Lynaelle wanted to scream, to run, but she could not. She found herself rooted to the spot, stark terror holding her fast. She couldn't breathe. As the fangs neared her head, the girl clenched her eyes shut, trembling and praying to Mystra that the end would be quick.
The stabbing pain of death did not come.
Lynaelle opened one eye and found herself staring at another eye, an orb almost as big as her balled fist and the color of glacial ice. That lone eye regarded her from a mere foot or two away, staring at her with a mixture of curiosity and malevolent eagerness while the winter storm raged all around them. The larger eye was set into a bony face, all shiny blue-white, smooth and glistening, like the frozen skull of a bird with a hooked beak, but with hundreds of icicle-teeth as long as the half-elf s fingers. The head bobbed low at the end of a serpentine neck covered in thick, jagged plates.
A dragon.
Lynaelle's knees lost their strength, and she crumpled into the snow that surrounded her. She realized she was holding her breath and exhaled sharply, then drew one shuddering gasp of air. The act nearly made her pass out, for she caught the scent of the beast's own breath, a cold, chemical odor that made her cough and choke. It reminded her of the distilled goat urine the smith back in Galen's Ford used to use to temper his forge work.
A dragon.
The beast's neck stretched up and away, connecting to a body that loomed high above the girl, indistinct in the swirling haze of snow. Lynaelle could barely make out two broad, leathery wings, bent and ribbed like the bat's, fanning out to either side of the huge monster. Even at five paces away, they were nothing more than a slightly darker shade of gray in the overwhelming white of the snow storm. And still they blotted out all light. They could have easily reached and engulfed the girl where she cowered, still trembling. A dragon!
"You will serve," the beast said, it's voice deep and hard-edged, like the sound the glaciers made when they scraped together.
Just hearing the dragon's voice made Lynaelle's heart flutter wildly in her chest, and she cringed at the sound of the words, not understanding them but wanting to flee their harshness. She tried to make herself very small, sinking into the waist-deep snow, thinking only of escape. She thought to hide, to cast a spell to take her away from the dragon.
Terror prevented her from remembering any magic at that moment.
Before Lynaelle could even turn away, a great talon-tipped claw raised up and reached for her, digits extended wide. The girl screamed and flailed, trying to roll over in the drift and scramble away. But the cumbersomeness of her heavy clothes and fur-lined cloak, along with the weight of her pack and the depth of the snowdrift, impeded her efforts. The huge claw shot forward, enveloping her.
As the claw closed tightly around her, Lynaelle expected to be crushed. But the dragon's death grip did not squeeze her unduly, nor did the talons gouge into her flesh. Nonetheless, the power of the dragon's grasp was undeniable, and the girl knew she was trapped as surely as if she were bound in iron. She found her arms pinned tightly to her sides, her cloak bunched up awkwardly, half covering her head. She felt the book, the damnable book covered in oilcloth in her pack, poking painfully against her spine. Snow pressed in and packed all around her, also trapped in the dragon's grasp.
Lynaelle sobbed, her wail muffled in the fur of the cloak, and she felt herself lifted from the ground, hoisted into the air easily. She struggled between the desire to peer out and see where the beast was taking her and the terror-filled urge to bury her face and clench her eyes closed, as if that could shut the world out, make the dragon go away.
She felt a sudden lurch, and the air was whistling fiercely against her head, whipping the hood of her cloak off and causing her long, straw-colored hair to lash about. Snow pelted her exposed skin, stinging her face. Curiosity won out for a moment, and she opened her eyes a fraction to see, but there was nothing but an endless swirl of white. She could sense that she was aloft, that the dragon was flying, for there was a rhythmic rolling motion that she equated with the beating of the beast's wings. With the blizzard raging all around her, though, the girl couldn't make out her surroundings, and the wind and ice simply hurt too much.
Lynaelle closed her eyes again in pain and despair as the white dragon carried her away from Silverymoon Pass.
She would not reach Silverymoon, would never enroll at the Lady's College. She would never deliver the book. A gift from her teacher for an old friend in the city, it would instead wind up in some lost place in the mountains, its pages rotting away alongside her bones.
That thought made Lynaelle sob and struggle desperately for a moment, but the effort was futile, and eventually she gave up, sagging in the dragon's grip.
For what seemed like forever, they flew, Lynaelle's fear dulled somewhat by the rhythmic pumping of the dragon's motion. As the initial shock of her capture faded, she began to consider her predicament, as well as the cryptic words the creature had uttered upon claiming her.
If it meant to eat me, the girl thought hopefully, it would simply have done so.
Unless it intends to save me for later, she added. But what did it mean by "serve?"
The thought that perhaps the dragon intended to keep her as a prisoner crossed the girl's mind, and hope actually rose within her. Whatever awful circumstances would be thrust upon her as a dragon's slave, they were better than dying, and it meant Lynaelle might find a way of escaping. Perhaps she would even be able to put her magic to use.
The notion of inflicting any sort of harm on the wyrm with her limited ability was laughable to Lynaelle, but tricking it was not out of the question. If she got the chance.
The half-elfs thoughts were interrupted as she became aware that the brightness of daylight beyond her shut eyelids, weak though it had been, suddenly and sharply diminished. She also noted that, though she still felt the keen rush of icy air, she was no longer being pelted by flakes of snow.
Lynaelle opened her eyes and nearly screamed again.
The dragon was dropping like a stone through a great shaft of ice, a hole in a glacier that was nearly vertical and just large enough for the dragon to unfurl its wings. Overhead, the dim gray of the sky was a receding circle, while below, the shaft plunged into deeper and deeper darkness.
The great white beast fanned its wings out, drawing up sharply and slowing its descent. Lynaelle was jostled roughly as the beast beat its wings three or four times in rapid succession and settled onto a solid surface. As it dropped into a crouch, the dragon released the girl from its grasp, sending her tumbling across a floor of cracked and rent ice, covered by a dusting of snow. She wound up sprawled on her back, staring upward, the book pressing painfully into her from beneath.
Some light shone down through the shaft, and permeated the area with an eerie bluish glow. It was ample illumination for Lynaelle to see that she was in a large domed chamber, a hollow bubble in a great glacier of ice. The shaft through which she and the dragpn had descended opened through the ceiling of the chamber, near one side. The rounded walls of the domed room were slightly uneven, like a drawn curtain, though still smooth and solid like glass. There would be no climbing those surfaces, at least not without tools or magical aid. Only the floor seemed the least bit rough and uneven.
The chamber was an effective prison.
"You will serve me," the dragon said, its harsh, crunching voice reverberating through the chamber.
Lynaelle's attention was drawn instantly back to the beast, which loomed over her, its wings folded in against its body for the moment. Unlike before, out in the weather, she could see the dragon clearly then. It peered down at the girl, its fang-filled jaws open slightly in an unsettling way as it regarded her. Muscles rippled along its chest and flanks, chorded and strong, yet shielded by plates that overlapped all along the surface of the beast. Its body must have stretched a good twenty feet, ending in a tail equally as long and segmented. It reminded Lynaelle of the tail of a beast called a crocodile, pictures of which Ambriel had once shown her.