Kiran walked over to the dead dragon, his legs still shaking like wet grass.
He bent down into the grey dust, picked up his steel wrench, and wiped the sticky black fluid off the metal using the hem of his torn shirt.
The iron was cold, but it felt good in his grip.
Solid.
Familiar.
“Don’t just stand there looking at it,” Vaelgor rumbled from behind him.
The big drake had sunk back onto his belly, his chest heaving with thick, ragged breaths.
The blood from his cracked shoulder was pooling on the floor, steaming against the cold stone.
His single bronze eye looked dimmer than before.
The short fight had drained whatever strength he had managed to gather during their rest.
“What do we do with him?” Kiran asked, pointing his wrench at Kark’s limp neck.
“You said more of them are coming.”
“We take what keeps him warm,” Vaelgor said.
The dragon reached out with a heavy front paw.
Using one thick, curved claw like a butcher’s knife, he cut down the center of Kark’s chest scales.
The sound was like leather tearing over wood.
With a grunt of effort, Vaelgor hooked his claws into the breastplate and wrenched the rib bones apart.
Inside the chest cavity, nestled right between the thick grey meat of the lungs, something was glowing.
It wasn’t blood.
It was a hard, round lump about the size of an orange, shining with a dull, cherry-red light.
It looked like an ember pulled straight out of a blacksmith’s furnace, throbbing with a slow, faint heat that pushed back the chill of the cave.
[JYOTI]
Lesser Fire Core: Extracted.
Grade: Low.
Quality: Unrefined.
Contains concentrated energy of a Stage 1 Bone Forging drake.
Kiran felt the heat from five feet away.
“That was inside his chest?”
“Every dragon has one,” Vaelgor muttered.
He carefully pinched the glowing knot between two claws and lifted it out.
The flesh around it sizzled and smoked, but Vaelgor’s thick scales didn’t even scorch.
“It is where the fire lives.
When a dragon dies, the heat gathers here before the body turns to cold stone.”
Vaelgor held the glowing red ball up to his snout, sniffing it.
“Are you going to eat that?” Kiran asked, his stomach giving a nervous twist.
“If I don’t, my own fire goes out before we climb down the next shelf,” Vaelgor said flatly.
“My blood is too thin.
I cannot close the wound on my wing without fuel.”
The big drake opened his jaws to swallow the core whole, then stopped.
His golden eye flicked down to Kiran.
“You took the warmth from that dead pebble earlier,” Vaelgor said slowly.
“Yeah.
It was warm.”
“A dragon core is not an old pebble,” Vaelgor grunted.
“If a human tries to eat this, the heat will burn your stomach out through your spine.
But…
when I crack the shell, the first breath of energy will spill out into the air.”
The dragon lowered his snout until he was level with Kiran.
“Sit down,” Vaelgor ordered.
“Cross your legs.
When I crush it, pull the vapor into your gut like I showed you.
If your chest starts to feel like boiling water, spit the air out.
Kiran didn’t hesitate.
He dropped onto the dirt floor three feet from Vaelgor’s nose, sat cross-legged, and rested his hands on his knees.
[JYOTI]
Preparation logged.
Advice: Do not inhale through the mouth.
Use the nostrils to filter the raw elemental heat.
Maintain slow, even pressure.
Got it, Kiran thought.
Vaelgor placed the glowing red knot between his back molars.
CRACK.
The sound was sharp, like a river stone splitting in a bonfire.
A bright flash of red-orange light lit up the dark walls of the cave, followed by a thick hiss.
A cloud of red-tinted vapor puffed out from the corners of Vaelgor’s lips, rolling across the stone floor straight toward Kiran.
It didn’t smell like sulfur.
It smelled like dry oak wood burning in the middle of winter, clean and intensely hot.
Kiran closed his eyes and drew a long, steady breath through his nose.
The heat hit his sinuses like snorting hot pepper.
Tears sprang to his eyes, and his throat clamped tight in panic.
It felt as if he had leaned right over an open furnace door and taken a full lungful of chimney heat.
Don’t cough, he told himself, his jaw clenching hard.
Push it down.
He forced his throat open.
He dragged the scorching air down his windpipe, steering it down past his collarbones, past his heart, straight into the pit of his belly.
The tiny spark under his ribs didn’t just turn—it caught like dry straw.
A wave of prickling, needle-sharp heat surged outward from his navel, rushing through his ribs and slamming into his shoulders.
Kiran gritted his teeth, his hands gripping his knees so hard the joints popped.
His skin flushed bright red, sweat pouring down his forehead in greasy sheets.
Inside his head, the blue letters flashed in rapid succession.
[JYOTI]
Foreign Fire Energy detected.
Purity: Low.
Circulating through primary channels…
Muscle fiber density: Increasing.
Bone resilience: Increasing.
For two agonizing minutes, Kiran felt like an iron kettle sitting on a roaring burner.
Every breath out was a puff of hot, grey vapor.
Every breath in was a fresh drag of burning air.
Then, slowly, the violent burning began to settle.
The wild heat didn’t disappear; it sank into his bones.
His limbs, which had felt like lead pipes since the walk through the ash, suddenly felt light.
The deep, throbbing ache in his scraped knee dulled into nothing.
The constant shivering that had plagued his spine since he woke up under the twin moons finally stopped completely.
Kiran opened his eyes and let out a long breath.
A small, perfect ring of pale smoke curled from his mouth, drifting up to the stone ceiling before fading into the shadows.
[JYOTI]
Iron Breath Cycle: Completed.
Progress: 2.1%
Physical Condition: Fatigue reduced by 40%.
Foundation established: Minor Heat Tolerance.
Kiran stared at his hands.
The dirt on his knuckles was dry and cracked, but his skin looked healthier, faintly pink beneath the soot, and his fingers weren’t numb anymore.
Across from him, Vaelgor let out a deep, thunderous groan of relief.
The massive drake had swallowed the rest of the core.
Beneath his grey scales, lines of bright orange light were pulsing through his chest, traveling along his neck and down into his injured left shoulder.
The broken meat pulled tight, knitting together under a fresh, hard layer of black scales that formed right over the wound like cooling iron.
Vaelgor stretched his left wing slightly.
It was still stiff, and the joint looked crooked, but it didn’t hang limp anymore.
“Better,” Vaelgor rumbled, his voice shaking the loose dust on the floor.
“Not healed.
But better.”
“You look less like a corpse,” Kiran said, wiping his sweaty face with his sleeve.
“And you did not burst,” Vaelgor replied, nudging Kark’s dead body with the tip of his snout.
“Though you smell like burnt hair now.”
“That’s just my jacket,” Kiran muttered, standing up.
When his feet hit the ground, he was surprised.
His legs didn’t wobble.
His ankles felt firm, and the heavy air in the cave didn’t press down on his lungs the way it had an hour ago.
It was like his body had finally learned how to push back against this world.
“Now we burn the carcass,” Vaelgor said, stepping back from Kark’s remains.
“If the King’s hounds find a body torn open by claws, they will know an injured drake did it.
If they find only ash, they will think the yellow fog dissolved him.”
Vaelgor took a deep, dragging breath, his ribcage expanding until the orange light beneath his scales flared bright as a torch.
He opened his jaws and unleashed a solid stream of red-orange fire directly onto Kark’s corpse.
The heat was blinding.
The flames roared with the sound of a freight train, filling the stone shelter with an orange glare so bright Kiran had to throw an arm over his eyes.
In less than ten seconds, the green scales, the meat, and the bones were blackened, crumbling into a pile of smoking grey slag on the cavern floor.
Vaelgor shut his mouth, coughing up a small cloud of black soot.
“The fire will pull trackers,” the dragon said, turning toward the back tunnel where the water dripped.
“The heat bloom will rise through the rock cracks.
We have perhaps thirty minutes before the second scout checks this shelf.”
“Through the back?” Kiran asked.
“You said that tunnel was just a water crack.”
“The water has to come from somewhere, ape,” Vaelgor grunted, already squeezing his massive shoulders into the narrow passage.
“It means there is a seam that cuts deeper into the gorge.
It will be tight.
You will have to walk in front and tell me if the walls get too close.”
Kiran picked up his wrench, gave his cloth-wrapped shoes a quick tug to tighten the knots, and jogged into the dark tunnel ahead of the dragon.
The passage was damp and narrow.
Cold water trickled around Kiran’s feet, washing the soot off his soles.
Behind him, the sound of Vaelgor’s scales scraping against the tight stone walls sounded like two heavy sledges grinding together in the dark.
They walked for twenty minutes in complete blackness, guided only by the faint orange glow coming from the cracks between Vaelgor’s ribs and the soft blue text hovering in Kiran’s line of sight.
[JYOTI]
Path slope: -14 degrees.
Descent into Lower Gorge Seam confirmed.
Warning: Acoustic signature behind host.
Distance: 800 yards.
Number of sources: Three.
Kiran stopped on a flat stone in the middle of the underground stream, turning his head back toward the dark.
From far up the tunnel, past the shelter they had just left, came a sound that made his stomach turn to water.
It was not a dragon’s roar.
It was the high, yapping bay of hunting beasts—sharp, frantic, and echoed a dozen times over by the wet stone walls.
“Vaelgor,” Kiran whispered into the dark.
“What sounds like dogs?”
Behind him, the orange glow in Vaelgor’s chest suddenly flared hot.
“Bone-Hounds,” the dragon growled, his voice tight with real fear.
“The King’s scouts don’t walk alone.
They brought the leashed packs.”