29. Lucy #2
His questions about the shadows bothered me more.
They circled my scales when I shifted, moving like they had purpose even though I couldn’t figure out what that purpose was.
They made me different from the other dragons I’d seen.
Made me wonder if that was why I’d become someone’s target.
Did the necklace connect to the shadows?
I’d ask Riot about them tonight.
The thought of tonight, of seeing him again, of his promise to be there when the moon carried me back, settled warm in my chest. And I wanted to stay there in the memory of him, but light from a tunnel we weren’t headed down caught my attention. Pale and flickering like a flame.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Emrys glanced over. “It’s a weird room, kind of neat the first time you see it. But the whole space is oddly warded and there’s not much else to learn from it.” He turned, gesturing for me to follow. “Come on. The spot I wanted to show you is this way.”
“I want to see the warded room first.”
Emrys’s grin was endearing as he turned back, leading me toward the flickering light, instead. “Curious little Lucy,” he sang, his voice echoing off the walls.
When we reached the entrance, I walked straight toward it and hit a wall I couldn’t see.
He laughed. “I told you it was warded.”
I stepped back, searching for the runestones that should have been placed around the entrance.
Nothing. The rock face was smooth. Until I looked closer.
The rune marks were embedded directly into the fucking mountain.
Not placed. Woven into the stone like they’d grown there, part of the mountain’s bones.
My breath caught.
If the entire mountain range was the runestone, that meant the magic here was more powerful than anything I’d seen before. Most runestones ranged from coin to palm-sized. What the hell would a runic mountain range mean?
I studied the markings, tracing them with my eyes. Again, they weren’t like traditional runes. The shapes were similar but the construction was different, like someone had taken the language I kind of knew and bent it into something else.
There was something vaguely familiar about them though. Like I was standing on the edge of a memory that wouldn’t come, close enough to feel it but not close enough to grasp.
I did my best to memorize every mark, every curve.
“You’re not even looking at the best part,” Emrys said. “If you stand off to the side, you can kind of see the light source coming from behind the wall.”
I followed his instruction, angling myself until I could peer past the magical barrier. Something glowed bright inside, pulsing with steady rhythm. I couldn’t tell what it was, but the light sort of flickered like fire.
Magic?
What if the dragons really were born from nothing into this world because of the power here. Eggs appearing in the mountains, magic sustaining them, no parents required.
So strange. But I guess if I was looking for a root. A seed. A beginning. This might be somewhere to start. Again, something for the notebook.
With nothing else to learn here, I turned back to Emrys. “Show me where you found the book about the Sable Deep.”
He led me farther into the cave system, through passages that narrowed and widened again, until we reached a chamber that looked like a dragon had lived here long ago.
Shiny things covered every surface. Jewels scattered like someone had been sorting them by color and given up halfway through. A tarnished silver cup. A broken flask. Things that sparkled and gleamed. Pip would die happily in here.
I could see the imprint in the floor where a dragon had repeatedly curled up to sleep, the stone worn smooth from years of use.
Around the edges there were scattered remnants of someone’s life.
A faded ribbon. A cracked mirror. Buttons—dozens of them, all different sizes and colors.
Sprite currency. Not at all necessary in this city.
An old newspaper lay near the wall, so brittle it looked like it might crumble if I touched it.
I knelt carefully to check for a date, but the ink had faded.
Still, there were Nexus scores from players that had died over a hundred years ago. Not Calix.
With so many similar abandoned caves, it was obvious why this one might not have raised questions to anyone that didn’t have Emrys’s curious nature.
For half a breath, my mind went where anyone’s would.
A Guardian had gone missing. And here was a dragon’s cave full of things from a world beyond the fog.
But that was lazy thinking, and I couldn’t bet on lazy thinking.
The objects told a different story if you actually looked.
Every single one was Fuerlis. Nexus scores, sprite buttons, a Grimoran newspaper, all debris from my world, the kind of bright, useless things a collared dragon would snatch up on a hunt and drag home out of pure magpie instinct.
Nothing here came from anywhere it shouldn’t have.
If the missing one had hoarded this den, I’d expect something strange, something that didn’t belong in any world I knew.
Instead, I was looking at a century of scavenged junk, sorted by color and abandoned.
This cave told me something far more important than an obvious conclusion.
I wasn’t the first dragon to be sent off hunting.
But, what if every one of them had been female.
What if that was why I was targeted. It had nothing to do with my shadows.
Females hatch every once in a great while and never live?
What if Emrys was wrong? What if they did?
But only, long enough to be collared and sent out the way I was. And the collar was what killed them.
Because they fought it the same way I did. Every female that ever hatched here ended up exactly where I was, hunting under someone else’s command until the collar ground her down for resisting.
The only reason I was still breathing was Riot. They’d fought alone. I hadn’t.
Emrys kicked over a bucket and sat on it, pulling another book from a pile near the corner.
He flipped through the pages without looking up.
I looked around the chamber again wondering if I should tell him.
I decided to keep my theory to myself for the time being.
Maybe with a bit more evidence, I’d feel more confident.
“Do you know what dragon used this cave?” I asked.
Emrys tossed the book on a makeshift table and stood. “I’m not sure, but it’s pretty clear he’s been dead a long time.”
I drew back. “How do you know he died?”
He smirked, completely unaware of the dots lining up in my mind. “Once again, you really need to learn more about your kind. A dragon would die before he abandoned his treasure.”