Chapter 2
The steam hit my lungs like a fist of wet wool, each breath dragging heat down into my chest where it tangled with the tang of blood. My legs shook with each step, muscles screaming their surrender, but I couldn't stop—wouldn't stop.
The chamber opened around me in ways that made no architectural sense.
Pillars of steam rose from vents carved into the floor, each one glowing with its own internal light like columns of captive aurora.
The walls breathed that crystalline pulse I'd seen in the passage, but here it was stronger, almost musical.
Every part of me hurt—bones, muscles, even my teeth from clenching them so hard.
I threw a glance over my shoulder, searching the steam-hazed distance for any sign of pursuit.
Rovik had called this dragon stone. Lord Garruk's territory.
The Heartbroken Dragon who supposedly walked our streets in human form, though I'd never believed those stories.
We were the forgotten territory, the productive mine that sent its tributes and received nothing back but silence.
But this place—this was tended. Loved. The channels in the floor directed water in patterns too perfect for nature, too careful for abandonment.
Someone or something maintained these thermal vents, these pools of mineral water that steamed with colors I'd never seen before.
The air tasted of deep earth and growing things, impossible this far below the surface.
My foot caught on a raised stone—not watching where I was going, too busy looking back—and I stumbled forward. My body tried to correct, arms wheeling for balance, but my legs had nothing left. I was falling, the floor rushing up to meet me, when I slammed into something that wasn't floor at all.
Something warm. Something that gave slightly under my weight before I bounced off like I'd hit a leather-wrapped wall. Something that made a surprised oomph sound.
I landed hard on my tailbone, pain shooting up my spine in white-hot spikes. My teeth clicked together hard enough to make my ears ring. The package shifted against my ribs, its corner finding new flesh to torment. But none of that mattered because I was looking up at—at—
Eyes. Golden-green eyes in a face that wasn't human but wasn't animal either.
Something between and beyond both, with an intelligence that made my breath catch.
The creature—drake, my shocked brain supplied, an actual drake—stared down at me with its wedge-shaped head tilted at an angle that suggested pure curiosity.
He was small. That was the second thing that registered after those impossible eyes.
Not the massive beast of legends but something almost delicate, maybe knee-high if I'd been standing.
His scales were the color of deep moss, the kind that grew in the oldest parts of the mountain where water never stopped seeping.
But these scales held their own light, a subtle shimmer that pulsed in rhythm with the walls around us.
As if he was part of this place, grown from it rather than born.
His head tilted the other way, nostrils flaring as he took in my scent.
I could see the delicate membranes inside those nostrils, pink-tinged and translucent.
His eyes had vertical pupils like a cat's, but the intelligence behind them was nothing like any animal I'd ever encountered.
He was assessing me, cataloging me, trying to understand what this terrified thing was doing in his space.
We stared at each other, frozen in mutual shock. Him, probably wondering why a scrawny human had just used him as an impact cushion. Me, trying to process that I was face-to-face with a creature that shouldn't exist here, not in the forgotten corners of Hammerdeep.
His scales weren't uniform, I noticed with the part of my brain that had detached from terror and floated somewhere near the ceiling. Some were larger, darker, forming patterns that might have been natural or might have been intentional. Around his neck, they were smaller, finer, almost like jewelry made of living emerald. His wings—he had wings, folded tight against his body—were gossamer-delicate and shimmered in the cavern’s glow.
Beautiful. The word came unbidden, unwanted. He was beautiful in a way that made my chest ache, this impossible little drake in this impossible place.
Then my survival instincts crashed back into my body like a runaway mine cart, and I screamed.
The sound that tore from my throat was raw, primal, the kind of noise humans had been making since we first learned that we were prey.
It echoed off the chamber's walls, multiplied and magnified until it seemed like a dozen girls were screaming in harmony.
The steam swirled with the force of it, patterns disrupted, light fracturing.
The drake jumped backward, all four legs leaving the ground in a startled hop that would have been comical if I hadn't been so terrified.
His head pulled back on his serpentine neck, eyes going wide in what looked almost like offense.
A confused chirping sound emerged from his throat—not the roar I'd expected but something almost musical, questioning.
He tilted his head again, stronger this time, as if trying to see me from an angle that would make sense of why I was making such terrible noise. His tail, which I hadn't noticed before, swished once against the stone floor with a sound like a brush on canvas.
Another step forward, tentative, careful. His nostrils flared wider, and I could see him processing my scent layer by layer—blood (mine), fear (definitely mine), the oil-wrapped package (stolen), and something else. Something that made him go very still.
The chirp that emerged from him this time was different. Louder, more purposeful. It wasn't meant for me. It rang through the chamber and into the passages beyond, a call that carried harmonics I felt in my bones. It wasn't alarm or threat or warning.
It was announcement. Come see what I found.
The sound traveled through stone like the stone itself was eager to carry it, racing through passages and chambers, down into depths I couldn't imagine.
But it was answered with another sound—a terrifying sound.
A crack.
It echoed through the passages like breaking bone—stone giving way to something harder than stone, something that wanted in with the kind of determination that only money could buy. My scream had done exactly what I'd feared, what screams always did in the Wheel—brought the predators running.
Footsteps pounded through passages I couldn't see, converging on this chamber from multiple directions.
They knew these tunnels, or at least knew them well enough to navigate at a run.
The sound bounced off walls in ways that made counting impossible, but there were at least three sets of boots. Maybe more.
I tried to stand, to run, but my legs folded like wet paper. The fall had done something to my tailbone, sent everything below it into shocked numbness. I could only watch as shadows grew in the steam, became shapes, became men with weapons and intent.
Rovik emerged first from a passage I hadn't even noticed, his purple coat torn and filthy, hanging off one shoulder where something—maybe the narrow squeeze, maybe the grate—had grabbed him.
Mud and something that might have been blood streaked his face, turning his pale eyes into chips of ice in a mask of dirt.
His crossbow was already up, already aimed, the bolt's tip catching the chamber's strange light like a promise.
Two guards flanked him, emerging from other passages like they'd practiced this convergence.
Their uniforms bore Zarathos colors under the grime, and their faces held that particular emptiness that came from doing violence for pay.
One had a cudgel, the other a blade that had seen better decades.
Both looked at me the way butchers looked at meat—assessing where to cut, how much force to use.
"Finally," Rovik panted, chest heaving with each word. His fine merchant's voice had gone ragged, scraped raw by chase and fury. "Thought you could steal from the Zarathos?"
The crossbow bolt never wavered, aimed directly at my heart. At this distance, he couldn't miss. Wouldn't miss. I could see his finger on the trigger, see the tendons in his hand already beginning to squeeze.
"The package," he said, and now his voice had found some of its usual oil-smooth control. "Give it here, and I might let you die quick. Make me dig it out of your corpse, and my boys here will make it last. They're creative like that."
One of the guards chuckled, the sound wet and anticipatory. The other tested the weight of his cudgel, let it slap against his palm with a meaty sound that made my stomach clench.
“Is that a drake?” one of the guards said, his voice ugly, guttural. “It’s our lucky day lads.”
I should have been thinking about the package, about bargaining, about finding some way out of this that didn't end with my blood painting these ancient stones.
Should have been calculating angles and distances, looking for escape routes, doing something—anything—that might let me survive another minute.
Instead, all I could think about was the small drake behind me.
This beautiful, impossible creature who'd done nothing wrong except exist in the path of my disaster.
He'd probably been investigating the thermal vents, maybe playing in the steam like a child in summer rain.
And now these men were here with their weapons and their violence, and they wouldn't care that he was small, that he was innocent, that his eyes held intelligence and wonder.
They'd kill him just for being in the way. Or worse—capture him, sell him to the highest bidder. I'd heard whispers of what happened to magical creatures in Zarathos markets. The pieces they were divided into, the potions their blood made, the power their bones could hold.