She was waiting for them at the top, standing where the wall remained heavy and intact. Thick enough for passageways beneath their feet and a wide battlement that wrapped the city. The town sprawling out in all directions around them. They went across that cold stone and Kayhi turned for a moment to watch them come and smiled and then turned back to the world before her as they fell in on all sides.
“Look at it,” she said.
The dragon was nearly gone. The crimson sun rising on the horizon, the mountains far off and blood red in the light, the painted snow and ice. That same brutal light edging onto the plains where the coals and the dragon's body smoldered and hissed. A long bed of blackened bones and little flames still licking over them. This pyre where the dragon had fallen blind and screaming to the earth, the girl swinging from its neck with the arrow through its blistering eye.
He reached for her then and she leaned against him, so small and wrapped in her cloak. He closed his eyes and saw her falling and heard her scream then over the dragon's and opened his eyes again. As if to assure himself that it was dead, that this time it was dead and only the ash remained.
On the edge of it all the captain stood before the tent. His eyes not on the dragon's burning but on them where they stood atop the wall. That cold wind coming down off the mountains, swirling the blood red cloak behind him. The firelight on his breastplate and helmet. Behind him the ice of winter flashing coldly as the mountainborn light fell, smoke and death and carnage on that wind.
Epilogue
Beneath her feet the heavy churning of the machines deep within the mountains. An incessant vibration that felt as if it reached the ends of the earth. The ever-present smell of sulfur and fire and smoke as she walked the halls, the remaining stone passageways of this ancient ruin. A place crafted in ages now forgotten, hewn out of the stone by men
(perhaps)
so long dead that even their bones had turned to dust and the dust to stone and no more were they known or remembered. A forgotten scourge, torn out of history, shattered and destroyed and it all so long ago no one knew who had done it.
She walked in the darkness with only the dim oil lamps lighting the stone in front of her. Those ageless marks from the picks. The darkness making it feel smaller than it was, but the stone ceiling actually a dozen feet above her, the passageway at least that wide. She did not know if they had built it this way to walk six abreast or if they had been a towering, hulking people for whom this was space for a single man.
But she felt that she knew, all the same.
The passage came to a bridge and she crossed it and an endless dark below her. Far, far down a faint light. Or a trick of the eyes. She would not look and crossed the bridge slowly, feeling a cold wind moving above her. Looking up and seeing that same towering darkness above and reaching on to an untold distance.
Her sword at her side, heavy and made of rough, black-forged metal. A cruel instrument made not for looks or grace but for tearing the entrails out of a man and moving on to the next. The hilt wrapped in twisted leather. The back edge dented and chipped but the front filed to a razor's edge.
She stopped on the other side of that bridge and closed her eyes. There for a moment a complete darkness. Feeling at her back the drop and wondering if she were to take a step back and to the side if she'd open her eyes as she fell. Or if she'd just keep them closed in sleep and let herself fall and feel the wind pulling at her dark cloak as she descended into the madness below.
She did not know. She never knew.
The passage continued and she went on and up the great stone staircase where the lamps no longer burned. The cold growing with each step. A frost on the front edges of the stairs, thin and just felt slickly under her boots. When at last she stood at the top she could see her breath in the air and the thin light now filling the landing. A cold and meager light full of mist and ice.
She looked behind her, into the nothing. Found her fingers on her sword and slowly put both hands into her cloak. Wrapping it and clenching the rough fabric. Then she turned and walked out the tall arch of stone and soot and frost and stood blinking on the balcony.
Below a drop of ice and snow over black rock, falling away for a thousand feet. Just the thin stone rail between her and that soaring fall. Clouds thin and cold below her. Finally at the end the mountain sweeping out into a glacial plain as far as she could see, running off in windswept fury. The snow so hard it was just shards of ice chased in that wind, swirling across the frozen expanse. Behind her the mountains still rose, climbing into this stark wasteland to impossible heights, the highest peaks even now lost in those vicious clouds, the air gone up there and the cold so deep it would rip the breath from your lungs and leave you as stone itself to be buried and lost.
Perhaps even now, bodies up there in the snow. Fools lost in ages past, still forever, unable even to rot.
Far down the balcony before her, the swirling of his cape in the ceaseless wind. Everything about him white, from the eyes to the skin to the hair to the long fingers wrapped around the edge of the rail. His clothes and belt and even the leather around the hilt of the silver sword. But that cloak itself the deepest black she'd ever seen, the sky at night with no stars and no moon, a deep void of nothing, nothing.
He turned as she stepped out, and she did not look down. His pupils alone a red like fire and ruby, burning in that dead face. Slowly, a long red tongue emerging to wet the thin and pale lips, cracked and chapped in this frigid gale.
And yet he stood in this world, his hands uncovered. Ice in his hair and eyebrows and on his boots. Looking at her with his red eyes and not blinking at all. Not a shake or tremor. Just the slightest mist before him as he breathed, thin and shallow breaths as they passed through his filed teeth.
She did not speak as she walked toward him, and he turned back to the frozen hell of the plain. There was ice on the balcony and she walked slowly to keep her footing. Or she told herself that was why she did it. Even believed it
(perhaps)
as the frost cracked, leaving thin tracks behind her.
When she stopped at his side he did not look at her, but raised his hands from the rail, clenching them once. Those long and serpentine fingers. It almost looked as if the bones moved under pale and stretching skin but the flesh did not move with them. Almost.
Then he snarled, just the corner of his lip twisting upward. One rotted and pointed tooth below, the skin creasing like it wasn't skin at all. A bloodless twisting. Above them the howling wind ceasing for a moment its torment. And in that brittle silence, he said:
“Someone has killed my dragon.”