The Road to Death

47

The dragon waited for Esprë to stop screaming before it spoke. Its low, rumbling voice sounded like a pair of giant millstones being ground against each other, and its breath smelled like a charnel house on a hot day.

“Finally,” it said. “The Mark of Death returns.”

Esprë wanted to scream again, but she’d already run herself hoarse. Instead, she stood there mute, with the swirling waters bubbling around her knees, and stared in horror at the massive beast.

She had heard stories about dragons before, but they were nothing like meeting one in the scale-decked flesh. She felt grateful that she could not see the entire thing at once. The light from the everburning torch she held didn’t stretch far enough to encompass the entirety of the beast in its glow. She could only see its long, horned head, its sinuous, snakelike neck, and the broad expanse of its chest.

Black scales covered all of these, ebon-colored bits of mail that could turn aside the mightiest sword. They fitted seamlessly over the beast, stopping only at its mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. Its toothy mouth dripped with some disgusting green fluid that reminded her of nothing more than distilled stomach bile. Its nostrils flared at her as the stale atmosphere of the cave hacked its way in and out of its phlegm-coated lungs. Its batlike ears waved at her independently of each other, as if batting at tiny creatures that lived inside their tattered flaps. Its orange eyes seemed to glow with a fire that threatened to devour her body if not also her soul.

Every bit of Esprë wanted to run, but something in her brain kept it from happening, some instinct that told her to freeze when confronted with something so large. Despite her fear, she listened to that instinct and held her ground.

“You have done well, half-breed,” the dragon said to Ibrido. “Capturing the bearer of the Mark of Death is not something done lightly. Is she …?”

It reached out with a taloned claw that stretched as long as Esprë’s arm. Its breath wrapped around her, and she struggled not to gag on the stench. Her eyes began to water, and she couldn’t say if it was entirely from the smell or not.

“Unharmed?” the dragon finished. The green fluid spilled from between its long, sharp rows of teeth as it spoke. Where it landed, the blackened waters fizzed and foamed in protest.

Ibrido stepped forward, a half pace in front of Esprë. “For the most part, Nithkorrh. The journey here was not an easy one for her. Before she came into my care, she was in an airship crash.”

Two, Esprë thought, but she didn’t wish to correct the dragon-elf at that moment.

“Yet she survived?” the dragon said.

It bared all its teeth in a way that Esprë could only guess was a dragon’s means of smiling, just as she’d seen on Ibrido’s face. On such a massive scale, though, it scared her all the more.

“Fate would not have placed the Lost Mark on a creature unblessed with a certain amount of luck,” the dragon said, “or so the prophecies would have us believe.”

“I …” Esprë started to speak and then thought better of it and let her voice trail off.

“Yes?” The dragon craned its neck back around toward her, inching its face closer to her as it did.

Esprë remained mute. She’d brought the creature’s full attention to her, and it had addressed her directly for the first time. She knew it expected an answer, but that was the last thing she wanted to give it.

“Answer the great Nithkorrh,” Ibrido asked. “Dragons do not like to be kept waiting.”

Esprë tried to keep her lips sealed, but this meant breathing through her nose, and the scent of the dragon and the place in which it lived soon made her nauseous. She parted her lips so that she could breathe without smelling the stench, and the dragon leaned in even closer. She could feel the chill from its cold-blooded breath. It stank like a sodden garbage pit.

Esprë looked up into the dragon’s eyes—twinned orange lanterns floating in the darkness before her—and found it difficult to tear her gaze away. Still, she managed to glance over at the dragon-elf and down at the remains of several flesh-bare skeletons staring up at her from under a thin veil of water. Then she looked back up into Nithkorrh’s eyes.

“This doesn’t seem very lucky to me,” she said.

Esprë felt Ibrido freeze next to her, unsure as to how the dragon would react to such impudence. She discovered that she didn’t care any more. If the creature killed her, then at least this ordeal would be over.

Robbed of an elf’s centuries-long life, she could still expect to be reunited with her mother in the afterlife, the limbo reserved for those elves who died before ascending to the Undying Court. Such a dark and dreary place was meant to be torture for those who aspired to a more meaningful existence, but Esprë could only think that it might be a wonderful respite for those who had grown tired or terrified of this capricious life.

The dragon snorted down at her, and the cloud of green mist that it expelled burned at her face and eyes.

“Elfling,” Nithkorrh said, “you may be too young to know better. There are far worse fates than this. You shall learn this soon enough. Some of them lie in your future.”

Esprë heard Ibrido breathe a sigh of relief. Perhaps he worried that Nithkorrh would kill her on the spot. Dragons had a reputation for acting impulsively. How would the dragon-elf explain the results to any other dragons interested in her fate? Chances were that Nithkorrh would kill him as well to remove any witnesses to his crime.

No, Esprë corrected herself. To a creature such as Nithkorrh, there were no crimes, only errors.

“The dragon kings will be thrilled to meet such a creature,” the dragon said, more to Ibrido than her. “We have been waiting a long time. I was barely a hatchling myself when we launched our crusade to destroy the House of Vol.”

The dragon leaned closer to Esprë, so much that it had to turn its head and focus just one of its burning orange eyes on the young elf. “You have no idea of the carnage your emergence shall beget.”

Esprë trembled despite her newfound resolve. It was one thing to decide that death wouldn’t be so bad. It was another to die.

“Turn around,” Nithkorrh said. “I must see it.”