Chapter One hundred eighty-six (Patreon)

When Kaz opened his eyes to a scaly face and flickering tongue, he thought at first that Li had found him. Then his eyes focused, vision much clearer than it had been since they were damaged, and he realized that not only was this creature black, rather than gold with hints of other colors, but it was huge. Larger than huge.

In fact, as he struggled to scramble away from it, he discovered that it was so large that gleaming scaled coils were wrapped around him, holding him upright and almost completely still. Those coils tightened around him, and the head turned, an obsidian eye the size of his two fists considering him as if trying to decide if he was friend or meal.

A soft thrum went through the long body as it released him, scales sliding against each other with a soft susurration of sound. It took a moment to realize that it was a laugh, and he heard a voice in his mind as he was finally able to back away from the gargantuan serpent.

<ohhh, no, i won’t eat you, little one,> a distant voice said, seeming to shout at him from a great distance. <in fact, i find you quite captivating, and i only wish to speak to you for a very short while. your friends search for you, and the dragon is especially concerned. it’s difficult to block her completely, even for me, so tightly are you bound.>

Kaz stared around, seeing that they were in a huge, arching cavern. Unlike the caves he was used to, the walls here looked to be only partially stone. Some kind of long, fibrous filaments dangled overhead, and the ground beneath his paws was made of packed dirt. It smelled of dampness and the world outside the mountain, which was a mixture of a hundred kinds of vegetation, earth, and the small creatures who lurked in the shadows and rested beneath the trees.

He took a step back, and the long tail gave an impossibly fast flick, bumping him forward again. <careful, little one,> the snake hissed, and Kaz realized that the sibilant voice was only in his mind. His ears heard only scales, breathing, and a sound of water that was so familiar he’d barely noticed it.

Glancing behind him, he saw that there was a dark, deep lake. Unlike the lakes he’d seen before, however, its surface wasn’t as smooth as Lianhua’s mirror. Small, soft waves lapped at stones washed bare by the ceaseless motion, and far in the distance he could see a glimmer of the bright, clear light of the sun.

Kaz glanced back and forth between the great serpent and what he hoped was a way out, and the snake hissed another laugh. <go if you wish. it amused me to bring you here, but i have no interest in incurring your enmity, nor forcing you to stay. if you stay to speak for a moment, however, i will help you leave, and i assure you it will be far easier with my assistance. in fact, you will undoubtedly reach your friends more quickly by waiting.>

He drew in a long breath, his fingers just brushing the pouch still firmly tied to the sturdy belt Raff had loaned him. That was intact, at least, which was a very good thing, but… He touched his muzzle, where the darklenses had rested, and found that they were missing. That was one more thing he owed the large human, then.

Li? he thought, though he already knew it was useless. He could barely feel her as anything other than a faint wisp of fear and desperation hovering in the back of his mind. The tiny thread of ki that constantly hung between them, connecting their core and cycles, was little more than the width of a single hair.

“All right,” he said cautiously, his hand still resting on his pouch. He had never managed to get a new knife from Idla before they left the mountain, so all he had was the worn blade an old male kobold had given him during his journey with the humans. Still, he had spent most of his life with a knife in his hand, and it comforted him to know that it was there.

His own power was probably more useful, but the snake burned with so much black ki that he couldn’t even tell if it had a core, or how many of its dantians were open. He had to assume the answers were ‘yes’, and ‘all of them’, and he was certain that in spite of the fact that he had been confident in his own strength just a short while earlier, this creature was tens, if not hundreds of times stronger than he was.

<good,> the snake murmured, settling her head on a coiled loop of her own body. That still left it well above him, and he thought his head would fit in the pits between her dark eyes and her nostrils. <who are you, and where did you come from?>

“I’m Kaz,” he told her, debating only briefly before leaving off the name of his former tribe. “I come from the mountain.”

Her tongue flickered in and out, the split tips nearly brushing against his skin as if she was tasting him, but he could tell she was laughing again instead. <there are so many mountains, little kaz. which one?>

He scratched his ear thoughtfully, feeling a bit lost without Li to help him find the right memories. “Raff calls it Scarabus, I think, but Lianhua says it’s Shensheng.”

<raff and lianhua are the humans with the dragonling?>

Kaz nodded, opting not to mention Chi Yincang. The male had ways of not being noticed, and if this creature didn’t know he was there, that could only be good for Kaz and the others.

<i know the mountain of which you speak,> the snake said thoughtfully. <perhaps i will have to investigate it further.>

Feeling a bit bolder, Kaz said, “Who are you? Are you a… Divine Beast?” The serpent certainly seemed to match the description Lianhua had given him. She was powerful and intelligent, far more so than any of her kind he had seen before.

The tongue flickered again. <ssss-omething like that. so far as i know, i am the only one of my kind remaining, though i sense something in you that gives me hope that i may not be as alone as i believed.>

“Me?” Kaz asked, hearing his voice sheer sharply upward in disbelief. What could there possibly be about him that would make this great and terrible being take notice?

This time, the snake’s tongue tickled Kaz’s ear, the maw opening wide enough that he could see glistening fangs folded flat against the roof of her mouth. Each one was the size of his leg, and he swallowed hard, quivering beneath the touch of that deceptively fragile-seeming appendage.

<you, but also your dragon, and the bond between them. i think you have it in you to become… sss-omething truly amusing. for one like me, amusement is a rare and precious thing.> The black eyes turned, slit pupils only visible against the equally dark irises as they narrowed. <but you should go. I believe, however, that i will see you again.>

The huge, scaled head rose from her muscular coils, and the snake lunged forward, heading straight for Kaz. At the last moment, she slipped ever so slightly to the side, just bumping into him so when she began to slide into the water, he tumbled in along with her. He flailed, then settled into his usual simple paddle, hands and paws moving to keep him from sinking.

Something immense rose from beneath him, and Kaz thrashed, his fingers slipping along the snake’s broad scales until his claws caught in a crevice. The serpent flowed through the water, her sides brushing the tunnel through which they passed, and Kaz clung on as water attempted to drag him off the great beast’s back, while the tunnel walls tried just as hard to scrape him away.

In spite of the long distance between where they had been standing and the tiny speck of light that marked the way out, it took less than a minute to reach their goal. The snake slid through a great cave mouth, and Kaz flinched back from the light of the sun, but it didn’t try to burn out his eyes as it had done before. The glare was painful, but not unbearable, and when Li flew toward him, he was able to see her clearly.

The dragon looked pitifully small compared to the enormous serpent, but when she saw Kaz, she let out a roar that was far from her usual squawk. Water vapor poured from her mouth, but the black serpent didn’t even seem to notice as it settled around her head.

<be still, dragonling. your companion is well enough,> Kaz heard, though he was somehow aware that the great snake was only being polite by including him.

Kaz waved a shaky arm at the golden dragon, who whistled sharply and folded her wings, dropping toward him in a steep dive. He had to let go of his death grip on the black scale in order to catch her, and the impact knocked them both off the serpent’s back. They tumbled into the river, and the flow of the water would have carried them away again if the snake hadn’t wrapped a coil around them, lifting them into the air again.

The great body shuddered, a ripple traveling through it, carrying Kaz and Li - who was clutched in his arms - to the riverbank. They were deposited there with a soft squelch, and the snake turned away. Coil after coil of slick scales slid by as the terrible serpent headed for her home.

“What’s your name?” Kaz called after her, feeling much braver now that he was reunited with his friend.

A distant flicker of humor reached him. <you may call me heishe,> she said, then slid beneath the surface, somehow vanishing into the depths of the river.

Something snapped taut within Kaz as Heishe disappeared. His bond to Li came into focus just as his eyesight did. Li obviously felt it too, because she began to speak.

<Who was that?> the dragon demanded, leaning back so she could eye Kaz up and down. <Did she hurt you? Why did she take you?>

Kaz shrugged, gently stroking the agitated dragon’s head until she relaxed slightly. “I’m fine,” he told her. “She just wanted to know who I am, and where I came from.” Li eyed him dubiously, and he shrugged. “Seriously.”

Silently, he offered her his memories, and she examined them, turning them over and playing them back, fast and slow, until at last she seemed satisfied.

<You don’t think she made you forget anything, do you?> Li asked suspiciously. <Like Nucai did?>

Kaz frowned. That was a good question. Far too many beings seemed to be able to alter his mind and memories, with or without his knowledge. “How long was I gone?”

<I don’t know. A long time,> Li growled, but Kaz realized that neither of them had any way to know, other than their own subjective impressions. He had seen both ‘day’ and ‘night’ now, and knew they really were more than words applied to the time when a tribe was awake, as compared to the time when most of them rested. Would he only know the day was over when the sun vanished and the sky grew dark again?

Kaz shook his head, then looked around. “Where are Lianhua and the others?”

Li ducked her head. <They were slow, so I left them behind,> she admitted.

Concerned, Kaz stood, finding that he was already almost dry, thanks to his lack of fur and the heat of the sun. “How will we find them?”

The dragon turned to look down the length of the river. <They were following the water. If we go back that way, we should meet them. If you insist.>

Surprised at this last, Kaz looked down at where she rested in his embrace, her long neck stretched out against his bicep, and her tail wrapped three times around his opposite wrist. “You don’t want to?” he asked slowly, realizing that he hadn’t actually checked to see what she wanted.

Li’s ribs heaved in a deep sigh. <You promised Lianhua you would help her.>

“I also promised I would help you,” he said softly. “Can I not do both? If I have to choose, I will explain to Lianhua why I can’t go with her.”

There was a long silence. <No,> Li said, and he didn’t think it was as grudging as she made it sound. She, too, was curious about the human lands, and she liked Lianhua and the others, even though she didn’t want to admit it.

Kaz scratched at the base of one of the little horns on the back of her head. They had just shown up after the last time she shed her skin, and she still had a hard time scratching inside the little arch they formed. “We’ll find your family, Li. I haven’t forgotten. As soon as we get to the human city, we’ll start asking where to find other dragons.”

Li nodded, then rubbed her cheek against his arm, and the two of them stood, basking in warm sunlight and mutual affection, at least until Raff’s deep voice called Kaz’s name. They turned to see the human striding toward them, waving his hand, with Kyla perched atop his shoulders, and a gleaming pinkish fuergar on hers.