Chapter 49: Return to Sender
"I SAID THAT I WANTED TO FLY!"
The shriek hit the corridor with the force of a physical object, the sound bouncing off stone walls and multiplying until it occupied every available inch of air. Goblins scattered in every direction, their hands pressed flat against their ears, their faces contorted in agony.
Barjuchne stood in the corridor with her face in one hand. Schmand, the royal princess of the nation, had both of her hands wrapped around Barjuchne's tail and was yanking on it feverishly.
The tail did not move. Schmand's feet slid on the stone floor as she pulled. She pulled harder. The tail remained where it was.
"I want to fly and it's your job and I HATE walking and I hate these corridors and I hate the heat, and—"
Barjuchne closed her eyes.
The hoard room was warm and dim and should have been peaceful.
Barjuchne lay on her stomach on a pile of gold with her eyes shut, wanting very badly but being unable to sleep.
"I HATE THIS! I HATE IT HERE! IT'S SO HOT AND DAMP!"
Schmand was on her back, her fists pounding against Barjuchne’s shoulders.
"STOP IGNORING ME!"
Rou-ya lay a few feet to Barjuchne's left. The goblin princess covered both ears with her hands, rolled onto her side, and pushed her head beneath a mound of coins.
Barjuchne groaned. She rolled the other way. Schmand fell off and then climbed back up the gold, continuing the attack.
"KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF OF MY DRAGON!"
Schmand had spotted Blibli. The slime princess was oozing toward them across the gold with her usual cheerful momentum. Schmand batted her fists uselessly in the air toward the approaching slime.
Blibli stopped. She looked, staring quizzically. Then she beamed and formed two pseudopods and began copying the motion, waving them in the air in the same pattern, her googly eyes wide with delight.
She thought they were playing.
The two princesses got into a slap fight.
"I will destroy you! I am the royal princess of—!"
Barjuchne planted herself between them, one arm extended toward each, her hands pressed flat against Schmand and Blibli, respectively. Schmand continued batting at the air from behind Barjuchne's arm, her voice like the scream of a revenant haunting the dungeon. Blibli continued copying her from behind the other, laughing with joy in her heart.
The dragon could only stare into the void.
"I'm going to have you eat that incessant countess," Schmand said, walking beside the dragon with a rather aggressive proximity. "I hate her. Who does she think she is? With her stupid face and her stupid opinions, I want you to fly down there and burn her estate to the ground. Not with her in it, obviously. Well. Maybe with her in it. I haven't decided."
Barjuchne stared into the middle distance. Her eyes had taken on a quality that could be described as belonging to something desperate for escape, but that has accepted that escape is not possible.
"HEY! LISTEN TO ME!"
Something grabbed Barjuchne's arm and shook it. The dragon's eyes stayed fixed on nothing. Her expression had passed through irritation and exhaustion and arrived somewhere on the other side, a flat, unblinking stare that processed input without responding to it.
"YOU'D BETTER LISTEN TO ME! OR I'M GOING TO SCREAM!"
Barjuchne sat on a stone bench that had not been there before she sat on it, making it on the fly with her ability to manipulate the dungeon’s stone. Schmand stood in front of her, her fists balled, her face red, her entire body vibrating. Her cheeks began to puff out as she held her breath.
Schmand lifted her head.
"AAAAAH!"
The shriek came from somewhere deep and, somehow, sustainable. Despite her size, the girl had lungs that would give Barjuchne’s a run for their money. The sound hit the stone walls and came back unchanged and hit them again.
Barjuchne's eye twitched.
Then, the impossible happened. The dragon broke. "I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!"
Barjuchne's voice came out in a full draconic roar that shook the corridor walls and sent small rocks falling from the ceiling. She grabbed the still-screaming Schmand by the collar and lifted her into the air with one hand, the princess's feet dangling, her mouth still open as she flailed around with fists and feet.
The nation's capital was not prepared.
Guards ran in every direction along the city walls, their armor clanking, their shouts overlapping into meaningless noise. Signal horns blared from the watchtowers, each one trying to announce something different, the combined effect being a general declaration that something was happening and nobody knew what to do about it.
The grand doors of the royal castle's throne room were removed from their hinges by the impact of something hitting them from the outside at speed.
Panting for breath, Barjuchne stood in the doorway with one foot still raised from the kick, her hair disheveled, her scales catching the light from the hall behind her. Royal guards lay scattered across the marble floor of the entrance hall in various positions of unconsciousness and regret.
In her right hand, held up in the air, was Schmand.
"I’VE HAD ENOUGH!”" Barjuchne yelled, stepping into the throne room.
Her foot hit the freshly mopped marble and went sideways. She caught herself, barely, her arms pinwheeling, Schmand swinging in her grip and going out of her way to vocalise it as always. The maid who had been mopping pressed herself against the wall with her bucket.
Barjuchne looked at her. She was cute. "Hey there. You want a new job?"
"I SAID PUT ME DOWN!"
"Quiet!" Barjuchne snapped at Schmand.
Schmand screamed at her.
Barjuchne screamed back.
They stood in the entrance of the throne room, screaming directly into each other's faces. Both of them seem to have subconsciously decided that the winner of this interaction would be whoever had the most air in their lungs.
The king sat on his throne at the far end of the room.
"What the hell is this?!" Barjuchne shouted, turning to face him.
"GUARDS!" the king shouted.
Two guards charged from either side of the throne, their weapons drawn, their boots striking the marble in synchronized steps.
Barjuchne threw Schmand straight up into the air.
The princess went up, tumbling, her shriek dopplering as she rose up high enough to nearly crash into the grand, vaulted ceilings of the palace court. Barjuchne stepped forward, met the first guard with a fist to the chest, pivoted, and caught the second with a backhand across the shoulder. Both of them left the ground. Both of them slid across the marble and through the open doors behind the throne, the sound of their armor hitting the far wall arriving a second later.
Schmand came down. Barjuchne caught her without looking.
"ARE YOU INSANE?!" Schmand shrieked. "MY BLOOD IS MRFF—!"
Barjuchne clamped her hand over Schmand's mouth, muffling it firmly. She walked toward the throne.
"You," she said to the king, with something close to hatred in her heart. It was an exhaustion so pervasive that it bordered anger.
"Dragon," said the king. He sat upright on his throne, his jaw set, his hands gripping the armrests. "Release my daughter. Is it not enough that you have stolen my people?"
"Do you have any others?" Barjuchne asked. "Does she have a sister? A cousin? I want to trade this one in for a better model."
Suddenly, Barjuchne let out a sharp hiss and yanked her hand away. Schmand had bitten her.
"HOW DARE YOU?! I'LL—"
Barjuchne dropped her.
Schmand hit the marble floor on her rear with a sound that was more dignity than injury. Barjuchne walked past her toward the throne.
"Look," said the dragon, doing her best to remain reasonable. She stopped in the center of the room and pressed both hands against her chest. "I'm a simple creature. I just want to live in my mountain in peace, surrounded by unfathomable amounts of gold and beautiful princesses. That's all. I don't care about your stupid kingdom or whatever. But this?” she pointed back at Schmand. “This isn't working."
"HOW DARE YOU?!" The shriek came from behind her, the words uttered often enough that Barjuche was starting to become able to just filter them out as background noise.
What she couldn’t filter out was the physical sensation. Barjuchne felt the hands on her tail first. Then the teeth.
Schmand had taken her tail in both hands and sunk her teeth into it with full force. Frankly, it hurt.
Barjuchne let out a sound that was not a roar and not a scream but something between the two, a high-pitched yelp that she would later deny having produced. She flailed, shaking her tail, trying to dislodge the princess who had locked her jaw around the leathery extension like a viper.
Schmand held on, swaying through the air as the dragon spun, trying to shake her off.
Barjuchne stumbled. The mopped marble offered no cooperation. Her feet went in opposite directions, and she caught herself, lost it, and caught it again. She yanked Schmand free by the back of her dress and the momentum sent her sideways.
The dragon hit the altar.
What looked like an ancient reliquary altar stood against the right wall of the throne room, its stone darkened with age. On it sat a dark iron bell. Cracked from crown to base, the metal held together by rust and time alone.
The impact of Barjuchne's shoulder against the altar sent a vibration through the stone. The bell wobbled.
The room went silent.
Everyone watched. The king. The remaining courtiers. The maid with her bucket. Schmand on the floor. All of them watched the bell rock on the altar, the crack along its face visible in the light, the iron shifting back and forth.
Sitting on the floor, Barjuchne looked up at the bell.
It wobbled itself out and then settled. She looked at it for a long moment and then she sighed.
The fastenings broke.
Slanting off of the altar, the bell fell. It hit the altar's stone surface and rang.
The sound was a single note. It should have been the sound of cracked iron hitting rock, a mundane, finite thing, the kind of noise that happens once and ends.
It was not that.
The note left the bell and went outward. It passed through the throne room walls without slowing. It passed through the castle's outer walls and into the city. It passed through the city and into the ground, and the ground carried it further, through the fields and the forests and the rivers and the mountains, through the borders of nations and the floors of oceans, through the bedrock beneath everything that stood above it.
The sound did not stop at distance. It traveled, and everywhere it reached, it did the same thing. It rattled the bones of people who heard it. It pressed against their chests and vibrated in their hearts and made them stop whatever they were doing and look in the direction it came from, a shared direction, a single point of origin that every living person on the planet could identify without being told.
Kings in distant capitals stopped mid-sentence. Emperors set down their pipes. Priests in the middle of prayer went quiet. Farmers in fields straightened up. Soldiers on marches halted. Sailors on ships turned toward the same horizon.
Every one of them heard the same note, felt the same vibration, and knew without explanation that something had happened that was not ordinary.
Like a bomb going off, the throne room went white. Noise and anarchy filled the air, but it wasn’t that of the bell or of an explosion. It was a fervent, zealous, angelic roaring. A thousand voices sang out in unison, and behind them were endless thousands more. A spiral of sounds came from everywhere that has ever existed, from any time and any place and unified into a single rising cylinder of song, like the choir of God itself had begun a harmony.
Fighting the blinding light, Barjuchne's eyes widened at what they saw.
The brightness was total and sourceless, filling the space without direction or origin, and in the center of it, something was taking shape.
A silhouette, dark against the light, manifesting from nothing. Shoulders. A head. The outline of a form that had not been in the room a moment before and was now becoming increasingly, undeniably present.
The hero.