Page 71 of Lady Dragon
If dragons didn’t dwell where they hunted and fed, they didn’t live where they went to die, either. None of her kind wished to rot where scavengers and insects could eat them. They wanted to perish with their pride intact, if not their flesh, cleansed by fire.
To Kirek it felt hotter than an oven. As hot as a… forge.
Of course,thiswas where a forge used by dragons would be.
Even for a dragon, it wasn’t terribly welcoming. Not for alivingdragon, anyway. Miraculously, she and the red dragon were still alive.
And they weren’t alone. Some loose scree tumbled down the hillside from above. It could have just been the earth settlingafter the eruption, but Kirek heard skittering accompanying it, and the red dragon hissed in warning. Could another dragon be here? Certainly no human…
But neither humannordragon suddenly slithered out from behind a massive rock and toward them on far too many legs, its movements almost snakelike as it wove its way down the mountain at incredible speed. And yet it wasn’t covered in scales like a snake or even a dragon, but armored, chitinous segments all linked together, striped in black and orange as if to hide among the lava flows, and preceded by a massive pair of pincers that clacked together viciously at its head.
Kirek had seen centipedes before, but only those, even the biggest of which, she could squash underclaw. Never one with the bulk of a lion and the length of a dragon.
The red dragon reared up as those pincers snapped where her face had been—her eyes, rather.
The hideous creature probably tried to blind dragons first before it went for the rest of them. Not only lava cleaned these bones around here, apparently.
Kirek shouldn’t have loosened her grip for even a moment, because she was thrown from the red dragon’s back when she recoiled. Kirek twisted as she fell to avoid breaking her neck, and ended up bouncing and tumbling down the hillside, scraping over shards of sharp rock that cut her skin like glass.
Through her spinning field of vision, she glimpsed something ahead that made facing the centipede behind the more appealing option: The hillside abruptly ended in haze-filled darkness. Kirek didn’t want to find out how far down it dropped. Scrabbling with one hand while trying to protect her head with the other, she yanked out one of her daggers, hoping shewouldn’t end up stabbing herself, and flailed at the mountainside. The dagger bounced off with the spark of steel on rock, and Kirek kept rolling.
A few more turns would take her over the edge. With a strangled cry, she lashed out once more.
Her dagger caught, yanking her arm and the rest of her body to a halt. She still slid a few more paces, her boots jutting out over the edge and into space. Trying not to panic, Kirek twisted, flattening herself on her belly to spread out her weight, and dug into the mountainside with her other hand, heedless of her pitiful nails that weren’t claws, and carefully dragged herself up until she could get her knees under her.
She looked over her shoulder and wished she hadn’t. A sheer cliff fell away at her back, plummeting to what would have been her certain death on jagged rocks below. She yanked her dagger out of the ground and scrambled away from the edge as quickly as she could. Only then did she return her focus up the hill.
The centipede was coiled, getting ready for another strike of what must already have been several. The red dragon, wings spread wide, sent a stream of fire flooding over it. The creature curled in on itself, flames licking and raging over its body.
When the fire died, it was sizzling and steaming. But then it raised its pincered head and struck at the red dragon again. It made sense that it was resistant to fire, living near molten lava.
“I’m coming, Samansa!” Kirek cried.
Her hand immediately went for her sword as she started running and slipping up the mountain scree—not that she imagined it could do much against those thick armor plates. But despite the creature’s size, Kirek had seen what a hawk could do to even the fiercest-looking centipede.
Here, the red dragon was the hawk.
Samansa flared her wings once more, but Kirek froze in her tracks when the red dragon only looked back at her with a bright, malignant eye.
I’m not Samansa, she said.
And then she pushed off, her wings shooting her high into the air. Not toward Kirek, but away. The smoke and darkness quickly swallowed her.
She’d left Kirek. Alone.
Well, not entirely alone. Its intended prey gone, the centipede’s antennae quivered, and its head swiveled in her direction. Its pincers clacked once. Then its segmented body uncoiled from its defensive crouch, flowing like a stream of far faster-moving lava, and it charged her.
Kirek barely had time to think. But she didn’t panic. And she didn’t move. Instead, she crouched.
A few paces before those pincers would have closed around her body and cut her in half, Kirek leaped. The centipede carried on under her, and she came down on its back, trying and half failing to run along it, her boots slipping on its smooth shell before she careened off the tail end and landed hard on her shoulder and very nearly her sword. But the hillside was under her, and even luckier, she didn’t roll or slide far, despite how fast the centipede was moving.
It sped right off the cliff in its haste, launching itself into darkness. Its body writhed as it fell, twisting, as if to run back along its segments, like Kirek had, to regain the ground, before it dropped out of sight. Within the pattering of scree raining down on the rocks below, Kirek heard a much louder, nastiercrunch.
And yet, she didn’t move beyond drawing herself up into a low squat, barely breathing, even though she was entirely out of breath. She waited, one hand gripping the mountain, the other her sword, listening.
And then she heard a clacking—angryclacking, if that was possible—and then the scratching and scrabbling of too many legs against the cliff face. She cast around for something, anything to throw or even leverage with her legs, but all the bigger rocks or boulders had already gone over the edge, this close to it.
Even then she didn’t run. In fact, she sidled up to the deadly drop, planted her feet at an angle, making sure to center herself above the worst of the noise, and readied her sword in both hands.
