Month 1, Day 8
By the second day in the dark I'd stopped being able to tell if my eyes were open. I kept blinking to check. Open or shut it came out the same black, so I quit checking and sat with them closed. At least that was up to me.
The water had run out the day before. Jonas had nursed the last skin down to a capful at a time, even all the way around the group, and then there was nothing left to be even with. Nobody said anything about it. Thirst was loud enough on its own.
For a long while after we shut the hatch the things had hammered on it over our heads. It went on until I stopped hearing the separate blows and it turned into one flat noise I forgot was there. Then they quit, all at once, and the quiet afterward was worse than the noise had been. The grey line around the edges of the hatch lasted into the first night, then thinned and went out. My torch, the one I'd dropped up in the arena, must have finally burned down to nothing. After that there was no up and no down, no wall until your hand found one.
I knew Nikita was awake because his breathing never went slow. He sat against the wall a hand's width off my shoulder, upright, turned toward the passage that ran down, where a thing would come from if one came.
"Sleep," he said, low, just for me. "I've got the dark."
"You always say that."
"And I always have it."
He was welcome to it. I didn't sleep, but it dragged something up out of me anyway, the first night all of us had ever spent in this world. A stone door we'd hauled shut, a black room, the same waiting on morning. That night he'd gone out cold in minutes, and I'd sat with my back to the door until light came, sure the whole time that something stood on the other side of it. Now he was the one sitting up. I kept that to myself, and he kept whatever he had to himself, and we left it there.
When we finally moved, it was Antoine who said so.
"We get nothing by sitting in it." His voice came out of the black off to my left, level and unbothered. "Down. That was the plan. While we can still stand up to do it."
Nobody argued. He wasn't wrong, and arguing cost water none of us had. But nobody got up, either. Two days back an order in the dark would have come from Basha in four words, and we'd have been on our feet before she finished saying them. This was just a voice in the black, and it didn't lift anybody off the floor.
Nikita got us up, and he did it without a word about it. He found the wall and the slope of the floor going down. Then he set my hand on the dwarf's shoulder, the dwarf's on the next, and so on down the line until we were a single chain holding onto each other in the dark.
We went on slow, a shuffle at a time. I kept my other hand on the wall. It was dry fitted stone at first, the big blocks the city was cut from, and then somewhere under my palm it stopped being stone and turned into something else. Ridged and hard, it curved away too wide to follow. Roots. The tree's roots, run down through the rock around us, so thick that my arm laid flat against one didn't reach across it. They got thicker the lower we went.
The dwarf read them with his hands. "Down's still down," he muttered, in front of me. "Floor holds. The big roots go where we're going. We keep to the big ones." He'd complained about this place since the first stair we set foot on. The complaining had stopped.
My hand passed over a stretch that wasn't smooth, grooves cut deep into the stone, the same carving that had covered the city above us. Two days ago Mirae would have had her face against it before anyone could stop her. I said her name, quiet, down the line. She didn't answer. All she did was move when the line moved and stop when it stopped, and that had been the whole of her for a day.
Rafi counted us. Every so often his voice came low down the chain, "...six, seven, me, eight," and then later the same again, holding us all where he could find us. When his voice shook the numbers came faster.
The air changed before I worked out what the change was. It got warmer. Not warm, just less than freezing, a softness against my face that hadn't been there. After two days of cold gone all the way into the bone, that pulled at every one of us. We leaned toward it without anybody calling it, because warm meant air from somewhere, or a way through, or anything at all that wasn't this.
Then there was light.
It was barely anything, a dull red low in the dark ahead, the first thing my eyes had been given to do in two days. I thought I was inventing it, until the dwarf stopped dead and I walked into his back. We stood and looked at it. Red, steady, low to the ground, and the warmth came off the same place it did.
"Fire?" Jonas whispered. "Is that, did somebody, that's got to be..."
"With what," the dwarf muttered. "Your teeth?"
Jonas didn't have an answer for that. Nobody had lit a fire. There was nobody down here to light one but us.
We went toward it because there was nothing else worth going toward. The passage opened out into somewhere wider, the roof lifting away past the little the glow showed me, and the floor turned from rock to a fine grit that shifted under our boots. That red light didn't sit on the ground at all. It came from between the scales of something huge lying along the whole far side of the cave. The light threaded out through the seams in thin lines, enough to show me pieces of it and nothing more.
My eyes kept working at those pieces and kept getting them wrong. What I could see was a long curve, a ridge of dark points, and a slow rise and fall I understood after a second was the thing breathing. Whatever it was didn't end anywhere in reach of the light. It ran the whole length of that side of the cave, black and thick, packed in scales that gave back almost none of the glow leaking out between them. Its head alone lay on the grit a dozen steps off, longer than I am tall on its own, and every breath it took stirred the dust around my boots.
"We're dead," Rafi said. Flat. His counting had stopped.
Nikita looked at it a moment longer than the rest of us did. "Finally," he said. "Protein."
Nobody laughed. Somebody let half a breath out through their nose, and it was the nearest thing to relief any of us had had in two days. Then the head on the floor opened both eyes at once, and the breath stopped in all of us at the same time.
Red sat behind them, the same dull red that came off the rest of it. Both eyes found us and held, and neither one blinked.
For one breath nothing else about it moved. Then the whole length of it came alive at once, far too fast for the size of the thing. The head lifted off the grit and rose until it hung somewhere over us in the dark. A sound started down in the chest of it, so low I felt it in my own ribs before I heard it in my ears.
The fire didn't come at us. Instead the head swung up and breathed a long column of flame straight into the roof of the cave. All at once the black turned orange, every corner of it, and for the first time since we'd found it I could see the whole of it at once instead of pieces. Heat rolled down over us, and we dropped where we stood with our arms over our heads.
Black, every scale, wound around the foot of a root that climbed up out of the light and kept going. The neck alone stood three times a man's height before the head even began. Its wings lay folded flat down its back, and one folded wing by itself would have covered our whole group with room left over. Nobody in our group needed the word said out loud. It was a dragon, and it was awake now.
The flame cut off. In the dark that slammed back down, the only light left was the red again between its scales, and both its eyes, neither one gone from us.
When it spoke I felt the sound come up through the grit into my knees.
"You came back." It wasn't a question. The anger under the words was old, and not all of it was meant for us. "After everything. Back here, to this, of all the places you could have..."
It stopped. The head lowered and came nearer, and its eyes went over each of us in turn, and I held still under them with every part of me wanting to be somewhere that wasn't there.
"No." The voice came quieter, less sure of itself. "No, you're not them. You don't even..." A pause that ran on too long. "What are you?"
For a second none of us could have answered anything. Then Antoine stood up.
He stood up in front of a thing that could have taken him in one motion without lifting its head, and he brushed the grit off his knees first, and his voice came out even. "We came down from the city above you. There was something living in the temple at the foot of this tree. We killed it." A small pause, for himself. "I killed it."
Neither eye moved to him. They looked past him at the rest of us, and Antoine might as well not have got up at all. Some mean little part of me, the part with nothing left in it to lose, was glad to see that.
The quiet ran on and nobody filled it, and somebody had to, and the somebody turned out to be me. I didn't decide to do it. My mouth was dry to the back of my throat, and the first time I tried nothing came, and I had to start again to get any of it out.
"We're lost." It was all I had. "We came down from up there, and we can't get back, and everyone who knew what they were doing is dead. Now we're only trying to get home, and we don't even know where that is anymore."
Both eyes came to me. Holding still under them was the hardest thing I'd done since the arena. But something in the cave had shifted, the anger gone somewhere else for a moment, and it was the plain truth that did it and not one word of Antoine's. I didn't understand why it worked, only that it did.
"So tell it." Nikita wasn't asking. He started before anyone could argue about who should. "A ruin opened at night. We went in. Found a city under it, empty, with weapons cut from blue stone. They hurt the things that don't die easy."
Short pieces, no space between them for anyone to feel anything in the gaps.
Rafi came in behind him, faster, filling in what Nikita left out. "There's this massive tree in the middle of the city, and under it a temple, and something was living down there. Waiting on us. It had one eye, and it talked, and it called us somebody's favorites, his toys, and then it..."
He stopped there.
"Basha," he said instead, quieter. "It got Basha."
Nobody added to that. Beside me Mirae made a small sound and pressed her knuckles against her mouth, and didn't make another one for the rest of it.
Nikita didn't wait for Rafi to find his voice again. "We killed it. Lost people first. Old Ben, before all this. Basha, in the temple. Some of Squad 1." He said it flat, no pause anywhere in it, and that was the only way he had of getting it out at all. "Then the small ones came through the archways, thousands of them, and we ran down here."
None of us tried to explain any of it. The dark that had poured from the thing's eye stayed a mystery, and so did the splinter of blue-green glass still sitting in my own pocket. We didn't understand either one well enough to try.
The dragon held still while we talked, and it was not a calm kind of still. Its seams burned brighter the whole time.
When he finished it let a breath out, warm enough to push my hair back off my face.
"So it begins again," it said. The red of it came up brighter, and none of that was aimed at us. "I keep hoping I have the years wrong. Always do."
It told us a little then. Not much. The first ones, it said, had lived here once, back when this was a place so full of life you couldn't have crossed a field of it without stepping on some. Then something came. It took all of that and left behind what we'd walked down through, the empty city, the dark, the things that move in the dark. The dragon had been set here to guard, and it had guarded, and it could not leave, not ever, and that was the end of what it would say on the matter.
I asked, because I'd lost the ability not to. "Guard what?"
Its eyes shut, slow, and opened again. "Better for you, climbing out of here, not to know that," it said. "I'll give you a great deal. That I'm keeping."
It went quiet a while, and the red of it sank back to where it had been.
"You'll die up there," it said. No cruelty in it, just a thing it had watched happen before. "Not today. But it's coming for your kind. It came for the others before you, and it'll come for you, and when it comes in full you'll need more than blue stone and good luck."
The dragon would sleep now, it said. Staying was the whole of what it was for. The guarding didn't stop because we'd wandered into it. But there would be a day, half a year off, when the dark came all the way up out of the ground at us. On that day it would come.
Nobody moved for a while. The dwarf lowered himself down onto the grit, slow, one hand braced on his own knee the whole way down. Jonas shut his eyes and kept them shut. The quiet ran long enough that when Rafi finally spoke, his voice came out too loud for the room.
"Why?" he said. "I mean, not, thank you, but why would you even..."
"Because if your kind goes under, the rest comes after," it said. "Yours is only the part that falls first. I've seen it before." It lowered its head back toward the grit. "Half a year. Stay alive that long and you'll see me again."
That left the one thing none of us had wanted to say out loud, with the hatch overhead packed full of the dark and no other door we'd found in any of it.
"Still leaves getting out," Nikita said. He never dressed a problem up to look smaller. "Up's no good. The way back is full of them."
For an answer, the dragon raised its head. Its eyes went up and away from us, along the root it had wound itself around, into the trunk that root fed and on into the black where no firelight had ever reached.
I followed it without meaning to. High up there, so far that my starved eyes might have been inventing it, there was a thin seam of light. It wasn't the dragon's red. This one was pale, almost grey, and after a second I knew it for daylight, the same far crack we'd seen from the city, the one gap left over the world we'd come out of.
"The tree runs up to the light," the dragon said. "It always has. The dark won't follow you into the light."
"Up the tree." The dwarf said it slow, his head bent all the way back, looking at that thin grey seam two kilometers over us. "You want us to climb the tree."
"Then climb," the dragon said, and shut both eyes. The red drew back down into its scales, and the cave went dark around us again. Far overhead, that thin grey seam was the only light left anywhere.