Vaelgor’s massive head loomed closer.
His single good eye was wide, the bronze glow inside it flaring like a struck match.
“I asked you a question, ape,” the dragon rumbled, his voice dropping into a low, threatening hiss.
“The Sunken Gorge is not marked on any map given to common slaves.
Only the Royal Guard and the condemned know that name.
Who told you?”
Kiran backed up until his shoulder hit the jagged wall of the cave.
He felt a bead of cold sweat roll down his neck.
In front of his eyes, the pale blue text flashed.
[JYOTI]
Warning: Host heart rate is 165 BPM.
Advisory: Lying to a predatory beast with superior sense of smell is ill-advised.
Then what am I supposed to say?!
Kiran shouted in his mind.
Tell him a glowing square in my eyeball gave me a quest?!
He’ll think I’m cursed and bite my head off!
[JYOTI]
Host may state that the information was received from an internal guide.
That sounds even crazier!
“I’m waiting,” Vaelgor snarled.
A puff of hot, sulfur-smelling smoke vented from his left nostril, washing over Kiran’s face.
“Speak before I snap your ribs.”
“I…
I heard voices!” Kiran blurted out, waving his hands in front of his chest.
“Look, ever since that fire threw me onto this rock, I have this…
thing in my head.
Like a voice.
It told me the Sunken Gorge is where you need to go to survive.”
Vaelgor stared at him.
The dragon didn’t move a muscle.
For ten long seconds, the only sound was the wind whistling through the cracks in the basalt ceiling.
[JYOTI]
Target is evaluating your sanity.
Probability that target considers you mentally unhinged: 88%.
Vaelgor slowly pulled his snout back, letting out a heavy, rattling sigh that shook the loose dust from the floor.
“A spirit curse,” the dragon muttered, disgusted.
“You humans have soft heads.
One little bump against a stone, or a breath of bad vapor from the vents, and your brains rot into mush.
You think the dead are whispering to you.”
“Yeah,” Kiran said quickly, nodding so hard his neck hurt.
“Totally.
Soft head.
Definitely brain rot.
But is it real?
Is there really a Sunken Gorge?”
“Of course it is real,” Vaelgor grunted, turning his head back toward the cave entrance to watch the silver sky.
“It is a wound in the earth, five hundred miles to the south.
The cliffs are so steep and the mist is so thick with poison that the King’s high-flyers cannot dive into it without choking.
Only the broken, the sick, and the banished crawl into that ditch to hide.”
“Then that’s where we go,” Kiran said.
Vaelgor gave a harsh, coughing bark that sounded like rocks tumbling down a chute.
It took Kiran a second to realize the dragon was laughing at him.
“We?” Vaelgor sneered, rolling his eye back toward Kiran.
“You think you are coming with me, little hairless thing?
Look at you.
You have no hide.
No claws.
No fire in your gullet.
Your skin is already turning blue from the morning draft, and you do not even have leather boots on your feet.
You will drop dead before we reach the valley floor.”
“And you have a shredded wing and a cracked shoulder,” Kiran shot back, his voice sharper than he intended.
“You can’t fly.
If an imperial patrol spots you out in the open, you can’t run.
You need someone small who can scout the narrow trails where your big head won’t fit.”
Vaelgor’s lips curled back, exposing a row of jagged, yellow teeth.
“I am a dragon of the Red-Iron clan.
Even on three legs, I can crush a pack of mountain dogs into grease.”
“Great,” Kiran said, crossing his arms over his chest to fight the cold.
“Then enjoy crushing dogs while the big dragons in the sky drop rocks on your head.
But if you want to make it to that gorge in one piece, you need two eyes and two heads.
Yours is mostly full of bad temper right now.”
Vaelgor let out a low, menacing growl, but he didn’t attack.
His tail gave a single, irritated flick against the stone floor.
He looked out at the vast, desolate landscape stretching below them.
The pale sun was climbing higher into the silver sky.
Far above the distant black peaks, the dark shapes of patrolling drakes were gliding in wide, lazy circles.
They were hunting, scanning every ridge and gully for signs of blood or movement.
“The air is warming,” Vaelgor said quietly, his tone suddenly flat and serious.
“The thermals will rise soon.
When the warm air lifts from the rocks, the high scouts can glide for leagues without flapping their wings.
They see everything.”
“Then we need to move,” Kiran said.
“Now.”
Vaelgor didn’t argue.
With a grunt of pain, the massive beast pushed himself up onto three legs.
His left wing hung slightly limp, held tight against his ribs by the thick, black scab of dried blood, but the bleeding had stopped.
He took a slow, heavy step toward the entrance, testing his weight.
The stone groaned under his claws, but he didn’t collapse.
“Stay under my shadow,” Vaelgor muttered, ducking his horned head as he squeezed out through the split in the mountain.
“If you see a shadow cross the sun, drop flat.
If you scream, I will step on you.”
“Understood,” Kiran whispered.
He followed the dragon out into the blinding silver daylight.
The moment Kiran stepped outside, the cold hit him again.
It wasn’t the freezing bite of midnight, but a dry, thin wind that sucked the moisture straight out of his lips and eyes.
The ground was a nightmare.
The slope leading down from the ridge was a steep, jagged field of black volcanic glass and loose shale.
Every step was treacherous.
Kiran’s sneakers, designed for flat suburban sidewalks and school hallways, had almost no grip on the loose stone.
Within five minutes, sharp edges of black rock had sliced through the thin rubber soles, sending sharp stabs of pain into his feet.
He slipped once, his knee slamming hard against a sharp ledge.
He bit his lip to keep from crying out, tasting copper.
[JYOTI]
Minor laceration on right patella.
Advice: Watch where you put your feet.
Basalt does not yield to human bone.
I’m doing my best!
Kiran thought, wiping sweat and dirt from his forehead with the back of his soot-stained wrist.
Beside him, Vaelgor moved with surprising quiet for a creature the size of a truck.
The dragon walked with a slow, rolling limp, keeping his belly low to the rock to break up his silhouette against the sky.
His heavy, curved claws dug into the shale with dull, rhythmic crunches, leaving deep grooves in the hillside.
They picked their way down a narrow gully—a dry, ancient stream bed cut deep into the mountain’s flank.
The high stone walls on either side offered some cover from the sky, but the going was agonizingly slow.
After two hours of continuous walking, Kiran’s throat felt like sandpaper.
His lungs burned from breathing the thin, ash-heavy air.
His legs were shaking with pure exhaustion.
“Water,” Kiran wheezed, leaning his shoulder against the cliff wall.
“Vaelgor…
is there water anywhere out here?”
Vaelgor stopped.
He turned his heavy head, his nostrils flaring as he tested the wind.
“There is no sweet water on the upper ridge,” the dragon said, not even looking back.
“Only sulfur springs and runoff from the high snows.
If an ape drinks sulfur, his guts melt.”
“Then I need snow,” Kiran croaked.
“Anything.”
The dragon snorted, but his golden eye flicked toward a dark crease in the rock twenty yards ahead, where the gully narrowed into a dark throat.
“There,” Vaelgor grunted, nodding his chin toward the shadow.
“Under the overhang.
The frost does not melt until midday.”
Kiran practically scrambled across the loose rock, dragging his feet.
Tucked deep beneath a shelf of black stone was a thick patch of dirty, greyish ice, packed hard against the rock.
It looked unappetizing, full of black grit and ash, but Kiran didn’t care.
He dropped to his knees, scraped away the top layer of soot with his bare fingers, and scooped a handful of the cleaner frost beneath it into his mouth.
The cold was an electric shock to his gums.
It tasted faintly of iron and smoke, but as it melted down his parched throat, it felt like life itself.
He shoved another handful into his mouth, his numb fingers aching from the frost.
[JYOTI]
Ingestion analysis:
Water contains trace mineral ash and iron particulates.
Toxicity level: Negligible.
Hydration restored: Minimal.
“Don’t eat too much, fool,” Vaelgor warned, his low rumble echoing in the narrow space.
“Cold water in an empty belly will make you retch.
And we have leagues to cross before nightfall.”
Kiran sat back on his heels, breathing hard, wiping his wet chin.
He looked up at the dragon, who was standing at the edge of the gully, peering out toward the lower plains.
“How far is five hundred miles for a dragon?” Kiran asked.
“On the wing?
Two days if the winds are favorable,” Vaelgor replied, his voice bitter.
“On foot, through the broken lands with hunters above us?
Two weeks.
Maybe three.
If the cold doesn’t kill you, and the scent of my blood doesn’t draw the mountain worms.”
“Mountain worms?” Kiran’s stomach sank.
“What are mountain worms?”
“You will know if you hear the ground humming,” Vaelgor said casually.
Before Kiran could ask for clarification, a sudden, high-pitched whistle cut through the sky above them.
It was not the wind.
It was the sound of air being torn apart at immense speed.
Vaelgor’s eye went wide with pure terror.
Without a word, the dragon dropped flat against the dirt, swinging his massive neck around and using the side of his snout to shove Kiran violently back under the rock overhang.
The impact knocked the wind clean out of Kiran’s chest, throwing him into the dirt right beside the patch of ice.
“Do not breathe,” Vaelgor’s voice was a vibration so faint it barely traveled through the stone.
High above the gully, a dark shape cut across the silver sky.
It was flying much lower than the patrol birds they had seen earlier.
Kiran could see it clearly through the narrow gap between the canyon walls.
It was an imperial dragon, but it looked entirely different from Vaelgor.
Its scales were not grey iron; they were a bright, polished bronze that gleamed like a newly minted coin in the silver sun.
Its wings were long, narrow, and sharp at the tips, built for pure speed.
Along its spine ran a crest of razor-sharp white horns.
It flew with terrifying grace, banking sharply on the wind currents without a sound.
The bronze dragon tilted its wings, circling the mountain ridge directly above their gully.
Kiran lay frozen on the frozen ground, his cheek pressed against the freezing dirt.
He held his breath until spots danced in front of his eyes.
Right beside him, Vaelgor had pulled his limbs in tight, burying his head beneath his good wing, trying to make his massive grey bulk look like just another piece of fallen boulder.
The bronze dragon circled once.
Twice.
Then, from high in the sky, a sound rolled down through the canyon—a clear, ringing challenge that sounded like a giant bronze bell being struck with an iron hammer.
The sheer pressure of the call made Kiran’s ears pop, sending a wave of nausea through his gut.
The bronze hunter didn’t dive.
After a long, agonizing minute, it caught a rising draft of air, leveled its wings, and shot away toward the southern horizon, disappearing over the peaks in a blink.
Silence returned to the canyon.
Vaelgor slowly lifted his head, his scales covered in black dust.
He let out a long, trembling breath that blew the loose grit away from his nose.
“A Sky-Guard,” the dragon whispered, his voice dark with hate.
“They are sweeping the lower passes.
They know I cannot climb higher into the thin air with a torn wing.
They are waiting for me down in the valley.”
Kiran pulled himself up from the dirt, his knees shaking, his clothes covered in grey frost.
“Then we can’t take the main valley,” Kiran said, his voice quiet.
“There is no other way south,” Vaelgor replied grimly.
“Unless we cut through the Ash Chasm.”
“What’s the Ash Chasm?”
Vaelgor looked down at Kiran, his bronze eye dark and solemn.
“A graveyard,” the dragon said.
“Where the first dragon wars were fought.
Nothing lives there.
Even the Sky-Guards do not fly over it, because the air above the chasm is dead.
If you step into the ash, you do not come out.”
In Kiran’s vision, the blue letters flickered to life.
[JYOTI]
Route Recalculation:
Path 1: Southern Valley (Detection Probability: 91%).
Path 2: Ash Chasm (Survival Probability: 12%).
Quest Note: Iron Breath cultivation method requires exposure to ancient elemental residue.
Recommendation: The Chasm is less crowded.
Kiran stared at the blue words, then looked up at the towering, battered dragon in front of him.
“Vaelgor,” Kiran said slowly.
“How do you feel about graveyards?”