Have you ever used a stair master?
I haven’t. Because I’m not insane. Voluntarily walking on a machine that goes nowhere is only done by people who hate themselves and love suffering. Lyra once tried to convince me, "just try it, Cas, it's good for you," but even Lyra didn't have the power to make me willingly exercise.
This tower was the Stair Master. This tower was every Stair Master in every gym in the world stacked on top of each other and sent to hell. The stairs twisted and narrowed, worn smooth by centuries of footsteps from people who were undoubtedly fitter than I am. They kept climbing, higher and higher, with no sign of stopping or showing any mercy.
I was gasping for breath, my heart thumping in my ears. My thighs were screaming. My calves were aching. The armor, sixty goddamn pounds of Perceval's vanity project, was trying to drag me down with every step.
I had talked a lot of trash about Perceval, but there I was, three hundred steps up, leaning over with my hands on my knees, wheezing like a seventy-year-old smoker.
I should’ve listened to Lyra. I should’ve gone to the gym with her. Every time she asked, I said no. I said that working out was for people with nothing better to do. I said my body was a temple, but that temple was closed. I said I'd rather die than run a mile on purpose.
I stopped. I leaned against the wall, pressed my forehead to the cold stone, and breathed. I tried not to think about how many more stairs there were because, every time I looked up, the spiral kept going, taunting me with its infinity.
One minute. Two. My heartbeat calmed down a bit. I kept going.
It took forever. It took the rest of my twenties. The question now was whether I could save the princess before I turned ninety. TBD. I counted the steps for so long that I lost count. Then I started counting again. Then I gave up and just stared at my feet moving, trying to enter a zen state where the stairs didn't exist and I was somewhere else, anywhere else. Fiji, Bora Bora, Punta Cana.
Then... a door! I couldn't believe my eyes. I climbed up the remaining stairs two at a time. The door, crafted from solid wood, was large and heavy, embedded in the stone at the peak of the staircase. No more stairs. I had climbed the entire tower in full armor and I had made it.
I stood in front of the door. My hands were on my knees, and I was once again out of breath.
Okay.
Okay, okay, okay.
I could do this. I had faced a dragon. Well, I had talked to a dragon about his book club and his union benefits, but I had faced him. Technically. I had stood in his presence and not died. That must count for something, right?
I'd climbed these stairs. Were there seven hundred? Eight hundred? A million? Didn't matter. I had done it.
I could kiss a stupid princess.
Walk in. She’s asleep. Cursed. Whatever. Walk up to her. Kiss her, not in a rapey way. The curse is lifted. The damsel awakens. Heroic action ensues. Easy. Simple.
One kiss.
My insides twisted.
Because it wasn’t just a kiss. It was Lyra’s face. Lyra's mouth... The last time I'd been that close to her face, I thought for one stupid second that it meant something. That it meant everything. Then morning came, and I realized that the most important moment in my whole life was just an ordinary Tuesday for her.
I shook my head. Hard. Like I could rattle the memory loose. Nope. Not thinking about that. Not right now. One kiss. For the greater good. In and out.
I was a good kisser. I'd been told this multiple times by multiple people. I'd been peer reviewed and evaluated by a diverse panel of participants, and the consensus was favorable. This would not be a problem.
“Let's do this,” I told the door. “Let’s fucking do this.”
I grabbed the handle and pulled. The door didn’t budge. I pushed, then tried again, harder. I rammed my shoulder into it. The armor struck the wooden surface.
“Oh come ON —”
I charged right into it, my whole self. The door gave all at once, no warning, flying open, and I stumbled through, tripping into the room —
Something struck my back.
Not something. A body hitting me from above. Legs locked around my torso. Hands on my helmet, yanking it sideways, slamming it against my skull.
“WHAT THE —”
A fist struck the top of my helmet. The clang rattled my teeth. An arm hooked under my chin, pulling and choking me, cutting off my air. I staggered to the side, hitting the wall, and tried to reach behind me, but my armor made my arms as rigid as table legs.
“GET OFF —”
Another hit. I saw stars, floating across my vision through the narrow slit of the visor. I spun. I tried to shake them. I slammed my back against the wall, and they grunted but didn't let go. I reached up, grabbed a handful of fabric, and pulled.
“I WILL BREAK YOUR NECK, YOU WRETCHED — FILTHY —”
That voice.
I grabbed the helmet with both hands and wrenched it off. It came free with a scrape of metal, and the iron rod stopped about three inches from my skull.
She was looming over me. Her hair was disheveled and knotted. Her dress was ripped and she was barefoot. She carried a rod that she had apparently broken off the bed frame, using it as if it were a weapon.
The princess. Cricket. Lyra’s face, pale and thin. She was extremely angry.
“Cassian?” The rod lowered. First an inch. Then another. “You came for me?”
“You’re AWAKE?” I was still on the ground, my body twisted at an angle, with one arm pressed against the floor. "You're... aren't you supposed to be—like—" I closed my eyes. Opened my mouth slightly and let my head loll to the side. Mimed sleeping. “Like this? Cursed? Deathless slumber? True loves kiss to wake you up?"
“Those fools.” She threw the rod onto the bed, a narrow cot against the wall. “They brought me here in chains. Thirty of them, chanting and weeping. They spoke of prophecy. Of divination. Of my sacred role in their wretched fantasy.” She directed her gaze toward me. “They attempted to poison me. They gave me a drink and bade me drink of it so that I might enter the ‘sacred slumber’ their prophecy demands. I spat it into the pillow when they turned to pray. These lunatics believe I am their god.”
“Cricket, that is —”
“They are mad, Cassian. Truly mad. “It is—I cannot—.” She stopped. She composed herself. “It does not matter. You are here. How did you find me?” she asked. “Did the Commander send a company? Did my father —”
“Uh. Not exactly.”
“Then how?”
“So there's this prince,” I began, feeling embarrassed. “Perceval. Of Ashenmoor. You, uh — may know him.”
She stiffened.
“He was supposed to do the whole… prophecy. Climb the tower. Face the dragon. Rescue you. The whole deal. But he, uh —”
“Of course that miserable, craven, coward would hide behind a stranger to do what he was foretold. He’s sleeping at the palace in this moment, I’m sure.”
“He’s actually hiding behind a boulder.”
“Eating, no doubt.” She picked up the rod again. I flinched. “That contemptible, worthless, spineless--"
“Yeah… he’s not great.”
She turned toward the window, with her back to me. Her hands were at her sides, her fingers curled into tight fists. She stood there for a moment, looking at the gray light.
“We should go,” I suggested. “Before the cult people realize you’re not actually asleep.”
“Yes.” She didn’t turn around. “We should go.”
I stood up. Picked up the helmet without putting it back on.
“This way, Cricket.”
She walked through the door and down the stairs without glancing back at me.
I followed.
The stairs were just as bad coming down. I felt like I was going to fall down them.
“So,” I said. “Those stairs, right? Pretty brutal. I was dying on the way up. Like I thought was going to —”
She paid me no mind.
“The cult people… they fed you, though? Like you had food up there? Because you look kind of skinny. Not in a bad way. Just —”
Nothing.
“Oh! You know the dragon? Him and I are kind of pals now, I think. His name is Doug. He’s actually really cool. We talked about his book club and —”
We walked in silence. Her footsteps, quick, were ahead of mine, and she did not look back. My footsteps, clanking, filled the stairwell behind her.
We made it to the bottom. Through the entryway, I stepped around the candles. When we walked by, Doug was asleep.
The bridge was no longer there. Damn it, I had completely forgotten about that. On the opposite side, just barely visible through the mist, was the carriage.
“So,” I said. “Small problem.”
Cruit looked down into the chasm, where the bridge used to be.
“The bridge may have… accidentally… caught on fire?” I braced myself.
“Bridges do not catch fire on their own.” Yep, there it was.
“This one did! I had to run and —”
“So, you crossed a bridge. And it burned behind you; you had no plan for the return?”
“I was focused on the rescue part! The getting there part! I didn’t think about the coming back part!”
“Of course you did not think. You do not think. You charge forward and swing your arms and hope for the best and leave wreckage in your path and it has never once occurred to you to consider what comes after.” She scoffed.
“Okay, that’s not fair —”
“You are meant to be my rescuer? My great savior?” She gestured at me, at the oversized armor, the helmet under my arm, and the sword I barely knew how to hold. “This is what Perceval has provided? A fool who burns his own escape route?”
“I came here to save YOUR ass! You’re welcome, by the way! A little gratitude would be —”
“Gratitude? You wish me to be grateful? For a rescue I did not request, performed by a man who is only here because he was paid to be, on behalf of a coward who could not be troubled to come himself?
“He did offer to pay me but that’s not WHY I —”
“Then WHY? Why did you come? Why are you HERE?”
“BECAUSE I —”
Her eyes widened. She was looking over my shoulder toward the tree line on this side of the chasm where the dead forest met the base of the cliff.
Torches. Figures wearing dark robes emerge from the trees: twenty of them, perhaps more, spreading out along the edge of the clearing. The cultists.
She grabbed my hand. Her fingers closed around mine and we ran into the fog, along the cliff edge, the chasm yawning on one side and the dead forest pressing in on the other. I heard the sound of voices behind us, shouting, chanting, getting closer.
“Where are we going?” I yelled.
“I don’t know!”
“You don’t KNOW?”
“You burned the bridge! There’s nowhere to GO!”
“This is the worst rescue in the history of rescues!”
The voices were getting louder behind us. They were spreading out and coming toward us from the cliff's edge, pinching us in.
The cliff curved and narrowed. The path along the edge was shrinking until it disappeared, leaving only a wall of rock on one side and a chasm on the other. Dead end.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay, okay."
I looked at the wall. Unclimbable. I looked at the chasm. Unsurvivable. I looked behind us. The cultists were spreading into a half-circle, closing in, their torches painting the fog orange.
“You don’t, by any chance, have like… secret magic powers? Something you’ve been hiding this whole time? A fireball? A teleportation thing? Anything?”
“I am a princess, not a sorceress.”
“Yeah. Didn’t think so.”
I took the sword. It felt heavier and less cool than before.
“Okay,” I said. “Here goes nothing.”
I advanced, placing myself within an arm's length of the first cultist. I raised the sword, adjusted my grip, and charged. My foot caught a rock. I stumbled. I caught myself. The sword dipped and the tip scraped the ground, sending up sparks. I swung it back up and nearly took off my own ear. I staggered to the side, overcorrecting my movement, and the sword swung wide, striking a tree branch instead. The branch snapped and fell onto my head.
Cruit walked past me and took the sword out of my hand. She held it differently than I did, with the blade pointed forward, her body weight shifted, and her stance became more fluid and natural.
The first cultist charged her. The blade caught his staff and redirected it. In the same motion, she stepped inside his reach and drove her elbow into his throat. He went down. She was already turning to the next one.
She parried. Stepped. Cut. She landed a slice across his forearm that made him drop his torch and stagger back, screaming. The third one came from the side, and she hit him with the flat of her blade across his face. He spun and landed on the ground.
To be honest, that was pretty hot.
A cultist grabbed my arm. Right. Yes. The fighting. I was also supposed to be doing that. I snapped back in, pulled my arm free, and punched him square in the jaw. Another one came from behind. I caught him by the robes and threw him sideways into a third one. They all fell to the ground in a heap.
I ducked a punch, came up inside, and kicked someone in the stomach. I caught a staff mid-swing and wrenched it free, then cracked it across someone's shins.
There were too many of them.
The fog and trees parted, revealing more torches, robes, and bodies. For everyone I knocked down, two more took their place, encircling the princess. She continued to move, but they were closing in on her. One of them caught her wrist. She twisted free, but another grabbed her from behind, with his arms around her waist, lifting her off the ground. The sword fell. It hit the rock with a loud clang that echoed throughout the cliff.
“Get OFF me, release me this INSTANT — I will have your heads, I will —”
Two of them pinned her arms and a third grabbed her legs. She kicked, thrashed and screamed, but there were too many of them and they had her.
I lunged. I only took three steps before something hit me in the back of my knees, and I went down. A body landed on top of me, and another. Arms pinned my wrists. A knee was in my spine. A hand pressed my face into the stone.
“Do not struggle,” a voice from above me whispered. “It is foretold.”
I struggled. I thrashed, kicked and bit someone's hand. This earned me a punch to the side of my head. More weight on my back. I couldn't move.
Across the clearing, they were dragging Cruit to her feet. They held her up between two of them, her hair in her face, her dress torn further, her feet scraping the ground. A figure emerged from the group, wrapped in a dark cloak. She gently cupped the Cruit's chin.
“The chosen one will come for you,” the woman said. “The prophecy must be fulfilled. You must return to the tower. You must sleep. And you must be woken by —”
“I would rather DIE than return to that tower!”
“You will return,” the woman declared. “It is written.”
I was pinned, face down in the dirt. Three bodies were on top of me. Cruit was being dragged toward the tower.
We were so screwed.
But then I saw it: a slow, creeping flame along the underbrush. Three trees, then five, and eventually the entire tree line burst into flames. A wall of fire surged forward, scorching my face. The cultists were now screaming and running away from the inferno.
A shadow passed above. The wingspan covered the sky for a full second.
Doug!
He landed between us and the cultists, shaking the ground with his arrival. He folded his wings, crouched on his haunches, and watched the screaming cultists.
“I was napping,” he said. “God, you people always make such a scene."
He looked around.
“Oh.” His head swiveled in my direction. “Hi, Cas.” His gaze shifted toward Cruit. “Oh, good. You got her out. Ah. Young love. That's nice.”
“Doug, can you maybe —”
“Oh. Right. Yeah. My bad.”
He inhaled. A mighty gust of wind stirred up the mist, causing the cultists nearest him to stumble backwards. Then he exhaled a stream of controlled flames, powerful enough to send the remaining cultists screaming into the trees, enough to clear the ground around us.
I stood. A few cultists were rolling on the ground, putting themselves out. The woman from before was being dragged away by two of her people, and her robes were smoking. Doug flicked his tail, almost carelessly, to get rid of the final straggler.
“Hop on,” he instructed.
Cruit looked up at him.
“You cannot be serious,” she protested.
“You got a better idea?” I was already moving toward Doug's side, looking for a way up. His scales were rough enough to grip. I grabbed, pulled, and climbed on his back. “Come on, Cricket. Unless you want to wait for them to come back.”
She looked back at the burning trees. The scattered cultists. The tower behind us. Then she climbed and sat behind me. Her hands found my waist, gripping tightly, her fingers curling into the gaps between the plates.
Doug unfurled his wings. Then we went up.
“HOLY SHIT! THIS IS SO COOL. AND TERRIFYING. BUT MOSTLY COOL."
We were soaring through the sky on a dragon's back. The wind hit my face. Cruit's grip on my waist tightened so much that I was worried about organ displacement.
“THIS IS INSANE. THIS IS THE MOST INSANE THING THAT HAS EVER — DOUG, THIS IS AMAZING.”
“Thanks,” Doug replied, evening out. “Try not to fall off. The paperwork for that is terrible.”
The wind died down. We were gliding now. The world spread out below us. The tower shrank.
“Hey, Doug?”
“Yeah?”
“Any chance you’d be willing to pick up a few more hitchhikers? Because there are three guys down there who are about to get real murdered by cultists if we don’t.”
Doug mulled over this. “How many?”
“Three.”
“Hm.” He turned left. “You know what? Let’s go crazy.”
He dove. Cruit shrieked. The ground rushed up and the carriage appeared below us and Doug landed. The ground trembled. The horse bolted. The carriage teetered on its side.
“So, long story short,” I called down from Doug’s back. “Princess rescued. Cultists everywhere. Get on the dragon.”
Wesley had already started moving. He was already grinning. He was already pulling himself up Doug's side, the manic energy propelling himself up.
“Sir, you are magnificent. Your scales, the iridescence, and the wingspan alone... how do you achieve lift with a mass of ths? The aerodynamics must be —”
“Get on or get left,” Doug said.
Wesley got on.
Wallace glanced at the cultists emerging from the tree line in the distance. “This is inadvisable,” he said, but he climbed on. “Come, sire.”
“No,” Perceval replied.
“Sire—”
“No. Under no circumstances. I am not mounting that… that beast! Look at it. Look at the size of it. There are no reins. There is no saddle. There is no railing. One gust of wind and I plummet to my death.”
“Hey!" Doug protested.
“It is a monster, Wallace! Fire breathing, ill-tempered, scaled monstrosity with teeth the size of my forearm and I am meant to simply climb aboard and trust that it will not eat me or shake me loose at altitude or —”
“I’m right here, you know,” Doug said.
“And the SMELL. I imagine being that close to a reptile of that magnitude the odor alone would —”
“I have FEELINGS,” Doug retorted. “I can hear every word you are saying.”
"Perceval," Wallace called from Doug's back. "The cultists are approximately two hundred yards away and closing. Get on the dragon.”
“I will not! I refuse! This is where I draw the line —”
Cruit slid off Doug’s back. She walked up to Perceval and punched him in the face.
Clean, one shot. Her fist met his jaw, and his eyes rolled back, his knees gave way, and he fell.
“Nicely done, Cricket.”
“He talks too much.”
Wallace and I helped him to his feet. Dead weight. He was heavier than he looked. We dragged him across Doug's scales and wedged him between Wallace and Wesley.
“Is he breathing?” Wesley inquired.
“Unfortunately,” Cruit replied as she climbed back up.
“Everyone on?” Doug asked.
“We’re on.”
“Great. Hang on. I don’t do this often and I’m a little rusty.”
Doug shot upwards. The ground disappeared beneath us. The wind hit us and Cruit's hands dug into me even harder this time.
Ever higher, up and up and up. Into the clouds. Into the fog. Into the sky.
The cultists stood at the edge of the clearing, watching us disappear below them. Above us was only sky.
“Where are we going?” I shouted into the wind.
“I know a place,” Doug replied. “Behind the fog.”