Chapter 5 #2
I’d seen the creatures that came through the portal — the unicorn, the phoenix, the griffin that had briefly terrorized Silver Hollow before returning to its own world.
They were impossible things, magical in ways that defied explanation, but they were still creatures, still something my mind could process and categorize and understand, however imperfectly.
The Dragon was not a creature. The Dragon was a force of nature given form.
It emerged from the earth the way a whale emerges from the ocean, slowly, massively, with a sense of displacement that made the surrounding forest seem suddenly small and fragile.
Its scales were the color of cooling lava, deep red shading to black at the edges, and they caught the green lightning and reflected it in patterns that my brain didn’t quite want to process.
Its eyes — enormous, ancient, filled with fire that burned without consuming — fixed on me with an intelligence so vast and inhuman that I felt my sense of self begin to dissolve under its weight.
Ben’s hand found mine, and the contact anchored me. The light between our palms flared bright, gold and blue-white merging, and I felt our bioelectric fields synchronize with a force that seemed to echo in my very bones.
The Dragon’s great head turned toward us, and for a moment, I thought it was going to speak. Its jaws parted, revealing teeth like obsidian daggers, and fire gathered at the back of its throat, casting dancing shadows across the clearing.
Then the images began.
They didn’t come through my eyes or my ears or any sense I had a name for.
They came directly into my mind, bypassing every defense I’d ever built, and they were overwhelming.
I saw the ley lines as the Dragon saw them — a vast web of golden light that encircled the globe, connecting the portals in patterns too complex for human geometry.
I saw the Silver Hollow portal, my portal, burning bright at one of the major nexus points, anchored by generations of my family’s guardianship.
And I saw what Gregory’s drilling had done.
The infection — that was the only word for it — spread outward from Welling Glen like rot in an apple.
Where the drill had penetrated the ley line, the golden light had turned black and gangrenous, and that corruption was creeping along the network, node by node, portal by portal.
I saw other guardians in other places — a woman in Ireland, a man in Japan, a family in Peru — all of them struggling against an illness they couldn’t understand, couldn’t fight, could only watch as it consumed everything they’d been born to protect.
I saw what would happen if the infection wasn’t stopped.
The portals failing, one by one, the connections severing, the creatures trapped on the wrong side of reality.
I saw the boundaries between worlds dissolving, saw chaos spilling through the gaps, saw Silver Hollow consumed by something that made shadow stalkers look harmless.
And beneath it all, I felt the Dragon’s rage.
Not anger. It wasn’t anything so small and human as that.
This was the fury of a volcano, of an earthquake, of a force that had slept for millennia and had awoken to find its domain being desecrated by insects who didn’t understand what they were destroying.
The Dragon had been the guardian of these ley lines since before humans had learned to stack stones into shelter, had protected the network through ice ages and extinctions and the slow crawl of continental drift.
And now some hairless apes with their pitiful machinery were poisoning everything it had spent eons maintaining.
The images shifted, and I saw what the Dragon intended to do about it.
Cauterization. That was the concept it showed me — not a word, but a feeling, an inevitability.
The infected section of the network would be burned away, the corrupted lines severed, the portals in the contamination zone destroyed utterly and completely.
It would be like cutting off a gangrenous limb to save the body. Painful, permanent, but necessary.
And Silver Hollow was at the center of the infection zone.
The Dragon would burn my home. Would destroy the portal my family had protected for generations, would kill everyone and everything within the blast radius, would erase the town from existence as thoroughly as if it had never been.
Not out of malice; I understood that now, understood that the Dragon didn’t hate humans any more than a surgeon hated a tumor.
We were simply in the way, simply the collateral damage that had to be accepted to save something larger and older and infinitely more important.
Please, I thought, pushing the word out through the crushing weight of the Dragon’s consciousness. Please, there has to be another way.
The response wasn’t words. It was a deadline.
I saw the Winter Solstice — December twenty-first, the longest night of the year, when the veil between worlds would be thinnest and the Dragon’s power would be at its peak. I saw the sun setting on that day, and I felt the Dragon’s intention crystallize into certainty.
If the infection wasn’t removed by then, the cauterization would proceed.
We had less than two months.
The images cut off abruptly, and I found myself on my knees in the moss, Ben beside me with his arms around my shoulders, the unicorn standing over us both like a shield.
My nose was bleeding again — I could taste copper at the back of my throat — and my head felt like it had been hollowed out and stuffed with broken glass.
Every nerve in my body was screaming, and for a long moment, I couldn’t remember my own name.
“Sidney.” Ben’s voice, raw with fear. “Sidney, come back. Stay with me.”
I clung to him, to the warmth of his bioelectric field, to the anchor of his presence. Slowly, painfully, I pulled myself back together.
The Dragon was watching us. It hadn’t moved, hadn’t attacked, hadn’t done anything except wait.
And as my vision cleared, I realized that the unicorn was positioned between us and the massive creature, its horn raised and glowing, and something was passing between them.
A negotiation, I thought. A bargain between two intelligences I still could barely comprehend.
I pushed myself upright, still leaning heavily on Ben, and met the Dragon’s ancient eyes.
“I understand,” I said. My voice was cracked and broken, barely audible over the pounding of my own heart.
“The infection has to be removed. Gregory has to be stopped.” I paused, gathering the shreds of my courage.
“But we need time. My family has protected this portal for generations. Give us a chance to fix this ourselves.”
The Dragon didn’t respond — not with images, not with any sense I could interpret. But its huge head turned toward the unicorn, and I felt something pass between them, a communication in a language older than humanity.
Then the unicorn stepped forward and touched its horn to my forehead.
The contact was gentle, barely a brush of pressure, but the effect was immediate.
Warmth flooded through me, burning away the headache, the nausea, the ragged edges of my consciousness.
The bleeding stopped, and my thoughts cleared.
And when the unicorn stepped back, I felt something new in my mind — a connection, thin but unmistakable, linking me to the vast presence of the Dragon.
It wasn’t communication, at least not in any way I recognized. No, it was more like a timer, a countdown I would feel in my bones, ticking away the seconds until the Winter Solstice.
You have been given a chance, the unicorn’s presence seemed to say. The Dragon has agreed to wait. But the deadline is absolute. There will be no extensions, no appeals, no second chances.
“I understand,” I repeated, and this time, my voice was stronger.
The Dragon held my gaze for one more endless moment.
Then, with a movement that seemed almost reluctant, it began to sink back into the earth.
The great slabs of stone closed over it like doors, the amber light fading, the heat receding.
Within moments, there was no sign that it had ever been there except for the pattern of cracks in the ground and the faint smell of volcanic heat that still lingered in the air.
The pressure in my skull eased. The green lightning overhead seemed to dim slightly, returning to its slow, sick crawl across the clouds.
The forest sounds began to return, tentatively at first, then with growing confidence, as if the creatures that lived here were emerging from hiding now that the danger had passed.
The unicorn turned to look at me one last time, its dark eyes unreadable. Then it walked into the trees and disappeared, as silent and graceful as it had arrived.
I sagged against Ben, suddenly exhausted in a way that went far deeper than simple physical fatigue.
“Did that just happen?” Ben’s voice was hoarse with worry and wonder. “Did a dragon just give us an ultimatum?”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes, feeling the phantom weight of the deadline settling into my bones. “We have until the Winter Solstice to remove Gregory’s operation and heal the damage he’s done to the ley line. If we don’t….”
I didn’t need to finish the sentence. Ben had seen the images, too — I could tell from the way his bioelectric field was pulsing, fast and erratic with residual fear.
“Two months,” he said quietly.
“Less.” I opened my eyes and looked at the sky, at the green lightning that was the visible symptom of everything going wrong. “The Solstice is December twenty-first. That gives us about seven weeks.”
And in that time, we’d need to stop a tech billionaire with unlimited resources and no understanding of what he was doing.
We’d need to somehow convince Sonya Rosenthal to turn against her only ally, the person who’d kept her from ending up in federal prison.
Seven weeks to heal damage that had been accumulating for months.
And if we failed, everyone I’d ever loved would die.
“We should get back,” I said, pushing myself upright and trying to ignore the way my legs wanted to buckle beneath me. “The others need to know what happened.”
Ben nodded, his arm steady around my waist as we turned away from the clearing. But I could feel him looking back over his shoulder at the cracked earth where the Dragon had emerged, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was.
The countdown had begun.