Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2) (25 page)

Suddenly, a sound. I grabbed Jade by the shoulder and stopped her.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.
 

She cocked her head to one side, listening.

“It sounds like—”

“The Fall,” Almara croaked.
 

“The Fall?” I asked.

He pushed past us and moved ahead slowly, running his hands along the rock wall. When he pulled them away, they were damp with moisture. He put his hand up to my face and touched my cheek with it.

His lips moved soundlessly and he gripped my arm, trying to make me understand.

“Just say it,” I said. “It’s ok. You can tell me.”

But he couldn’t. His mouth moved, but no sound came.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jade asked.

His hand moved from my face to his throat, his fingers clutching at his sagging skin. Two fat tears fell from beneath the blindfold and rolled down his cheeks before he sank to his knees.

I stepped away from him, alarmed.

“Father!” Jade said, falling to the ground beside him. “Father, what is it?” Her hands caressed his hair and face, but he continued to mouth words only he knew, his grip growing tighter around his own throat until he was literally choking from it.
 

“Father! Stop that!” Jade shrieked. Then she turned to me. “Do something!”

But I was stuck fast, unable to move, unable to breathe. I waited, watching him slowly choke the life from his own body. I waited for smoke to come from his lips, for his death to echo my dreams.
 

“Aster, please!” she begged.

 
Her cry jolted me out of my trance, and suddenly I found I could move again. I pushed her aside and grabbed his hand, wrenching it away from his throat.
 

He took in several large gulps of air, the panic on his face slowly receding. He tilted his head backward, his breathing rattling in his ragged throat.
 

“He needs rest,” Jade said. “He’s exhausted. We’ve been pushing him too hard and now—”

I sat back against the wall, breathing hard, still reeling.
 

“We can’t stop now,” I panted. “We have to push on, at least until we can find somewhere to hide.”

“But he can’t talk and he can’t breathe,” she said, tears of her own splashing down now. “What if we keep going and then—and then—”

“We’ll keep a lookout for somewhere to stop, ok?” I said, looking at the tunnel around us. We were completely exposed here, and while the place was certainly not crawling with guards, if
anyone
came looking for us we would be easily discovered. “We can’t stop here.”

She reigned in a sob, swallowing as though her mouth were full of cotton. We both stood up and heaved Almara to his feet.
 

“Are you ok?” I asked him. “Can you keep walking?”
 

He reached out, not towards my voice, but towards Jade. He found her small, white hand, slipped it into in his own and started back down the path in answer.
 

Soon, the descent ended, and we found ourselves on flat ground. With each step we took the sound of rushing water grew until we were completely enveloped by its roar. Slowly the tunnel around us was growing wider, taller, and the blue orb of light cast deep shadows behind the crevices of rock that hung above us. Jade and I gaped at the mountain cathedral as we entered it, and I wondered at how a place like this had ever been created. Somewhere along the slabs of earth that ground against each other to raise this mountain, this enormous pocket of air had remained, untouched, until it came to rest as we now saw it. Maybe, in a million years, the opening where we stood would be squashed flat, filled with rock as the mountain kneaded itself over like baker’s bread.
 

Mist became thicker as we walked, and the tiny beads of water that collected from it ran down the sides of the rock. The facets of granite glittered and winked like diamonds in firelight.
 

On and on we walked, and taller and taller grew the chasm, until the light of Jade’s stone could no longer reach the roof above our heads. Ahead, our path was ending. A wide opening led us into the empty heart of the mountain, and we no longer needed Jade’s light at all. Far above us the afternoon sun shone in thick, yellow beams through huge cracks in the summit.
 

We walked out onto the ledge, a hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long, and carefully crept to the edge, peering over the side. What I saw there took my breath away. The rock fell straight down,
thousands
of feet down, too far for me to see to the bottom. On the other side of the enormous divide, a sheer sheet of rock shot upward, gradually narrowing until it reached the top. Droplets of mist, like had sprouted on the tunnel walls, fell from the sheet in a cascade, collecting and growing louder as they joined to create a giant waterfall. On our right, the precipice we stood on continued until it met the vertical wall of the mountain a thousand feet away. On our left, the rift continued, but in the distance a bridge of rock arched out over the gap, meeting the wall on the far side, where an opening in the rock beckoned to us.
 

That’s the way.

For a brief moment, standing there on a ledge higher than any I had ever seen or heard of, I almost fell. My head swam from the height and with great effort I stumbled backwards away from the side. I felt sure later that, had I remained standing in that spot another second, six inches from an abyss deeper than I had ever imagined, I would have tumbled into it.
 

I ran into Jade and Almara, his hand still in hers. This seemed to be something she was just starting to notice, and she was looking at him curiously when I barreled into them, knocking all three of us to the ground.
 

Both of my hands hit the stone floor, and I spread my fingers wide, trying to shake the dizziness from my head.
 

“What are you doing?” she asked, irritated.
 

“It’s
really
far down,” I said.
 

Jade opened her mouth to protest, but at that moment an unfamiliar sound pierced the air, louder even than the roar of water, and Almara gripped her arm tightly. He struggled to get to his feet, and he pulled both of us back from the edge until we were hidden in the wide tunnel. We poked our heads around the corner, trying to get a look at whatever had made that sound.

“What was
that?
” I asked. The sound came again, a twisted combination of a shriek and a roar. It was an animal, there was no mistaking that. But no nature show on TV could have prepared me for
this
sound. Whatever beast out there was calling, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. And it was big.
 

Almara’s lips were moving again, but no sound was coming out. Over and over his lips moved in the same way, a single word that I could not comprehend without his voice behind it. We both stared at him as he struggled, his hand slowly creeping up towards his throat again, panic stretching his face. I grabbed both of his hands and held them down at his sides. He tilted his head backwards, mouthing the word again and again.
 

Finally, with an effort that must have cost him dearly, he released what remained of his voice from its tether.

“Dragon!”
 

Dragon?

The shriek came again. Each time the sound seemed to echo off different parts of the walls, as if the animal was swiftly moving, sending his voice into different parts of the cavern.
 

Almara dragged us away from the ledge, running at full speed back in the direction we had come. The moment we passed back into the first cavern, he turned, leading us both behind a huge boulder at the opening, all as if no blindfold existed at all.
 

But I couldn’t be bothered with questioning the blindfold. Instead, I tried to reconcile the image of dragons I had in my head with the look of terror on Almara’s face. Dragons were…cool. How many times had I read a book about dragons? Befriending them, training them, riding them. They were just really big, really powerful, really cranky lizards. And though my heart thudded in my chest with excitement, I felt certain that, if I were really about to come face to face with an actual dragon, no matter how terrifying, I would find a way to make peace with the animal. That’s what always seemed to happen in stories, anyways.

Almara had slumped to the ground, and Jade held his hands away from his throat. I looked down at the two of them for a moment, and then couldn’t resist looking around the edge of the wall again. I eagerly searched for the beast, excited to see the face of this new creature that was sure to become my companion.

It did not disappoint. It screeched again as it flew through the narrow chasm, its cries echoing off the cavern walls.
 

But it was not what I thought it would be.
 

Bigger than the largest elephant on Earth and the color of aged cement, the beast thrust its body into inelegant swoops with enormous, bat-like wings. The skin on them hung like large, supple sheets of leather, and with each beat they made came a great swooshing sound as they fought against the wind. Its scales stuck out from its skin, sharpened on the end of each and every one, giving it an almost porcupine like appearance.
 

But this was no porcupine. Thousands of scales glinted in the dim light of the cavern, layer upon layer, sharp as razors. I may have fantasized about stroking a dragon’s scaly skin, but one look at this one and I knew I would never desire to touch it, not unless I was looking to slice off a few fingers. Its eyes were as large as dinner plates, sticking out too far from its skull, with irises the color of coal. It opened its mouth to reveal two long sets of serrated fangs. And, set deeply into the back of its throat, the glow of a deep, intense heat.

We were transfixed.
 

And then Jade screamed a shrill, terrified scream. The dragon’s onyx eyes darted towards us and fixed upon her. For a moment I thought she would freeze, crumple under its steel gaze. But then she turned and darted back into the tunnel.
 

I moved without realizing what I was doing, numbly and without fear. I swept down and scooped up Almara, throwing him over my shoulder, only vaguely registering how light the old man felt draped around me. I watched her feet fly away in front of me, focused on them, and wondered if we would survive. Behind me, the dragon blasted us as it shrieked its call to the mountain. Then, as I turned the corner into the cavern, I took one last look behind me.

It hovered in midair, right above the ledge I had stared over moments before, its wings beating great gusts of wind. It screamed again, and then released the heat from its throat, launching a fireball the size of a house in our direction. The fire rolled and boiled as it billowed out, filling the entire precipice with flame.
 

No fire made it into the interior cavern where we hid, but a shockwave of heat burst through the opening, scorching our faces. All of us shielded our heads from the blast, but it was gone as quickly as it came, racing now through the tunnel, on its way to the outside world.
 

I flattened my back against the wall, barely daring to breathe, and waited. Jade clung to my legs and Almara sat curled into a ball, his hands over his ears, his face hidden in his knees.
 

Again and again the dragon sent his fireballs. He was big, that was for sure, but I wondered how he could release so much force in such quick succession. He must have been drawing his power from another source, just like a seer could, magnifying it somehow.
 

And then the attack was over. The beating of the great animal’s wings died, and we were left with only the sounds of the falls and our panicked breathing.

“Are you ok?” I whispered. Jade was crouched into a ball like Almara now, rocking back and forth, waiting for the deluge to end. I pulled her hands away from her ears. “Jade, are you ok?” I asked again.
 

Uncertainty clouded her normally crystalline eyes as she looked up at me. For all of her insistence about our plans, her determination to lead us down the right path, she was still a young, frightened girl.

I hadn’t been expecting to meet a dragon, but if I had, I would not have expected it to feel like it did. Kiron’s pretty paintings of winged lizards and a lifetime of friendly renditions of dragon tales had left me thinking of dragons as things of beauty, majestic and graceful. Their fire was reserved for the deserving, a weapon to be used against thieves and warriors.
 

But this…monster didn’t live up to any of my expectations. Skin like concrete and its awkward efforts at flight were strange and almost comic. The fire, though, when it released its flame, was terrifying. Combined with the cry of the animal the heat from the beast set every inch of my flesh alight with panic. Again, for the second time in two days, I found myself holding myself back from fleeing this place and my purpose here. Couldn’t I just resign myself to living out my life here in the Fold? Did I really have to accept this quest and all the responsibility that came with it?

The answer sat at my feet. Jade and Almara stared around, she too frightened to speak and he long past able to.
 
As much as I desired to leave this place with them and never look back, I knew what awaited them on the outside. Almara, wasted and mad, would never be able to reclaim his glory, and perhaps never his mind. And Jade, broken and tired. She would never be able to find peace if I quit now.

“What was that thing?” she asked, her voice shaking from the effort. She looked from me to her father, but his voice was gone, his mouth no longer moving. He stared at the far wall, dazed.
 

“He said ‘dragon,’” I answered.
 

She looked down. “I thought dragons were supposed to be, you know, beautiful.”

Almara shook his head at her words, his face sad and drawn.