Murtagh

Then horned-two-leg stroked the side of his neck and said, “Your Rider needs you, dragon. Think of him. Do for him, not yourself. For other we can be strong.”

The words sank into his mind, settled there. He clung to them with desperate strength. Rider-Murtagh needed help. And Rider-Murtagh had always helped him.

There was only one choice. It was the only choice there had ever really been, but he had feared to truly face it until that moment.

The first step was impossible.

The second was nearly so.

The third was only horribly hard.

The fourth came quickly, and then he was crawling forward like four-legs-no-wings, scenting for prey. The cave-fear did not leave, still felt like hot-blood-heart would break, but he could move. He could fight. He could help.

He roared again.

…

Bitterness coated the back of Murtagh’s throat, sharp, acrid, poisonous. He came to, coughing and hacking, and each purging convulsion caused him agony through his chest.

He blinked back tears, barely able to focus. Thorn was on his way. The realization brought as much fear as pride and relief. If what was in the hole could hurt Thorn, Murtagh wouldn’t be able to protect him.

He rolled back onto his knees and again peered over the rim of the abyss, dreading what he might see. As before, he had a dim sense of ponderous motion within the murky, smoke-filled space beneath the mountain.

He reached out with his thoughts. No living thing lay below. And yet…He widened his search, opening his mind and spreading his consciousness as far as he could through the deepness. Wider and wider he went, until he was spread as thin as a film of soap, and he felt…

He felt a mind.

A mind as vast as the mountains themselves. A consciousness so far removed from his own, he might as well have been an ant clinging to the side of an unimaginably large beast. The thoughts of the mind were cold, slow-moving things—dark islands of ice drifting along a listless current. Pervading all was a sense of dire intent, an ancient, calculated malevolence that pulsed outward like the beat of a monstrous heart. From the mind he felt hunger, immense and endless, and a coiled rage that knew no bounds.

Shocks of freezing fear shot through Murtagh’s limbs.

At his touch, the mind stirred, and the tremors and rumbles beneath the cave intensified, and Murtagh felt the mind turning toward him, focusing the enormity of its consciousness upon the single point of his being. When it found him, when it had him within his grip, he knew he would be helpless.

He did not think. He did not wait. He drew upon what was left of his strength and cried out the spell he had used once before, on the windswept plains between Gil’ead and the Spine: “Vindr thrysta un líjothsa athaerum!”

The air above the glowing crystals rippled like glass, and in an instant, all the light in the cave bent into the hole and flash-formed a single bar of blinding, white-hot illumination: a fiery lance forged from the sun itself.

A blast of superheated air struck Murtagh with the force of a thousand hammers. It slammed him into the ground, and he felt his organs shift as the world exploded beneath him.

***

He blinked.

Everything had gone cold and silent. Ash drifted down from the stone ceiling, soft grey flakes that fell like snow.

He pushed himself onto his forearms.

The hole in the center of the cave was twice as large as before, and the edges glowed a dull red. Through it and below…nothing was visible. No hints of movement beside the falling flakes. Empty.

A piece of rock dropped from the ceiling and bounced across the floor several feet from him. It made no sound he could hear.

He tried to stand, but his arms and legs would not hold his weight.

He tried to reach out with his mind, but that too was beyond him. His throat was tight, and he felt as if he were choking. Darkness feathered the edges of his vision.

He tried.

He tried to try….

He couldn’t…

As awareness slipped away like water between fingers, the stone beneath him shook with the hurried tread of something huge and heavy approaching….

His last thought was one of regret. If only…

***

Glittering redness moved above him, and white jags that resolved into claws and teeth.

Thorn. He tried to rise but had not the strength.