Chapter 61: Of the Past
The descent to the bottom of the mountain took its time.
They went through the new gates, dozens of them, every one fortified and guarded. Rows of dragon clan goblins stood at attention as the procession passed, spears vertical, heads bowed at the passage of the dragon queen. The gates had been installed days ago, in a rush of construction that followed the discovery, each one a bottleneck of defensive architecture designed to slow anything coming up from below. Goblins worked the mechanisms. Lizardmen held the flanks.
As if quarantining a deadly plague, the mountain's interior had been rearranged around a single principle: nothing gets up from down there.
Goblin shamans worked between the gateposts, chanting in low, rolling voices, painting sigils onto the walls with brushes loaded in white paint and something darker. Barjuchne had no idea what any of it meant. Rou-ya had told her it was warding against spirits.
The twin saintess priestesses walked at her flanks.
"There is a great evil here," said one of them.
"A thing that craves," said the other.
They looked at each other. The identical faces turned in profile.
"It is in the air of this place."
"It resides in the stone."
Behind them, the procession marched. Priestesses and priests of the Holy Church, dozens of them, walking in ordered ranks, escorted by holy knights in consecrated armour. These were the most divine people of the nation, if not the world, and they had answered the dragon's request without hesitation.
Barjuchne was not taking any chances.
They passed the final gate. A team of dragon clan worked a metal mechanism the size of a man-of-war’s anchor, and the door it moved opened so slowly that its weight dug grooves into the mountain bedrock on the way, the stone screaming in a low, grinding register.
Cold air came through the widening gap, carrying the smell of the older dark, as the goblins called it.
"Ooh, I'm going to dig up an ancient ungodly grave site right below where I live," mumbled Barjuchne, in a high-pitched, parroting voice to herself. "Ooh, I'm going to unleash an ancient evil so I can write a field report that nobody will ever read."
The dragongrave opened in front of them.
It was a cavern beyond scale. The lanterns they had brought burnt at their brightest and found no walls and no ceiling, the black eating the light whole. Rising out of that dark, visible now in pieces as they moved deeper were the bones.
Massive. Ribcages like cathedral arches. A skull bigger than a hillfort, its fangs individually taller than the gate they had come through. Even half-embedded in stone, the frame of the thing communicated a size that had no business existing.
Barjuchne stood in front of the skeleton of her predecessor and looked up at it.
"Please do not be angry," said one saintess.
"When you are upset, it makes me upset, because I think it was my fault," said the other.
They turned their heads to look at her.
"I'm not angry," said Barjuchne. "I'm disappointed."
They stared at her.
Seeing the expressions, she went on quickly. "Not in you two. You're both perfect."
The twins stared. She stared back, slowly turning her head, her eyes never leaving them as they watched her like two owls, unblinking, identical, waiting for instructions or clarity or possibly nothing at all.
Barjuchne lifted a claw to each of their foreheads and gently closed their eyes, one at a time. The eyelids came down. They opened again, the forced blink completed.
"Good enough for me, at least." She nodded once. "Light it up."
The saintesses raised their hands. Holy magic gathered at their fingertips and then left them, and the cavern lit up.
The wave of light rolled outward, covering the darkness entirely, the pale gold of it chasing shadows back across bone and stone. The cavern showed itself.
Somewhere in the vast space, there was a hiss, brief, as if something thin had burnt away in the light.
Barjuchne stepped inside and felt the tingle of energy on her scales.
This place was deeply magical. The air was nearly electric, dense with something old, the ambient pressure of a million devoured souls still decaying upward through the rock. She stood there, looking up at the bones of her predecessor.
They were massive, larger than her largest form. If she took the leviathan shape here, she would look like a juvenile standing next to him.
Something in her core growled.
An animalistic rivalry. At a corpse. Because it stood in her territory, an intruder, even in death. Her lip pulled back from her teeth before she caught herself, the sound rumbling out of her chest into the dark at the offender of her beliefs.
Not even because it was here, where she lived. Worse. It had done something she couldn't ever forgive.
"Okay," said Barjuchne. She looked back at them. "Clear it out."
The holy procession set to work.
Led by the saintesses, they formed an organised circle and performed the rites to sanctify the space, holy chants rolling in overlapping lines, the knights standing perimeter with drawn weapons as if spirits and revenants of the angered dead might rise at any second.
Barjuchne handled the rest herself, taking the fabric roll a priestess handed to her.
She used her dungeon reshaping ability, and the stone obeyed her. It receded from the bones in slow, careful walls, uncovering the skeleton piece by piece, the rock parting like soil around a buried root. She worked her way upward along the neck, the reshaped stone opening paths where her hands could not, until she reached the first golden cage.
It hung from a horn the size of a mountain spire, the metal tarnished dark, the bars still holding their shape after two hundred years.
She looked inside.
A heap of bones lay on the cage floor, wrapped in cloth so dry and papery it looked like a single breath would blow it away. A golden circlet sat loosely on a skull, tilted, fallen half onto its side.
A princess of a former day and a former nation.
The dragon gripped the bars of the golden cage in both hands and bent them apart. The metal screamed and broke, and pieces of it fell down to the stones below, clattering noisily in the vast dark.
She opened the fabric roll. She laid it out flat on the reshaped stone, meticulously gathered the bones together with the circlet, and gently folded it closed.
After the bundle was tied off and full, Barjuchne stood there in silence, her hand on top of it and stared.
What a horrible thing.
Her clawed hand stroked across the fabric once, softly.
"You're mine now," she said quietly, taking the princess from her predecessor. “So go do whatever you want.”
She patted it once and then picked up the bundle. Barjuchne carried it back down, passing the others as a gust of wind moved through the tunnel, coming from somewhere in the depths, robes and hair billowing around it.
Barjuchne's double-lidded eyes flicked over, tracking the current. She saw a blur in it. Nothing identifiable.
She watched for a second longer. Then she went to the saintesses and set the bundle down in the centre of their holy circle.
"Do your thing."
She rose and looked around. Golden glints caught her eye everywhere, embedded in the mountain, the glinting edges of other cages still holding others. There were more bodies to recover from the victims of the last dragon.
They would exhume all of them. Perform a ceremony for each. And then send the remains to the palaces of their families, if any families remain to receive them. Two hundred years late, but they would be buried at home.
Something touched her foot as she walked.
Barjuchne looked down. A broken, bent piece of gold from the cage she had just opened, fallen and rolled to rest. She picked it up, held it in her hands, and looked at it the glittering metal for a long moment.
Then she dropped it in disgust.
"Throw the gold into the magma," she ordered. "All of it."
She glanced back from the side of her eye at the saintesses, who looked her way.
"It's tainted."
Even she did not want this. The gold of the cages.
"Yes, Barjuchne," said both of the saintesses in unison as the holy circle behind them began performing the last rites over the retrieved bones.
The dragon girl walked by herself, deeper into the cavern.
Elsewhere, later.
Soil moved, thrown to the side, over and over.
Barjuchne dug. This time with her hands and claws, no dungeon magic, no reshaped stone. Her fingers in the dirt.
She was outside the dungeon, in the moonlight, out by the crater lake on the other side of the mountain. The wild slimes lived here. The water lay flat and silver in the night. It was cold.
Veliah sat nearby, watching, her knees pulled into her arms. She had been there for a while. She exhaled, the breath visible in the cold.
Barjuchne caught her breath, stood upright, and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist.
"I remember watching you do this before, already," said Veliah.
Barjuchne looked at her.
"I was standing by the cave, back when it was still just a cave," the elf went on, almost nostalgic. "And you were just out here digging holes. For all of those little dragon bones." She looked up toward the sky. "I think that's when I realised you weren't actually so scary."
Barjuchne returned to digging.
"You need help?"
"Thank you, no," replied Barjuchne, continuing. "I have to do it myself."
Veliah's ears drooped slightly. She watched the dragon work.
"You know it's not a generational debt," she said. "You have nothing to do with any of that. It's just old history."
Barjuchne continued scooping soil away. She did not answer. The hole deepened.
"...This has been a strange year," muttered Veliah.
"Tell me about it. Try dying and then waking up with scales and horns," said Barjuchne, finishing the sentence into the dark.
She looked at the hole, judged it, and climbed out of it. She knelt at its edge and took up a bundle.
These bones had come from inside the dragon's mouth, not from any cage.
They belonged to the princess of the imperial nation. The eastern princess, the one the beast had chosen as its bride, the one who had smashed its eggs and been swallowed for it. The one whose own family had disowned and disavowed her after her death, too shamed by the scandal to claim her remains, so that there was nowhere in the world left to send her. No palace. No family tomb.
Nothing.
Except this place, out in the open air, under the stars. It wasn’t much, but it was better than a cave.
Barjuchne laid the bones down into the grave together with a bent, old sword, the family blade that had been found fused to the remains, and began to rebury them.
Veliah sat there quietly, watching her. Then she let go of her knees and came over. She knelt down and started scooping dirt.
"Veliah," started Barjuchne.
"I let you dig the hole yourself," said the elf, not slowing. "I'm going to be helping you now with the easy part."
Her tone made it clear she wasn't afraid of her or accepting a denial of the offer. Barjuchne watched her for a moment, and then returned to gathering soil.
Later.
They lay outside by the lake once it was done, staring up at the night sky next to each other.
"So there really are other worlds?" asked Veliah, watching the stars.
"Yeah. I mean... I guess so," replied Barjuchne. She lifted her hand in front of her face and looked up through it at the night. "I don't really remember a lot, honestly. It's like... a lot of who I was just sort of got erased by this. I don't know. This new personality. That old place, that old person. It's just a blur now."
She thought about it for a moment while Veliah lay quietly.
"Actually, I don't know if that's true," she clarified. "Maybe this was just who I always was. And could never really be, before?"
Veliah rolled her head, looking at her for a second, then looked back up. She lifted her hand too, lying there beside her, and the two of them stared up through their fingers at the night sky, the stars weaving light through their digits.
"Can you tell me about it?" asked Veliah. "About what you remember from back then?"
Barjuchne stared through her fingers for a while. The light from the stars moved between her claws, thin and cold and constant.
Then it paled. More than it already was. Slightly, then noticeably, the whole sky dimming as if something vast had passed in front of it.
Something cold touched her hand, melting instantly from the heat of it.
Barjuchne and Veliah stared, watching as the first flakes of snow began to fall from above, drifting down through the starlight, landing in their hair, on their claws, on the fresh-turned soil of the grave beside them.
The season of winter was here.