Chapter 44: Home Sweet Something
The dungeon was on fire in several places and falling apart in a few others.
— The former fact was remarkable, given that it was all made out of stone.
Goblins and adventurers traded blows across the main hall's floor, the fighting broken into clusters that moved and reformed with the unpredictable rhythm of a space that had been contested for longer than anyone could keep track of. Lizardmen dropped from the wall alcoves onto the heads of their enemies. Arrows flew from the upper galleries and crossed paths with spells in the open air, the collisions producing small bursts of coloured light that scattered across the stone. Bricks worked loose from their mortar and fell from the frames, shattering on the floor below in clouds of dust.
A massive support chain ran across the vaulted ceiling, bolted at both ends into the stone. The bolts on the eastern side had been heating for some time, the metal softening in the ambient temperature of a room full of fire spells and they gave way simultaneously. The chain detached on one end and swung down across the chamber in a long, heavy arc, the loose end cutting a canyon through the floor that sent bodies flying in both directions.
The impact shook the walls. A section of the upper gallery cracked and sagged.
In the back of the hall, F.P. was in the air.
The fairy princess flew after a goblin who was running across an overhead beam, her tiny form moving with determined speed, a small stick raised in one hand. She was shouting at him and he was not stopping to listen. The words were lost in the noise but the tone was clear. He had refused something and she was not accepting the refusal.
Below them, another goblin sat on a pile of gold that had apparently been hauled up from the treasury. He was dispensing tokens to a line of smaller goblins who had arranged themselves in front of him.
A dragon whelp came through the eastern passage at full tilt, its small wings folded for a ground-level charge. Blibli rode on its back, both pseudopods gripping the whelp's neck, her form flattened against its scales for aerodynamic efficiency. The whelp hit an adventuring party's alchemist, who had been setting up a workstation against the wall, and the collision sent glass flasks and ceramic bottles spinning through the air in every direction. They hit the floor and detonated in sequence, each one producing a different effect.
Smoke. Acid.
A brief but enthusiastic flash of light. A patch of ice. Something purple that stuck to the wall and stayed there.
Barjuchne stood at the entrance, staring.
Next to her, the obsidian gate had been partially dismantled. A team of human miners was working the inner surface with picks and pry bars, hauling sections of the black glass down and stacking them on a cart. They had been at this long enough to develop a system. One of them was taking measurements with a piece of string.
"Excuse me. You're in the way." A human miner squeezed past her without slowing. He had a chisel in one hand and a water skin in the other. He did not look at her twice.
Barjuchne's eye twitched.
"I was only gone," she began, very quietly, the words almost lost in the noise.
She inhaled.
"- FOR A WEEK!"
The growl hit the room the way an avalanching boulder hits water, the force of it moving outward from the gate in a pressure wave that rattled loose stones in their settings and silenced every conflict in its path.
A hundred bodies stopped mid-motion and turned, all at once, toward the source.
The room went quiet except for the distant sound of the miners, who had not heard and continued working.
Barjuchne opened her mouth.
The lightning formed between her teeth, bright enough to turn the air white, the electric charge filling the room in a slow, building pulse. The silhouettes of everyone present turned black against it.
She let it loose.
The lightning bolt hit the first adventurer in the chest and arced. It crossed to the next and the next, the electricity finding every conductive body in the room and connecting them in a chain of rapid, branching arcs. It hit the goblins. It hit the lizardmen. It climbed the support chain and ran along its length, raining sparks down from the ceiling in a cascade of white-hot points.
Bodies went down. The electricity locked muscles and threw people sideways, the involuntary contractions sending weapons flying from hands and boots skidding across the floor. The spread was too wide to kill anyone; the charge divided too many times across too many bodies, but the pain was real and immediate and the fear it produced was worse.
"DRAGON!" someone screamed from the floor.
"GET THE HELL OUT!" Barjuchne pointed at the gate.
They went.
The adventurers scrambled for the exit in a flood, pushing past each other and past her, streaming through the broken gate and down the mountain path with the desperate urgency of people who had received a clear instruction and intended to follow it completely.
"That's right, keep walking!" Barjuchne growled. She shook her fist at them. "Just because this is a dungeon doesn't mean you can just come inside willy-nilly. Out. OUT!"
One of them was moving too slowly for her satisfaction. She grabbed him by the scruff of his collar and threw him through the gate after the others. He hit the ground outside and rolled and kept rolling.
"Dragon!" A knight had stopped in the midst of the exodus, turning to face her. He held his sword out, the point aimed toward her, his stance wide and braced. "I have come to slay you in honourable combat." He clenched his gauntleted fist against his chest. "So that I may prove my bravery to my betroth—"
Barjuchne reached down and grabbed the base of his cuirass with one hand and lifted him off his feet. He hung in the air in front of her, his sword still raised, his arms shaking but not lowering.
She glared at him through the slots of his visor. Her eyes burnt red.
He held the sword despite that.
"Is she hot?" Barjuchne asked after studying him for a moment. He meant business.
"I'M STANDING RIGHT HERE!" Veliah shouted from beside her. "Come on!"
Barjuchne rolled her eyes. Then she reached down to her own forearm, found a scale that had been loosening for days anyway, and pulled it free. She shoved it through the knight's visor with two fingers.
"Send her my regards," she said.
The hydra girl spun and threw him. He cleared the gate, tumbled down the slope, and crashed into the escaping crowd at the bottom, his armour making sounds against the rocks.
"Was that necessary?" Veliah asked.
"Who am I to stand in the way of love?" Barjuchne turned back to the room. "F.P.! What the hell is happening here?!"
"Oh, thank goodness, you're back." F.P.'s head emerged from inside Blibli. The slime princess had formed a hollow bubble within herself and tucked the fairy inside it to protect her, the translucent wall of the bubble visible around F.P.'s shoulders. The insulation had blocked the lightning's charge from reaching her.
"Barjuch-yay!" Blibli called eagerly, her eyes those of an excited puppy.
The slime princess charged forward and hit Barjuchne with full enthusiasm. She wrapped around the dragon girl's midsection, crawled up her side, and extended herself upward to bring her face level with Barjuchne's.
"I was a problem!" she said, beaming.
Barjuchne kissed Blibli's forehead, her face sinking in a little from the pressure. "I'm sure you were."
Blibli giggled and rippled with joy, her entire mass shivering with the reaction.
F.P. pulled herself free of the slime. "Don't I get a greeting? It's been a week. Or do I need to confess to being a troublemaker first too?"
Barjuchne plucked the fairy free of Blibli's residue and set her on the shoulder. "It's cute when she does it."
"I'm the favourite!" Blibli called from below.
"As if," snipped Veliah from the side. She had already begun collecting items from the floor, sorting the salvageable from the broken. A goblin hiding behind a pile of gold caught her eye. She hissed at him through her teeth. He ran.
"I'm afraid things have got out of hand while you two were away," F.P. said. She crossed her arms and her small legs over Barjuchne's collarbone. "With the others incapacitated, there was simply too much to manage."
"You're supposed to have experience in ruling. You are, literally, a princess."
"Yes, well." F.P. looked at the ceiling. "You understand the circumstances being what they are. Most of your creatures refuse to listen to me. And Rou-ya has been unable to walk for days."
Barjuchne sighed. "Is everyone okay?"
"We had to restrain that Vildt girl you brought home," said F.P. "She's insane."
"That means a lot, coming from you."
Barjuchne pecked the top of the fairy's head and then put her on her shoulder.
F.P. settled in without comment, but her wings buzzed once, soft and brief.
"How much gold is missing?" Barjuchne asked, looking at the pile the goblin had been sitting on. It was larger than it should have been.
"Missing? Oh. Actually, there's more than before," replied the fairy.
Barjuchne blinked, staring at the heap that was up here by the entrance. "Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Good job. Tribute?"
F.P. twirled a strand of hair around one finger. "...Not quite," said the fairy, after a moment.
The twin saintess priestesses appeared at the corridor entrance. Each of them popped one head around the frame from either side, their identical faces checking the room with the synchronised caution of people who had been waiting for the noise to stop.
"Barjuchne," said the first, smiling.
"You've returned," said the second, smiling.
They stepped aside in unison, each gesturing down the hallway with one hand. "Her royal majesty will see you now," they said together.
"Who, the what?" asked Barjuchne.
"Ah, yes," began F.P. She looked at the gold heap. "That isn't tribute. It's a down payment. You have... a visitor."
Barjuchne looked at the fairy on her shoulder. Then into the corridor. "What?"
"You've been sold. The royal princess of the nation seems to think so at least. She's down the hall, waiting for you to return so that you may be packaged and shipped accordingly."
Barjuchne stared. "...Does anyone here understand how this works? This is my mountain. I am the dragon here. I take princesses."
"Where did your tail go?" Blibli asked from somewhere around her waist. "You aren't as scratchy anymore." She paused. "I liked your tail."
The saintesses had approached and were examining her from both sides with the focused attention of people conducting an inspection.
"This is terrible," said the first. "We wanted to fly more."
"Most awful," agreed the second. "We also enjoyed the tail."
They each grabbed one of Barjuchne's arms, squeezing the forearm through the cloak. They exchanged a glance.
"Very smooth," they agreed, nodding at the same instant.
"Rubbery."
“Bouncy.”
Barjuchne pressed her hands against her own face in exasperation as she was poked and prodded at from all angles. The exhaustion was genuine and deep and had nothing to do with the very long walk back to the mountain.
It was good to be home.
A shrill, aggrieved scream came from the end of the corridor, cutting through the settling dust and the last distant sounds of fleeing adventurers.
"WHERE IS MY DRAGON?!"