Chapter 54: They Live Here
The midday hours had a sound of their own inside the mountain. The forges up in the eastern halls kept their steady rhythm, water ran somewhere far below through channels cut for it, and the warm draft rising from the deep levels met the cold air sliding in from the gate. Where the two currents crossed, the banners in the junction hung crooked and never settled. Goblin voices carried from three directions at once, none of them urgent, all of them busy.
Ead, Ei, and Blibli came down the main corridor together, talking over each other and laughing about something.
Ead had her journal clamped under one arm and her hat shoved back off her forehead. Ei walked beside her, all four hands in motion while she spoke, sketching the shape of some new tunnel into the air between them. Blibli oozed along at their feet, giggling at a joke only she had heard the whole of.
Rou-ya, Veliah, and Bruschetta passed them going the other way, each with a rolled fabric mat under one arm.
“It’ll be good for your health,” said Veliah, glancing back at Bruschetta, who brought up the rear with the expression of someone being marched to her own trial.
“Fine,” said Bruschetta. “If you think it will make Barjuchne happier with me.”
Rou-ya reached back without looking and patted her side, consolingly. Bruschetta did not look consoled.
A pair of goblins dragged a captured adventurer past them toward the prison level, the wizard’s heels cutting twin lines through the dust. He had been found in the lower storage halls with his pockets full of dungeon property.
“You be good, you’ll leave in a month,” said the goblin with the firmer grip, hauling the man along by his collar. “Be glad the great Dragon Queen is merciful.”
The wizard began to explain his understanding of his rights. The door to the cells closed on the explanation.
F.P. sat by herself on a rock at the junction and watched them all pass.
She had been there a while. She sat with her legs crossed and her hands folded over her knee, and the traffic of the mountain moved around her rock without stopping.
Nobody joined her. Nobody had thought to. Nobody ever did.
Until now.
“Half of them aren’t even real princesses.”
The annoyed voice came from below. Schmand had arrived at the base of the rock with her arms crossed and her chin lifted, glaring out at the corridor with the full force of royal displeasure.
F.P. looked down at the girl.
“It’s so annoying. Did you know that none of them have ever ruled a nation?” Schmand went on. “We’re the only ones, you and I. If you don’t count the Vildt girl, which I wouldn’t, since they don’t even have a kingdom anymore.” She sniffed. “Don’t even get me started on the goblin. The humiliation of it.”
F.P. looked at her for a moment. Then she looked away.
The truth of the matter was quieter than the girl’s complaint, and it sat heavier. F.P. did not have a kingdom anymore either, did she?
The fairy kingdom had been folded into the dragon’s logistics, its mushroom rings running tribute and patrols on schedules she had not herself ordered. The place where her old throne used to be was now a literal warehouse.
She stood further from her own power than she had been in three hundred years.
And in a way, she was not sure she cared about that anymore.
The realization had been sitting in her for some time, unlabeled. Hearing it laid out sideways in a spoiled complaint gave it edges.
F.P. rose from the rock and flew off without a word toward the deeper passages.
“Hey! Ugh, whatever,” came from behind her.
The heat thickened with every level she descended. Torchlight gave way to light-stones, light-stones gave way to the glow of the magma channels, and the guard posts doubled, then doubled again. Rows of armored goblins stood through the final approach, still and silent, the mountain’s most precious space beyond them.
F.P. passed between them without slowing. They bowed their heads as she flew passed. None of them moved to stop her.
The brooding chamber opened around her.
The island sat in its ring of slow magma, the moat painting everything in deep orange. Eggs rested in the warm hollows of the stone. There was one now for every princess, one each, and all of them were black and obsidian, cut from the same dark glass that armored the mountain. But there were traces of the mother in every shell. A thread of gold through one. A green shimmer along the curve of another. A crown of ridges on a third, patterned and deliberate.
Veliah’s egg sat at the center of it all, and it was bound to hatch any day now. The whole mountain knew it. The question of what exactly it would contain sat on everyone’s mind in the meantime.
Would it be a child? Or a thing? A monster?
Even F.P. did not know. The old dragon, the one who had begun all of this two centuries ago, had never been capable of laying eggs. There was no history to consult. No records, no precedent, no elder to ask. Whatever broke open these shells, it would be the first of its kind in the world.
In the darkest corner, past the reach of the magma’s light, sat a single egg that was hers.
F.P. flew to it and settled onto the alcove beside the shell. It was all by itself, far from the rest.
She sat there quietly for a while. She looked around the chamber, at the glow of the other eggs. Then she leaned in, pressed the side of her head against the black shell, and listened.
Silence. Only her own heartbeat was in her ear.
She closed her eyes.
Then, a sensation. A thump. Faint, muffled through the obsidian, but unmistakable. Something inside had moved. Something inside had responded to the knocking of her heart.
F.P. smiled.
It was a rare thing for her, a genuine smile, unguarded, and there was no one present to see it.
The truth, the one she had never said aloud and did not intend to, was simple. She did not care what it was. Child, thing, monster. It had come from her, so it wouldn’t matter what shape it took.
That was not a frightening thought. It was the only comfortable one she had.
F.P. opened her eyes, seeing the glowing fungus growing along the walls and ceiling of the chamber.
“We need to talk,” said F.P.
The hoard room held its evening quiet, gold light pooling in the hollows of the treasure. Barjuchne lay along the slope of it with a coin stack in one claw, partway through an inventory. She looked up.
The dragon nodded her head to the maid next to her, who silently rose to her feet and got up, her frilled dress soaked through with sweat from top to bottom. Her waterlogged shoes squelching, the maid walked off.
“About what?” Barjuchne set the stack down. “Let me guess. You have another secret?” Her eyes narrowed, lazy and amused. “We talked about this, F.P.”
F.P. studied her for a moment. Then she looked away.
“It is my nature,” said the princess. “No different from the way all of this is yours.” She crossed her arms and looked out over the treasure, then back at the leaving woman. F.P. waited until the maid was gone, then looked back at Barjuchne. “You are filled with the sins of lust and greed, and we are expected to simply accept that. But I am also a wicked thing by blood. Even if I play nice, that is only because I... enjoy you.”
The dragon’s claw came up, unhurried. The tip of it settled beneath the fairy’s chin and turned her head back around.
They stared at each other.
“But do not think that I am something to be rehabilitated,” said the fairy, proudly, even with the claw at her chin. “I hurt and killed hundreds in pursuit of nothing but my own leisure. I do not have a morsel of regret about either.”
The claw stayed where it was. Barjuchne tilted her head, patiently waiting for F.P. to get where she was going.
“And even after you defeated me and forced me to bend the knee, I continued my work here. Because that is what I do. I am cruel by design. I aim only for what I want, and I do so to this day with no regard for what you or anyone else in this mountain desires.”
F.P. took hold of the claw and pushed it aside. She held onto it, though.
Barjuchne studied her for a moment.
“I see,” replied the dragon, her voice not affected. “So why are you telling me this?” she asked. “That defeats the point of a secret you could use to betray me with, my cruel little treasure.”
F.P., blushing, cleared her throat and then reformed her face.
“I am telling you this,” began F.P., annoyed, “because I feel that this is what will bring me what I want.” She lifted her chin. “Because what I want has changed since my arrival, then."
The dragon’s tail swept slowly from side to side behind her, knocking loose coins down the slope.
“And what exactly do you want, F.P.?” asked Barjuchne, interested. “You wanted a castle. I built a fortress the world has never seen, for you to reside in as royalty. "You wanted to rule. I conquered a nation for you to govern.” The dragon’s eyes moved over her, possessive, missing nothing. “You wanted to be accepted. Even if you never said it. And I have given you a full share of my heart, no different from any other, not one grain less.”
The dragon’s chest rumbled low, and coins slid and rattled down the hill of treasure.
“You are mine.”
F.P. was quiet for a moment. Her wings buzzed once, softly.
“I want to tell you why I really began all of this,” said F.P., lifting her head again. “Long before you came to this world, reincarnator.”
Her grey eyes caught the red light of the dragon’s ire and held it.
“I want to tell you about where the rats live.”
Deep below them both, in a passage that had not existed that morning, stone gave way.
The wall collapsed inward with a rolling crunch. Ei shielded her face with two of her four arms while the dust rolled over her. Her tunnels had gone very deep now, deeper than the dungeon’s charts and maps.
She lowered her arms.
Ead stood at her shoulder with her lantern raised and her journal open, pencil frozen mid-word. The two of them exchanged a glance.
Blibli peeked out from inside the brim of Ead’s hat, her googly eyes swiveling toward the gap in the wall. “See! I told you there was a big hole!” said the slime princess.
Beyond the broken wall, the lantern light fell into a cavern so wide it never even came close to finding the far side. Rock hung down in curtains from a ceiling lost to shadow. And there, sunk into the body of the mountain itself, lay a skull.
It was enormous.
A single tooth stood taller than the tunnel they had cut to reach it. The sockets of its eyes were caverns of their own, deep enough to swallow the passage of eyesight. Stone had grown around it and through it, and still it held its shape, waiting in the dark with its mouth open.
Ead’s pencil had stopped moving.
Then all three of them screamed.
A flood of rats poured out of the skull’s shadow and through the gap in the wall, thousands upon thousands of them, a grey tide that broke around their boots and kept coming, squealing, streaming, endless. Ei swatted at the air with all four hands. Ead scrambled backward up the tunnel, shrieking. Blibli cheered.
The rats ran on past them, scattering into the deep tunnels of the mountain.