Page 47 of Dragon Valley
The men parted and someone else approached me. Small, tattered shoes and a blue skirt stained with blood floated closer to me like a ghost. I looked up to see long, dark hair whipping around a smiling, feminine face.
Myra. She said something but I couldn’t hear through the ringing in my ears. Something hard and heavy cracked against my skull, and then blackness.
* * *
“Oh good, he’s waking up.”
A sharp pain cracked across my cheek, followed by bellows of laughter echoing off stone walls. I kept my eyes closed and tried to get my bearings as consciousness crept back in. Everything hurt. My whole body was on fire and I couldn’t move. My thoughts immediately went to Nadi. Did they have her too?
I fought the screaming pain in my limbs and tried to sit up. My hands strained against heavy rope holding them behind my back. I was sitting on a cold, stone floor. The air tasted damp, musty, and heavy. Even my eyelids stabbed with pain as I gingerly opened them and tried to survey the room around me.
As I suspected, I was in some kind of windowless cellar lined with stone. With the four people standing in front of me looking down at my shackled form, it seemed to fit all the criteria of a dungeon.
“Lieutenant Caden Fraise, so good to see you in the company of a woman instead of with Captain Aron’s dick in your mouth. I was beginning to suspect the worst.”
More laughter rang out, making my ears hurt. I blinked and squinted to make sense of my captors. Three men stood in armor I didn’t recognize. Their faces didn’t look familiar either, but so many enemy faces blurred through my mind over the years. The fourth person was none other than Myra, now wearing a clean cotton dress and her hair and face freshly washed.
“I clean up nicely, don’t I, lieutenant?” she giggled running a hand flirtatiously through her hair. “Are you sure you don’t want female comfort? You don’t look too well.”
“Who are you?” I asked hoarsely. I’d kill for a drink of water. “The royal army?”
“No, sorry to disappoint,” said the first man. “Your royal family does pay nicely, though.”
Fucking mercenaries. My exhausted, pain-riddled mind frantically tried to make sense of what was happening. Myra tricked us. She led us into a trap and wanted Nadi and Dusa here too. Why? And why would the royal army hire soldiers?
“Where’d your little friend and her dragon fly off to?”
My vision kept blurring and I couldn’t keep track of who was talking. Still, I croaked out a bitter laugh.
“No point in telling you assholes. When she gets back, that dragon will turn you to ash before you can breathe a word to the royal army.”
“Ohh, the young buck’s still got some fight in him! General?”
A moving shadow flickered across my vision before pain exploded throughout my stomach and chest. I sucked in a breath but no air came into my lungs. It felt like someone was hitting me with an iron hammer. Again and again the blows came until someone said stop. Any attempt to breathe felt like I was choking on blood.
Breathing through my nose was slightly easier but I was certain I had broken ribs and possibly pierced lungs. Every inhale and exhale felt like knives slicing through me.
“I think he’ll behave now. Anyway, he’s right. The girl and her dragon are probably on their way here.” A hand grabbed my hair and roughly jerked my head back. Pockmarked skin and a smile filled with rotting teeth greeted me. “Wanna see what we do to dragons?”
He stepped aside, still holding my head up while I watched a demonstration that filled me with soul-eating dread and despair.
One of the men lit a massive torch. The entire length could have been a small tree trunk and it nearly filled up the entire room. At one end of the torch danced a blue flame, the hottest fire in existence that didn’t come from a dragon’s mouth.
Across the cellar, another man stood over a large cauldron with pale gray smoke coming out of it. The smoke acted… unusually. I’d never seen anything like it before. Rather than rise toward the sky, it drifted down to the floor like water before dissipating into nothing. Even as it bubbled over the cauldron lip it had a flowing, water-like quality to it.
The man dipped a ladle into the cauldron carefully and pulled it straight out. I noticed he wore thick leather gloves sealed by twine around his wrists. He carried his watery smoke-filled ladle across the room and poured the contents over the blue-flamed torch.
The flame didn’t just go out. Before I could blink, half the length of the torch froze solid into a block of ice.
But the demonstration wasn’t done. The ladle-wielder grinned at me as he gently tapped the handle on the frozen portion of the torch.
It shattered like glass, breaking into thousands of frozen solid pieces on the floor. The hottest flame known to man on a torch thicker than my arm were just destroyed like they were children’s toys.
My heart sank and I silently begged for Nadi and Dusa not to come here. I screamed in my mind for them to go back to Dragon Valley and warn Captain Aron. It was useless but that hope was all I had left.
I just saw what would kill us all. This mysterious substance was the weapon against dragons.
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