A thousand more besides.
But he had always felt that men longed to be dragons for what dragons were and what they could be, this beast the realization of all that men craved. And in that also a spiteful arrogance, found likewise in so many men. As it had chosen to kill those around him and to burn cities and to drag him on toward Kayhi so that it could kill her in front of him.
Perhaps in this a deep-seated knowledge of the response such a thing would elicit, forcing him into sleeplessness and rage and waiting for him to make a mistake because of it. For a weary hunter seeing his life torn apart in front of him would not hunt the way he needed to hunt to kill a dragon. Instead clumsy and reckless. He'd seen others die this way and would see more do so. As all emotions and thoughts fell aside but anger and pain and very quickly those things became the hunter's undoing.
But he did not think so. He thought this was something else entirely, a vile torment being wrought for its own sake. To torture him and nothing more.
And he would not let himself think of what that must mean as he walked on toward that second pillar of smoke and the beast hulking at its base, breathing into it the heat of both life and destruction and waiting with black wings to shred the air and fall on him in fang and fire, a raging molten heart beating in its chest and driving it to this final stand.
They camped that night in the middle of the plain and still the dragon waited. Something had shifted within him and Brack felt no compulsion to run or push himself on. He knew now what this was. If it was going to kill her before he got there then she was dead already. But it would wait for this was the game that it played and there was no timeline within it. Their meeting would arrive when it did and be resolved how it would and they were both now marching to that end.
The camp was simple and they sat on the ground about their fire. The bedrolls long lost. The girl looking at them in endless silence but something within her still changing. Juoth watching in the firelight the distant city. The pillar of smoke now lost to the night but the fire burning bright at its base. The dragon fueling it and perhaps crouching in that same night and looking out long across the plain to their own small fire flickering in the stillness.
There was a peacefulness to it and he'd felt it before battle and other times besides. Always the next day drowned in blood and chaos. But this was as simple as anything could be.
For when a man thought he would die in the morning only then was his mind free of all that which usually enslaved it, all thoughts of what life held or what he must do to build toward some imagined end that he had determined he wanted or been told he wanted and all of life then a struggle to obtain it. Wondering all the time if the obtainment would be bitter when it was not what he thought it would be.
But with death standing in the doorframe all of that fell away and he was no longer blind nor bound and an immense weight was lifted. He'd seen men smile on the eve of battle who had never smiled in their lives and the next day they were run through or hacked into pieces and he felt they'd known that night before what would happen and that was why they smiled.
He looked at the girl. She was holding her hair over one shoulder in her hands and turning it with her fingers and looking at it curiously as if close to remembering something. Some way of tying it, perhaps.
“What's your name?” he said.
She looked at him and she blinked and said nothing. He met her eyes at first and felt there was the faintest trace of a smile or some bemusement on her lips and then he looked away. When he looked back she was folding her hair again and twisting it about her fingers.
“I thought you'd take seeing her differently,” Juoth said.
Brack smiled softly and moved a log on the fire. Sparks rising in the night air. “Think I'd run screaming? Try to put an arrow in her?”
“Maybe that's too far. But you know what I mean.” He motioned to the side at her with his head like some paralytic. “This girl was dead.”
“I know she was.”
“And now she's not.”
“And now she's not.”
Juoth scowled. “That's just what it is where you come from?”
“You told me you don't believe in magic. Said there's no such thing.”
“I know what I said.” The scowl deepening, then fading into something like resignation. “But that's not it. You think I'm a fool?”
“I know you're not a fool.”
“That so.”
“And that's why you believe in it. You saw the boy, now this girl. You know I'm not a liar and I told you that dragon died two hundred years ago. Yet it's also alive.”
Juoth was silent.
“I'll tell you what I think if you want to hear it.”
“I'll hear it.”
“You don't want to believe in it,” Brack said. “So you try not to. You're not alone in that. All men do it. I met a man didn't want to believe in the plague and told me it wasn't real and it wasn't coming on the ships. But I saw the way he watched the harbor. Even met some who told me there was no such thing as dragons, despite the dragonskulls decorating the walls of the Ringed City. It always comes back to power.”
“In what way?”
“A reduction. A man is nothing in the face of a plague, a dragon.” He met Juoth's eyes. “Of magic. There is nothing we want more than that control and having a say in our lives and making them what we want them to be. Wars have been fought over it too many times to number. But against some things there is no solution and it's then that men refuse to believe. Because believing in something that takes that power and control away, and against which one cannot stand, well, that's enough to break a man.”
“You think I don't want to be broken.”
“If you do, you'll be the first person I've met who did. No one does. Me, you, her.”
“So I'm the liar, then. Is that all this is?”
“I think you said what you wanted to believe.” He leaned in, keeping his face calm. “But you always believed what was real. No matter what you said. Because you're not a fool.”
Juoth sat back and Brack watched him. For a while nothing on his face but many things working in his eyes. The shadows of those things within. Then finally he smiled and said:
“You're a son of a bitch, you know that? Never met a man who told me something, then I told him he was lying, then he told me I was lying about the lying and why I was doing it. Never met a man who'd do that in my life.”
Brack said nothing but grinned also as he turned again the log in the fire. They sat then in the silence for a time and it started to burn down and he didn't put anything else on it. The dragon was close enough that there would be no wolves. They would sleep and then rise and finally they would do what they'd been brought here to do. Whether it was what he thought they'd come to do or what the dragon thought they were there to do – to die – they would know soon enough.
He could see its shape in the twisting ruin of that spired city before the others, his eyes bred for this so that he and the dragon could watch each other across the distance when other men would walk unknowingly to their deaths. It sat on the shattered pinnacle of a short tower, the stones clutched in those talons that cut it as if made from diamond, the other towers rising around it like some thin and mangled forest of stone. Its black wings folded against its back. Before it rising with each breath a simmering glow and embers sweeping upward. He felt that he could see the scar around its neck where the head had once been cut from the body but he did not know if he saw it or if he only knew it was there. Either one the same in the end.