Page 16 of Burned Alive to Be His
We reach the entrance to the Serpent’s Maw. It is not a cave. It is a wound in the mountainside, a dark, jagged fissure from which a visible, shimmering heat pours like a foul breath. The air itself tastes of metal and poison. The rock around the entranceis stained with yellow and green mineral deposits from the toxic gases that vent from within. The groaning sounds that emanate from its depths are not the sounds of wind, but of the mountain itself, shifting in its uneasy sleep.
The human stops, her eyes wide as she stares into the dark, heat-hazed opening. I can feel the terror rolling off her in waves. It is a palpable thing, a scent in the air. For the first time since she washed ashore, she looks truly, utterly broken. And the sight of it, the sight of that defiant fire in her eyes finally extinguished, brings me no triumph. It brings only a cold, hollow ache.
She takes a deep, shuddering breath, a soldier preparing to walk to her own execution. She turns to face the opening, her small shoulders squared. She is going to do it. She is going to walk into that hell without a word.
And I cannot let her.
Not like this.
“Halt.” The command is a sharp bark, torn from my throat before I can think.
She freezes, her back to me.
“Turn around,” I order.
She turns slowly, her face a pale, sweat-sheened mask. The defiance is gone, replaced by a weary, fatalistic resolve. She thinks I am about to deliver a final cruelty.
I look at her feet. They are a mess. Cut, bruised, and blistered from the hot, sharp ground. They are the feet of a creature not meant for this world. They are the feet of a creature destined to fail. And her failure will be my own. My embarrassment.
“You cannot enter the Maw like that,” I say in a low growl of frustration. “Your feet will be cooked to the bone before you take ten steps. Do not embarrass me by failing over something so pathetic.”
I turn my back to her, a deliberate act to conceal what I am about to do. I cannot let her see this. It is a weakness I cannotafford to show. I reach into the leather pouch at my belt and pull out a strip of cured likar hide and the small, sharp blade I use for skinning.
With a quick, practiced movement, I press the edge of the blade against the thickest part of the obsidian scales on my left forearm. I grit my teeth and scrape, hard. A sharp, searing pain lances up my arm. It is the pain of a part of me being stripped away. A fine, shimmering black powder flakes from my scales onto a piece of leather I’ve laid out. It is not much, but it will be enough. My scales hold the fire of my blood, the innate resistance to the mountain’s heat that is my birthright.
I quickly mix the powder with a dab of animal fat from my pouch, creating a thick, black paste. The act feels… intimate. Sacrilegious. I am giving a part of myself, of my very essence, to this human. I tell myself it is a calculated investment. Nothing more.
I turn back to her, my face a mask of indifference. “Sit,” I command, gesturing to a flat rock.
She hesitates, her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Now, human,” I snarl.
She sits, tucking her ruined feet beneath her. I crouch before her, ignoring the way she flinches as I reach for her. I go to grab her ankle, and she yanks her foot back, scrambling away until her back hits the rock.
“Don’t,” she hisses, the word a shard of glass in the hot air. Her eyes are wide, but they burn with a cornered animal’s ferocity. “Don’t touch me.”
The defiance, even now, even after last night, sends a jolt of something hot and infuriating through me. “I will touch what is mine,” I snarl, losing patience. “And your pathetic feet are about to get you killed, which inconveniences me. Now, sit still.”
I don’t give her a choice. I lunge and grab her ankle, my grip firm, ignoring her sharp intake of breath and the way her entire body goes rigid. Her foot is so small, so fragile in my large hand.
I work quickly, my movements rough and impersonal. I smear the black paste onto the two pieces of likar hide, the mixture still warm from my body heat. I press the hides to the soles of her feet, then use thin leather thongs to bind them in place, creating crude but functional shoes.
Throughout the process, she is utterly still, her breath held. I can feel the tremor in her leg, but she does not pull away. When I am finished, I release her and stand up, putting distance between us once more.
“They will offer some protection,” I say, my voice clipped. “Now go. And do not fail.”
She looks down at the makeshift shoes, then up at me, her eyes filled with a confusion so profound it is almost painful to witness. She does not understand the act, and I will not explain it.
She stands, testing her weight on the protected soles. She gives me one last, searching look, then turns and walks toward the mouth of the Serpent’s Maw. She does not look back. She simply disappears into the shimmering heat and the oppressive darkness.
And I am left alone.
The silence she leaves behind is a heavy, suffocating thing. I am forbidden from helping. I am commanded to wait. Waiting is not something I do well. I begin to pace, a caged predator, my boots crunching on the black grit. The rage I felt earlier has been replaced by a different kind of fire. A hot, coiling anxiety that tightens my chest and shortens my breath.
I stare at the dark fissure, my senses stretched thin, trying to pierce the veil of heat and shadow. I can smell the poison in the air, the scent of a thousand years of the mountain’s foulbreath. I can hear the deep, groaning shifts of the rock, the world groaning in its sleep. She is in there. Alone.
Minutes stretch into an eternity. Every groan of the mountain is her being crushed. Every hiss of a steam vent is the sound of her skin cooking. The logical part of my mind tells me she is already dead. No human could survive in there for this long. But another, more primal part of me refuses to accept it.
