The chain rattled again, slow and heavy, dragging over the flat stone.
Ignis scrambled backward until his tail smacked against Kiran’s shins.
The young drake dropped flat, his snout buried in the dirt, shivering so hard his crooked horn rattled against the rock floor.
Vaelgor didn’t hide.
He stepped in front of Kiran, his massive chest blocking the view of the tunnel.
The heat beneath his dark scales flared bright orange, making his ribs glow like hot coals.
“Show yourself,” Vaelgor rumbled, his voice low and dangerous.
“I don’t play games in the dark.”
The green eyes blinked twice in the black tunnel mouth.
Then, with a slow, scraping shuffle, the owner of the eyes stepped out into the orange light of the glowing seam.
It was a dragon, but he looked like an old tree that had survived a lightning strike.
He was barely twenty feet long, small and thin, with scales the color of dried mud.
His back was bent, his spine curving up in an ugly, crooked hump.
His wings were completely gone—not torn off recently like Vaelgor’s, but cut away so long ago that only two flat, scarred stumps remained on his shoulders.
Around both of his back legs were heavy iron cuffs, thick as tree branches, rusted red with age.
A broken chain trailed behind him, sliding through the dirt like a dead iron snake.
His pale green eyes were milky with cataracts, squinting against the bright heat of the ember stone.
“A Red-Iron,” the old dragon wheezed, his voice dry as dead leaves.
“And a broken one at that.
Smells like the north.
Smells like blood and ash.”
[JYOTI]
Target: Slate-Hump Drake (Old Male).
Status: Malnourished.
Crippled.
Bone density: High, but brittle from age.
Threat level: Low.
Vaelgor didn’t lower his guard, but the tension in his shoulders dropped an inch.
“You’re an old forge-slave.”
“A smith,” the old dragon rasped, baring flat, worn-down teeth.
“Not a slave.
I was shaping iron before your mother cracked her egg, little bull.”
The old drake shuffled two steps closer, his rusted chains clinking against the stone.
His pale green eyes swept past Vaelgor, stopping abruptly on the central anvil.
Then he stopped dead.
His cloudy eyes widened.
He tilted his head, his long neck trembling with age as he looked down at Kiran.
Kiran was standing right beside the massive stone anvil, holding his steel wrench in both hands.
He didn’t run.
He just stood there with his feet planted on the stone, his breath slow and deep, the warmth from his belly keeping him steady.
“What…” the old dragon whispered, his voice cracking.
“What is that?”
“It’s a human,” Vaelgor grunted, turning his head slightly.
“An annoying one.
He throws rocks.”
“I can see he’s a human, you fool,” the old dragon snapped, taking another dragging step forward.
The tip of his snout came down until it was three feet from Kiran’s face.
He took a long, wheezing sniff.
The old drake’s eyes darted from Kiran’s face down to his hands, locking onto the grey steel wrench.
“Where did you get that iron?” the old dragon demanded.
His voice wasn’t angry; it was trembling with shock.
“That is not mine-scrap.
The edges are true.
The corners are square.
Who shaped this?”
Kiran looked at the old wrench in his grip.
It had a little manufacturer stamp near the handle, worn down by grease and years of hard use in his dad’s garage.
“A factory,” Kiran said.
“A what?” the old dragon blinked, confused.
“A workshop,” Kiran corrected himself quickly.
“Back where I come from.
We make tools to fix engines.”
The old dragon stared at the tool, then slowly shifted his gaze to Kiran’s chest.
His nostrils flared again, pulling in the hot air that was still drifting off Kiran’s skin.
“You smell of the seam,” the old drake whispered, his voice hushed with disbelief.
“You have been pulling the heat into your bone.
A human…
standing by the anvil, breathing the deep fire.”
“He was cold,” Vaelgor muttered, though he watched the old dragon carefully.
“I taught him the breath so he wouldn’t freeze on the trail.”
“You taught him?” The old dragon let out a dry, barking laugh that ended in a wet cough.
“You think a common lizard can teach an ape how to drink stone-fire?
Look at him, boy!
His marrow didn’t shatter!
If an ordinary human from the surface breathed from that seam, his veins would turn to black ash in three heartbeats!”
Kiran looked down at his arms.
The skin was still flushed red, but the deep, solid warmth in his bones felt completely natural now.
Jyoti, Kiran thought.
Is he right?
[JYOTI]
Old dragon is partially correct.
Human physiology cannot process raw elemental energy without extreme damage.
Host’s ability to survive is due to: Sealed Bloodline.
Authority Level: Insufficient to elaborate.
One day I’m going to find your authority settings and turn them all on, Kiran thought back with an irritated sigh.
[JYOTI]
Good luck finding the switch.
“What is your name, old one?” Kiran asked, resting the wrench back on the flat top of the anvil.
The old dragon stared at the wrench on the stone, then slowly lifted his head.
“Torven.
In the old days, they called me Torven Iron-Biter.
Now…
now I am just the ghost who watches the mice.”
“Why are you chained down here, Torven?” Kiran asked.
Torven looked down at the heavy iron rings around his ankles.
A bitter, tired smile pulled at his scaly lips.
“When the great war ended three hundred years ago,” Torven rasped, “the Iron King didn’t want anyone to know how deep this mine went.
He didn’t want anyone to find what the human diggers had uncovered in the seventh seam.
So he sealed the upper shafts with lead, broke my wings so I couldn’t climb the vents, and left me to die with the dead tools.”
Ignis peeked out from behind Vaelgor, his orange eyes wide.
“What did the humans uncover?”
Torven’s pale eyes turned toward the dark tunnel behind him—the passage that led deeper into the mountain.
“A door,” the old dragon whispered.
“A massive gate of black iron, buried five miles down, under the solid bedrock.
It had no keyholes.
No latches. Find the original chapter at g.com.
Just markings that burned with white fire whenever a human hand touched them.”
Kiran’s chest gave a sudden, violent thud.
White fire.
The exact same white fire that had swallowed him in the burning warehouse on Earth.
“Did anyone open it?” Kiran asked, his voice tighter than he meant it to be.
“Nobody could,” Torven said, shaking his heavy, horned head.
“The King sent three whole squads of royal guards down to break it with heavy hammers.
The moment their iron struck the door, the white fire flared.
It burned twenty warrior dragons to grey ash in less than a second.
After that…
the King was terrified.
He ordered the shafts collapsed and the whole place buried.”
The chamber fell into dead silence.
The only sound was the steady hum of the glowing orange seam in the wall and the crackle of dry dust under their feet.
Vaelgor’s single bronze eye was fixed on the dark passage leading down.
“The seventh seam.
That is where the air smells cold.”
“Do not go down there,” Torven warned, his voice suddenly sharp.
“The gate is quiet, but the things that crawled out of the deep cracks when the mountain shook are not.
Blind beasts.
Stone spiders with legs like iron spears.
They live in the dark shafts.”
“We didn’t come to dig,” Kiran said, looking at the old drake’s rusted shackles.
“We came because Vaelgor is hurt, and we need a safe place to hide from the hunters on the ridge.”
Torven looked at Vaelgor’s broken horn and the ugly black scab on his wing.
Then he looked at the small, crooked drake shivering in the corner, and finally back at Kiran.
“You picked a strange crew to travel with, boy,” Torven muttered.
“A broken prince, a twisted whelp, and an ape with a smooth hammer.”
“It’s a wrench,” Kiran corrected.
“Whatever it is,” Torven said, turning his hunched back toward the glowing rock seam.
“If you are going to stay in my forge, you don’t sleep for free.
The air-ducts above the old chimney are choked with fallen stone.
If they don’t get cleared, the sulfur from the deep cracks will fill this room by tomorrow night.”
The old dragon pointed a crooked front claw toward a narrow, vertical chimney cut into the ceiling, twenty feet above the anvil.
“I have no wings,” Torven said flatly.
“The big one is too fat to climb up there.
The twisted one has no courage.
That leaves you, boy.”
Kiran looked up at the dark, narrow chimney.
It looked like an old elevator shaft, with rough stone pegs cut into the wall for miners to climb.
He looked at his hands, feeling the solid, heavy strength resting in his bones.
A blue screen popped up in his vision.
[JYOTI]
Side Quest Triggered: Clear the Forge Vent.
Objective: Unblock the upper air passage.
Danger: High altitude climb, unstable debris.
Reward: Forge Access Granted.
Physical conditioning bonus.
Kiran picked up his wrench and tucked it firmly into his waistband.
“I used to climb onto the garage roof to clean the drainpipes every monsoon,” Kiran said, walking toward the base of the stone chimney.
“How bad can a dragon vent be?”