Throne of Dragons

“She will not survive,” Kleos said. “She has no strength to withstand the change.”

He said that like he was observing an animal in the wild, not looking down over the body of a young woman who had supposedly been there on the island with him for years. It wasn’t that there was no pity there, but there seemed to be something resigned about it, something that merely accepted the inevitability of what was to come.

“No,” Nerra said. “You have to help her. You have to do something.”

It was too late, though. Nerra could see the way that Lina’s flesh was pulling itself apart, see the great tears in it now. For a moment, a rent appeared in her flesh that seemed to show Nerra the inner workings of her body, even the beating of her heart, frantic and fluttering, struggling to keep up.

Then that heart stopped.

“No,” Nerra said, looking away. “No.”

“It is a sad moment for us all,” Kleos said. “But you must remember that—”

“Don’t you dare say anything!” Nerra snapped back at him, pointing one accusing finger. “Don’t you dare! She was my friend, was kind and gentle, and you just stood there watching her die like even comfort was beyond you.”

“I have seen more death than you ever will,” Kleos said. There were tears in his eyes, but they were nothing compared to the ones in Nerra’s. “Do you think if I weep for all of them, it makes it any better? I’ll be here watching over this island long after the dragon sickness claims you!”

Yes, he would. He would be here, and Nerra… She looked back at the body of her friend, but she couldn’t bear to look for long. Not when the dragon sickness had taken her friend from her so brutally, and so utterly.

Nerra had thought she might have years here, thought she might be able to come to terms with it, as Lina seemed to have. Now, she had seen firsthand just how swiftly, and how brutally, the sickness could strike.

She knew what she had to do. Even the death Kleos had warned about the waters bringing was better than this.

***

Nerra walked across the island, the heat bearing down on her. It seemed to grow as she crossed the slopes of the volcano, walking without stopping, knowing that if she stopped, she might lose her nerve to do this.

She had to do this, because the alternative was just sitting and waiting for death. All her life, Nerra had tried to learn about the world, tried to help and heal others. She couldn’t accept a world where death could just snatch at her at any moment.

The way was treacherous beneath her feet. Nerra found her footing giving way every few steps, the rocky slopes of the mountainside uneven, the slope itself steep enough that it was hard to think of the way she was walking as a path.

Yet there was a path, leveled into the slope, only broken here and there by fallen rocks, some larger than Nerra herself. The sight of them made Nerra look up the slope, and it was that which saved her. She saw a tumble of rocks heading down toward her, each large enough to easily kill her if it struck her. She ducked out of the way just in time, watching the boulders roll on past.

She kept going, yet one thing seemed determined to stop her: a pain that started as a dull ache inside her, but seemed to grow with every step. Strangely, it receded when Nerra backed away a pace or two, but grew again when she kept going, almost as if there was something there pushing her back, trying to keep her from her destination.

Nerra didn’t stop though, just gritted her teeth and kept going.

The pain built, and built, so that it felt as though every part of her was pulling in a different direction. The world seemed to swim in front of her eyes, and her body seemed to long for her to stop. Nerra stared at her arms, fully expecting them to be twisted and misshapen, the way Lina’s had been. No, though, this wasn’t the scale sickness killing her; this was a purer kind of pain that had nothing to do with it, and everything to do with whatever force was trying to keep her back.

Nerra fought her way on, step by step, stride by stride. On this side of the volcano, there were live patches of lava, forming pools crossed by basalt spans that looked as though they might fall away at any moment. She kept going past them, crying out with agony now, but not stopping.

She saw it then, round a bend in the track, a structure of black pillars that seemed to have an impossibly green space within, while all around it was empty rock. At the heart of that was a circle of more black stone, from which water bubbled up in a fountain, falling into a pool around it.

With that target in mind, Nerra forced her way forward, eyes on the pool. One step, then another, getting closer to the pillars with each one. Her hand found the black stone there…

Instantly, the pain vanished, leaving Nerra to stumble forward onto the grass around the fountain. She knelt there for a moment, looking around, and that was when she saw the bones. They lay scattered in piles around the fountain, bleached white by the sun but otherwise untouched. They had to be those who had come to the fountain before, the ones who had been so sure they would survive, the ones who had needed its cure so badly.

Nerra could feel the fear of that welling within her. She knew that the waters here might well kill her, could see the evidence all around her. Was she really arrogant enough to believe that she might survive the deadliness of the waters? Wasn’t it better just to turn back, to live out her life…

“No!” Nerra shouted, forcing herself on.

She didn’t dare to stop, instead crawling forward until she pulled herself up to the lip of the fountain, looking down into the waters that sprang up there. They were clear and deep, with no sign of anything within them other than the reflection of Nerra’s features. Nerra gasped as she saw them, and the way the scale mark had crept its way onto her features in the time that she’d been there. She touched a hand to it, imagining all the ways it might change her, all the horrors that it might inflict upon her flesh.

That gave Nerra the courage to do what she hadn’t been sure she would do, even now. She had no wish to end up like Lina, destroyed by her own body, or like one of the bestial things that Kleos put down with his blade. She wanted to be free of this sickness, free to go home. She wanted to see her sisters again.

Nerra dipped her hands into the water. It was warmer than she had thought it would be, although that might just be the effects of the volcano close by, with nothing magical about it at all. What if that was really all it was? A pool poisoned by the volcano’s minerals, with stories linked to it for so long that it still gave hope to the hopeless.

Even then, it would be better than the alternative.

Cupping her hands together, Nerra drank.

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