Torven turned his heavy body back toward the glowing rock, his tail dragging through the grey dust.
“Take the jar and the copper sheet,” the old drake rasped, his voice flat.
“Follow the tracks down through Sector 5.
If the ceiling isn’t collapsed, the sixth seam has an old pump-room where the air doesn’t smell like sulfur.
You can rest there.”
Kiran didn’t pick up the map.
He walked over to Torven’s hind legs, stopping right beside the heavy iron cuffs bolted around the old dragon’s ankles.
The iron was two inches thick, covered in pitted orange rust.
A broken chain trailed four feet behind it, ending in a snapped link where Torven had dragged it across the stone for hundreds of years.
“What are you doing, ape?” Torven grunted, glancing over his shoulder.
“You’re not staying here,” Kiran said.
“Don’t be a fool,” Torven muttered.
“I have no wings.
My joints ache when the air gets damp.
The King’s soldiers will be here tomorrow with iron bars.
If I run, they’ll catch me on the trail before midday.”
“They won’t catch you if you’re down in Sector 6 with us,” Kiran said.
He knelt in the dirt, tapping the rusted hinge of the left cuff with the flat of his wrench.
“Besides, you know the tunnels.
We don’t.
If we walk down that dark hole alone, we’ll probably step straight into a spider nest.”
“The cuffs don’t open, boy,” Torven said, his raspy voice tired.
“The guards poured molten lead into the keyholes when they locked me in.
The pins are fused.”
“Lead is soft,” Kiran said.
“Iron is hard.
If the iron is rusted, the seam is weak.”
He leaned closer, examining the lock-box on the side of the cuff.
Just like his father always said when dealing with old pipes: rust didn’t just sit on metal; it pushed metal apart.
The red crust had swollen inside the seam, cracking the lead seal into thin, crumbly grey powder.
Kiran reached into his pocket, pulled out the jar of bone-salve, and rubbed a small smear of the cooling grease along his sore wrists.
The icy prickle sank into his arms, tightening his grip.
“Ignis,” Kiran called out.
The skinny young dragon poked his head out from under the tool rack.
“Me?”
“Come here.
Put a small flame right on this hinge.
Just a needle of heat.
Don’t melt the stone, just heat the iron until it turns dull red.”
Ignis trotted over, his crooked horn dipping low.
He puffed out his skinny chest, took a careful breath, and blew a thin, whistling jet of orange fire straight against the rusted hinge of the left cuff.
The iron hissed. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Flakes of orange rust curled and blackened.
The old lead plug inside the keyway melted, dripping down onto the stone floor like silver solder.
“Stop,” Kiran said.
Ignis snapped his snout shut, coughing up a small ring of smoke.
Kiran stepped in while the metal was still hot and expanded.
He jammed the hardened tip of his steel wrench straight into the cracked seam between the two halves of the cuff.
He took a slow breath through his nose.
Down to the belly.
Out to the bone.
The dense, solid heat woke up beneath his navel, rushing up through his spine and into his shoulders.
The leather bracers clamped tight around his forearms, the cold-iron splints humming against his skin.
Kiran set his boots against the floor, gripped the wrench with both hands, and threw his weight into a sharp, violent twist.
SNAP-CLANG!
The swollen iron pin sheared in two.
The heavy cuff flew open, hitting the floor with a hollow, ringing crash that echoed off the walls.
Torven flinched, pulling his hind leg back as if he had been stung.
He stared at his bare ankle.
The scales underneath were pale, worn completely flat and smooth from centuries of rubbing against rough metal, but the heavy weight was gone.
“The…
the pin broke,” Torven whispered, his cloudy green eyes blinking in pure shock.
“One more to go,” Kiran grunted, wiping sweat and soot from his eyes.
“Ignis, heat the other one.”
Five minutes later, the second iron ring cracked open with a loud thud, tumbling into the dust beside the first.
Torven stood on all four feet.
The old dragon took one slow, trembling step forward.
Then another.
He lifted his back legs high, shaking them in the warm air of the forge as if he couldn’t believe the ground wasn’t holding him back.
He let out a sound that didn’t sound like a dragon at all—a high, shaking wheeze that sounded like an old man laughing through tears.
“Three hundred years,” Torven breathed, his voice cracking.
“Three hundred years dragging that cold ditch-iron.”
He turned his scarred, hunched head and looked down at Kiran.
The cynicism in his cloudy eyes was completely gone, replaced by a quiet, stunned reverence that made Kiran feel slightly awkward.
“You really are a strange ape,” Torven murmured.
“I just don’t like seeing things stuck in rust,” Kiran said, tucking his wrench back into his waistband.
[JYOTI]
Hidden Action Completed: The Smith’s Shackles.
Torven Iron-Biter has joined the group.
Party Mobility: Unchanged (Torven is still slow).
Party Morale: Significantly increased.
Iron Breath Progress: 14.2%
Vaelgor walked over, nudging one of the broken cuffs with his claw.
The big drake gave Kiran a slow nod—not saying a word, but the golden fire in his single eye burned a little warmer.
“Pack what you can carry,” Vaelgor rumbled.
If we are going into the deep seams, we go before the mountain cools.”
Kiran picked up the copper map, tucking it inside his shirt against his chest.
He took the heavy jar of bone-salve and wedged it into his back pocket next to the wrench.
Torven led the way toward the dark tunnel at the back of the forge.
The passage was wide—cut big enough for two draft drakes to walk shoulder to shoulder—but the moment they stepped past the boundary of the forge, the heat from the glowing rock seam disappeared.
The temperature plummeted.
It wasn’t the sharp, biting cold of the mountain snow.
It was a dead, hollow chill, like stepping into an underground cellar that had been sealed for centuries.
The air felt heavy, damp, and completely still.
Ignis walked right beside Kiran, his crooked head tilted low.
A small ember sat glowing in the back of the young dragon’s throat, casting a soft, flickering yellow light across the floor.
The walls here were different from the upper levels.
They weren’t smooth granite.
They were jagged layers of dark slate, crisscrossed with thick white veins of quartz.
Every twenty paces, heavy wooden support beams arched over their heads, their black timbers bowed under the terrible weight of the mountain above.
Kiran looked at the walls as they walked.
Running along the stone at waist height were long, narrow scratches.
They weren’t the broad marks of human pickaxes.
They were thin, razor-sharp grooves cut deep into the rock, grouped in clusters of three and four, as if something with needle-tipped legs had dragged itself along the walls in the dark.
“Torven,” Kiran whispered, his hand drifting to the grip of his wrench.
“What made these marks?”
Torven didn’t stop walking, but his chained stumps gave a small, nervous twitch on his back.
“Spindle-crawlers,” the old smith muttered, keeping his voice low.
“They live in the cracked shale between Sector 5 and Sector 6.
They have no eyes and no blood.
Their legs are made of hollow black bone, sharp enough to punch through drake scale.”
“Do they hunt in packs?” Kiran asked, his heart speeding up.
“They hunt when they hear iron strike stone,” Torven said.
“So keep your little tool quiet, boy.
If one of them drops from the ceiling, you don’t hit it.
You let Vaelgor burn it before it finds your neck.”
They descended deeper into the dark.
The slope was steep, the stone floor slick with black moisture that smelled faintly of old oil.
After twenty minutes of silent walking, the tunnel widened out into a massive, cavernous hall.
The floor ended at a broken edge.
Stretching out in front of them was an underground chasm—a bottomless black gorge that split Sector 5 in half.
Across the void, two colossal stone bridges had once connected the mine shafts, but both had been shattered in the middle, leaving only jagged stumps sticking out into the darkness.
Running between the two broken edges, suspended over the black abyss by four thick, rusted iron cables, was an ancient wooden tram platform.
It sat completely motionless in the center of the gap, forty feet out, swaying gently in a freezing draft that blew up from the deep.
And clinging to the underside of the wooden platform, half-hidden in the shadows, were three pale, spindly shapes the size of horses, their long, needle-sharp legs twitching in the dark.