on her toes. I assumed that she was also grinning like an idiot, but she stood in the light and it was hard to see that kind of detail.

“Alright,” I said, breathing heavily but happy as I maintained the darkness. “Here I go!”

With that I focused on the small opening and reached for it as I dissolved into shadow. At first I thought that I wouldn’t be able to reach it, which would have been very embarrassing but, with the dragon in my ear urging me to “simply go,” I discovered that not being solid meant that I could control the shape of my body to some degree. Which is to say that, when I reached and stretched desperately for the opening because I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of my friend, my body responded by stretching like taffy until I reached it.

My head was the first part of me to reach the opening, and it fit through easily. On the other side was a smooth stone tunnel. It was straight, sloping down into the distance, and looked like it was exactly the same height and width as the gate. With my head inside I willed myself to move through, and there was the same feeling of resistance and stretching as the previous night as my body forced itself through, like an octopus squeezing itself inside a bottle. On the other side of the gate I poured onto the ground and solidified with a sense of triumph.

I looked around. There was the gate, still outlined on this side in magical light. There was the tunnel, which I couldn’t see the end of. It must be pitch black, because I could see very well.

Herald was still outside the gate. Now what?

I’d passed through the hole quickly, so the doors couldn’t be very thick. Could I push them open? I put my shoulder to one side of the centre line and heaved. Nothing happened. I tried again, harder and for longer, and still nothing happened. I stopped as I heard a scrabbling above me.

“Draka!” Herald’s voice came in a loud whisper. “What is in there, Draka?”

“A tunnel into the mountain,” I whispered back.

“What?”

“A tunnel into the mountain!” I repeated, louder this time.

“Oh!” she replied. “That makes sense, I suppose. Can you get the gate open?”

“I’m trying, but either it’s too heavy or something…” I heaved. “Is holding…” I heaved harder. “It shut!” I heaved with all my might, my claws scraping on the stone floor, and a whole lot of nothing happened.

“Draka, it is alright if you cannot get it open,” Herald said, but I could hear the disappointment in her voice. “I will just stay here with Melon, and… and you can go ahead and let me know what you–”

“Fuck that!” I said angrily, and heaved as hard as I could on the stone. “Come on, you fucking…”

I was a dragon, dammit! I could fly, and get chopped in the neck with swords, and I could defy physics. I was going to get this thing open. I wanted it open. I demanded that it open!

“Open!” I roared, and I felt something leave me. The lines around the gate flared briefly, and the gate slowly ground open, Herald dropping lightly to the ground in front of me and getting Melon out of the way.

“Is foul language the secret, then?” she asked jokingly as she peered into the dark.

“It usually helps, yeah. But it felt like I did something. Like I pushed magic into it, and then it just opened.”

“Perhaps that is how the others got in. It would be just like Tam to stumble onto something like that.”

“Yeah? Is he smart?”

Herald laughed. “Draka, I love my brother, and he is not dumb. But no, he is far more lucky than smart. Extraordinarily lucky. Come on now, let’s go.”

I hoped that she was right about that, and that his luck had held. Wherever he was.

Herald took her bow and her bags but left Melon loose outside. “Is that safe?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Herald answered. “She’ll wander a little for food and water, but she’ll stay in the area. If we do not come back in a long while she might find her way home, but I am willing to risk that. She’s a clever old girl.”

And so the two of us entered the tunnel. The darkness and silence swallowed us quickly, and Herald walked along carefully, holding on to my wing for guidance. There was no dripping, no scratching. No distant echoes. Only our footsteps. The tunnel, I saw, curved subtly in a downward spiral as it went along, and once the gate was out of sight it was almost like being in a small, separate world. There were barely even any scents on the weirdly dry air. All I smelled was stone, dust, and Herald.

“Can you see at all?” I whispered to Herald after a minute, when there was no longer any light visible from the open gate. It was so quiet in there that even that felt loud, and I was starting to wonder about who or what else might be in here.

“No, nothing,” Herald whispered back. “I have a lantern but I did not want to light it in case there is something unfriendly in here. But if all those people came here there must be light sooner or later, right?”

“Right,” I said, but it was hard to believe it in this bubble of darkness. “Where’s that shiny stuff on the walls when you need it?”

“It is too dry,” Herald said, reaching out to touch the wall. “Glow slime needs enough water that it trickles down the walls.”

As we descended I kept thinking that there were things we should have asked ourselves before we went in here. Like, why would a whole village just up and leave for a hole in the mountains? Especially since those who had been away didn’t know anything about it. And why would a whole mining camp do the same? The goblins hadn’t said anything about anyone taking them. They’d all just walked off together into the mountains.

What the hell might we find down here?

I had no idea how long we walked through that tunnel. It might have been ten minutes or two hours. The tunnel wasn’t smooth, but it was completely featureless. Just one long, curving rectangular tube, going on and on and on, with no light, no sound. No luminescent algae. No dripping water. No small critters scuttling in the dark. Nothing but our footsteps and our breathing, our heartbeats and the rustle of Herald’s clothing.

I could have cried with relief when I actually heard a sound in the distance that wasn’t us. I stopped, and Herald took another step and then stopped as well.

“What is it?” Herald whispered tensely, bending towards me and keeping her voice as low as she could.

“Do you hear that?”

She was silent for perhaps a minute. “Yes. A… creaking, grinding sound. Rhythmic.”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Can’t be far.”

“Gods, I hope that you are right.”

“Let’s go. Slowly and quietly.”

As we went on the sound got louder, and was joined by other sounds, scratches and taps and thuds, and a rushing sound in the background that might be water. Soon there was a faint light at the far end of the bend, and we crept forward ever more cautiously until, without warning, the tunnel ended.

It opened up into a large space, a natural cavern that had clearly been expanded in places. It was lit with a pale blue light, and I could see large stalactites hanging from the ceiling. From where we were we could see across the space, and it looked like there was a walkway cut around the side of it that led to other openings in the wall, much like our own. Whatever lay deeper was hidden by a wide rock ledge and the first step of what must be a staircase.

At this distance we could hear sporadic voices, mutterings and sometimes harsh laughter, though most of it was drowned out by the creaking. We got low, me flattening myself to the floor and Herald on her hands and knees, and crept forward towards the ledge. Herald reached it before I did, and her breath caught with an almost silent “Oh!” as she looked down.

I wasn’t completely sure what I was seeing. Rows of people sat along the walls of the lower level. Some of them looked like they were making simple crafts or mending clothes. Others turned a large horizontal wheel which creaked loudly with every push. I couldn’t see that the thing was attached to anything so I guessed there must be more to it under the floor. The people were men, women and children of all ages, dressed in simple homemade clothes, and the cavern smelled of unwashed bodies. No human spoke. No children cried. Their faces, from what I could see at that distance, looked completely blank, as though they were sleepwalking. I was pretty sure that we had found our missing villagers.

Besides the smell of the villagers there was something else there. Something I couldn’t separate out from the other scents, but it was definitely there, like a background. The dragon stirred, and though it didn’t say anything I felt anxiety and confusion from it, emotions that it rarely expressed.

I was sure that the smell didn’t come from the other group of beings in the cavern. Watching over the humans were a few tall, thin creatures. In the blue light I could only tell that their skin was paler than the humans’, and they were hairless, with large eyes but no noses or ears, just slits and openings. They all held spears, but their posture and the way they paid more attention to each other than the humans suggested boredom more than anything else.

I watched one of them walk up to a woman sewing something. It knocked the piece out of her hands with the butt of its spear. The woman calmly picked her work up and continued. The guard knocked it out of her hands again. She picked it up again. He kicked her lightly in the side with his boot and she didn’t react at all. Finally it seemed to slump a little, finding no entertainment there and walking up to one of its fellows, which spoke to it in a language full of hisses and guttural consonants and laughed. At it or the woman or at the whole situation, who could tell?

Every now and then the guards would take one of the people pushing the wheel and sit them down by the wall. Then they would get someone who was sitting and put them at the wheel. The prisoners just did as directed, with no sign of fatigue or emotion.

The source of the pale blue light was four small orbs set like torches on the walls. They shone with different brightnesses, and as one of the guards passed a particularly dim one it stopped and looked at the orb, then reached out and touched it. Even at a distance I saw a little bit of magic gather in the guard and then flow into the orb, which immediately became much brighter. Magical torches? Neat. I wanted one.

“These must be the villagers," Herald whispered. "Do you see their eyes? It is like there is nothing there.”

“Fucking creepy, yeah. What are those creatures guarding them?”

“I have no idea. They do not resemble anything I have ever seen or heard or read about.”

“They’re valkin,” a male voice whispered behind us, and I only barely swallowed a shriek.