Page 51 of Dragon Gods

“I do, too, Little Fox.” The words were a whisper in his hair.

“The Dragonborn believe the dead don’t always go to the afterworld. That sometimes their spirits get stuck.” His voice was still muffled and quiet, as if his father might hear him from across the house. “Do you think Leon is a ghost now?”

She was quiet for a while and he wondered if she would answer.

“Leon is with all of the other loyal king’s men now in the afterworld, where every king of the past looks over us all after we die.”

He wanted to point out that perhaps there was no afterworld and nowhere for the spirits to go after they died, but he was too fearful of breaking Mother’s heart over his own doubts. He stayed silent. It was what their family was good at. They stayed like that until his father’s voice rang through the hall, calling for Mother. She gave Fox a soft kiss on the forehead before she left, closing the door behind her so his father wouldn’t see him in there.

He should have gone back to his room. He should have wiped the hot tears from his eyes and straightened his clothes. Instead, he curled up on his brother’s bed, the pillow now clutched in his arms, and he closed his eyes, comfortable with the familiar scent. He woke up the next morning to his father’s shouts in the doorway, and that evening his brother’s bedroom was empty, every trace of him swept away.

CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO

SOFIA

Sofia didn’t even bother to look back at Ocon as the entire cavern came to life under the colorful light of the lanterns. The stained glass cast rainbows across the floor and walls, highlighting the intricately painted designs that had faded away with time. Even the ceiling was painted the color of the sky in the heart of the cold season.

She’d been impressed with the resistance’s base the first time she’d seen it, with its dirt floors and torches. But now she realized that the cenotes they’d moved between were decaying things, long dead and nearly forgotten. This one though, no matter how forgotten it appeared, wasn’t dead. The light that the lanterns cast danced across the walls and theybreathed. She felt the ghosts of her ancestors even now taking up space.

She ducked her head into the first hall she came across and saw that the lanterns continued at regular intervals. The light from the main room lit just enough to see a line of intricately carved doors disappearing into the shadowed darkness.

“Ocon!” she called. “I need your monkey arms.”

She waited, trying not to be annoyed when he didn’t even answer her.

“Ocon,” she said, not bothering to hide her frustration as she came back into the main room. He was standing a few yards away now, along the edge of the cavern, newly lit with the candle he was holding.

When he turned, his expression sent ice down her spine and she walked forward with rigid steps. Only once she was closer and able to look past him where the candlelight chased away the shadows on the ground did she see what had caught his attention.

Human remains, clothes turned nearly to dust and bones picked clean by centuries of decay, were scattered across the back wall.

“Oh,” she said, a hand covering her mouth. The longer she looked, the more her stomach turned, but she couldn’t turn away. There were so many bones—so many people had died here—and some of the skulls she saw were so small. These weren’t the bodies of warriors scattered from a battle. These were families, lined up and slaughtered.

Her eyes burned and she felt the tears welling hot. She turned away before Ocon could notice. Bile was sharp on her tongue, the water she had overindulged in earlier crawling up her throat. She had found the ghosts.

“Can you light me a candle so I can look through the halls,” she said once she knew her voice wouldn’t crack.

“Yeah—yes,” he said, turning away from the bones after another moment. She couldn’t quite tell in the dim light, but his face was a shade too pale and his eyes a fraction too wide. He turned and walked away before she could try to read his expression, grabbing a candle from an unlit lantern. He handed her the candle, lit with his own.

Although the arched doorways down the closet hallway drew her attention, she walked back to the previous hall, wanting to follow some type of pattern with her exploring. She also wanted some space from Ocon to pull herself back together. He didn’t deserve to see her grief and pain over the horrors done to her people.

The first room she entered was small, a sitting mat nearly decayed into nothing lying along the back wall. A doorway to the right led into what had once been a bedroom. The wood and clay base of the bed was obvious, although the pad and blankets that had once sat on it were long gone, eaten away by age and exposure. The next three doors held the same remnants of a family’s life, one bed in one, three beds in another. Proof of the people that had once lived and loved here.

Most anything of use—blankets, clothes, or food—had long ago rotted away, although she found a few clay bowls still in one piece. They would make drinking water easier, at least.

She almost turned away, knowing that the other doors likely held similar remnants of living quarters behind them, each patterned the same. But she noticed some of the doors farther down the hall were broken away, the thresholds gaping like lost teeth and her feet moved of their own accord. At the first doorway, she saw that even the frame had been broken away, dirt falling from the ceiling for lack of support. She didn’t even need to step over the collapsed doorway to see what waited inside. Another pile of bones, these ones intertwined together in the corner of the room, the fear of their ghosts heavy in the air. She wondered if it was the raw pain that had happened here or her own connection to her ancestors that had her almost hearing the cries of the family as they had died.

Still nauseated with hunger, she turned away quickly and left the living quarters behind. She didn’t need to see the other rooms that had been broken into to know what was on the other side.

She found the hall with the arched doorways and saw the rotted remnants of large kitchens and a bathhouse. The water left behind in the baths had allowed the twisting roots and fallen seeds from the earth above to flourish, turning the bathhouse into a small rainforest, the plants somehow thriving here with the barest hint of light from the cracked ceiling above.

An echoing sound from a few rooms away drew her attention, and she followed the flickering light of Ocon’s candle through another arch. He stood across a large room, the shadows and light dancing with every shiver of the flame in his hands. He was silent, looking up at the mural that stretched across the wall. Even in the dim light, Sofia saw that the mural wrapped around the entire room, a never-ending landscape of Wueco, from the sea to the mountains. But it wasn’t the land that had drawn Ocon’s eye. He was staring in wonder up at the large cenote dragon that wrapped around itself, the painting so detailed she thought she saw its wings moving and a sparkle in its blue eyes.

She turned and saw she was standing next to the long tail of another dragon, spiraling up toward the ceiling. She stepped to the left, moving her own candle along the mural to study it closer. Her dragon stood proudly along the wall, the sharp claw-like talons clutching the snowcapped mountain beneath it, each one the length of her hand. Even faded and covered in dust and dirt, the black and silver scales of the dragon were a stark contrast to the white snow. The feathers at the dragon’s neck almost gleamed in the candlelight, as if painted with real silver.

Beneath where its claws dug into the mountain peak, a low altar was just visible beneath the detritus of time. She ran a hand along the stone ledge, sweeping away some of the leaves and dirt, uncovering the small candles and gold basin still waiting for their prayer.

A few feet from where her dragon ended, she saw the tail of Ocon’s dragon wrapping around a tree, its blue feathers contrasting against brown and green. Its scales gleamed a pale silver that she realized with a small jolt matched Ocon’s own eyes. He was still standing below the dragon’s head, his hand running along the wall where its mouth was opened in a scream, water pouring forth from it in frothy waves. Looking past him at the other wall, she could just see the white-and blue-painted sea dragon, twisting through the air above a roiling ocean.

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