Chapter 34: Home At Last (Patreon)

I had never really explored the area beneath my mountain. I’d seen it from the air plenty of times, but I was always going somewhere or looking forward to coming home, and had never taken the time to get low and look around. I probably should have, but hindsight is easy.

The land rose slowly here, and the forest climbed high into the hills. The farther I got from the coast the less leafy trees there were, and by the time I was getting properly high most of the trees were low spruce- or fir-like trees, mixed with somewhat taller ones with bare stems, like small pines. The cool night air smelled wonderful, but there were some scents that made me wary. Besides the various scents I thought of as prey, I smelled bear, and something else that made me think of predators – wolves, maybe. Maybe the prey-predator thing had something to do with diet? That would make sense. Regardless, the scent of predators was triggering something inside me, a deep seated indignation that they had chosen the foot of my mountain to hunt. It was a feeling much like having a harmless bug in your home. They didn’t actually affect me, but I knew that they were there, and I wanted them gone!

I had a feeling that this was going to bug me until I did something about it, but enforcing my territorial rights could wait. The important thing was that I also smelled people. I had become very familiar with the smell of humans who hadn’t been able to wash as frequently as they might have liked to. It was… distinct.

Anywhere else I would have avoided them, but so close to home I needed to know what was going on.

I was no bloodhound, so the fact that I smelled them in the still air meant that they must be close. I couldn’t smell any smoke, thought that might just mean that whoever it was had the same idea as Herald and didn’t want to draw any attention. It took some sniffing around, but I could usually tell when something was to the right or left of me, and I found them.

It looked like something had taken a chunk out of the mountain, leaving a deep, square, downward sloping cut in the naked rock. Trees grew almost all the way up to the stone, though, and it would have been hard to spot from above if you didn’t know what you were looking for. In this cut a party had set up a pretty nice little camp. Three large tents surrounded the cold fireplace, where a man with a bushy moustache sat guard, looking into the darkness of the forest. Some tools were stacked neatly between two of the tents, mostly picks and shovels, and two mules and two fine-looking horses slept by a tree.

I wondered if the man could actually see anything, but I kept hidden and silent just in case as I circled the camp, shifting through the shadows when there was no good cover. There was the beginning of a path worn into the forest floor leading from the camp deeper into the cut, and I followed it down, curious what I might find.

Whoever they were, they had been busy. I wasn’t sure how long they’d been there, but judging by their smell and how much dirt they’d shifted it must have been several days. At the very point of the cut they had dug a deep, wide hole, with some rough steps packed into the dirt on the camp side. They had had to fell a tree to do so, which lay farther up the slope, its roots dug up and left next to it.

Judging by how clean the stone was they must have brushed or washed away any dirt stuck to the rock. And at the bottom of the hole, where the two faces of the cut met, I could see the perfectly straight-angled top corner of a depression cut into the stone.

I leaned down, curious to see what they had dug out here, and my breath caught. The humans had cleared away the dirt, leaving an empty space between the stone and the dirt about a foot – see, I was practising – high and just as wide. At the back of that space was a flat stone surface, and on the surface was, just barely visible, two lines of magical glow, at a straight angle.

I knew what they had found. I had no idea if that was what they’d been looking for, or if they’d have any idea what they were looking at when they dug it out, but it was clear to me. Here, on my doorstep, almost under my nose, so to speak, was another gate into the mountain. It had been buried for who knew how long, and here were a group of humans digging it out.

I had to get back to my cave, for now. The draw was strong, and I had to check on my hoard. But once I had done that, I knew what I was doing the next couple of days.

*****

Getting up to the cave was both easier and harder than I’d expected. It was easier in that I could go shadow and move up the side of the mountain with not much effort. It was steep, but it wasn’t a sheer, vertical face, and I think I would have been able to climb it as a human, and possibly even as I was. It was way harder because my cave was, at my estimate, several hundred metres up, and at a few metres at a time I didn’t have a chance in hell to reach it before dawn. That meant that after climbing for a few hours I had to spend the rest of the night looking for somewhere I could properly settle in and rest while waiting for darkness to fall again.

This was also by far the longest that I had stayed in shadow form, and I felt it. It clearly used energy of some kind, which must have been recharged by plain old calories because by the time I found a crevice wide enough to settle into I was getting peckish. Besides that it was mentally tiring. I needed to maintain a certain level of focus to stay as a shadow, and now I felt like I’d pulled another all-nighter. Or all-dayer, since I’d slept away the day and been up at night.

Clearly I was not going to be able to do this regularly, not unless I could plan for it. For now, though, I had no choice. I’d just have to cut my stay in the cave shorter than I would have liked. I’d check on my hoard, get a good day’s sleep down there, and then I’d go hunting. Goats, I thought. The high mountain passes were closer to my cave than the forest was, after all, and the humans digging at the foot of the mountain could wait.

My crack in the mountain was definitely in the top three least comfortable places I had ever slept, but I managed. It was beaten only by the spots I’d chosen to pass out after a couple of particularly drunk nights. In those cases I blamed bad judgement, or friends who hadn’t been mean enough to keep me moving. In this case I could only blame my own bad planning.

After sleeping away a restless day I felt a little better. I reached my cave faster than I’d expected, only taking about an hour from the crevice to the ledge, and when I came back together on the dirt and sparse grass I felt quite pleased with myself. I’d made one dumb mistake by not paying attention to what was in front of me, and it had cost me a week. But I had made it back, without my wings, using my feet, my sense of direction, and my magic. There was nothing wrong in feeling proud of that.

I looked out across the forest, trying to see where I’d come from. Far in the distance was Karakan on the coast, and following north of that the forest began. I couldn’t actually see the edge of the forest, but I could guess where it was. The sea was also invisible, even with the moonlight, but my imagination was enough at the moment.

Having appreciated myself and my achievement enough, I wasted no more time making my way down, following the pull of my hoard. Sliding through the narrow crevice was second nature now, not even comparable to two weeks ago, and then I was in. The first thing I saw, of course, was the pit, but I had no time for that and the boatload of bad vibes it brought.

I turned around and I could see my hoard, and smell it, and a grinding anxiety that I had only barely been aware of vanished. My hoard was there, and whole, and safe.

“Only the girl is missing,” the dragon whispered.

“Yeah,” I answered quietly. I ran my hands over my treasures, spreading the coins a little on the ground, then lay down and relaxed completely for the first time in days. A low, slow rumble started in my chest, completely unconscious but not unwelcome. It felt nice. Soothing, even if I was the one doing it.

A little nap would be nice, I thought. I deserved that after what I’d done. Just a little one.

My eyes snapped open. Only the girl is missing? Had I actually heard that?

Nah, just my sleepy brain playing tricks on me. I closed my eyes again, and drifted off.

*****

I woke up feeling rested, whole, and absolutely starved. That had been some nap! Or, I admitted to myself, it had probably been far more than just a nap. I got to my feet slowly, not wanting to leave my treasure but knowing that if I didn’t go find some food soon I might do something unfortunate.

As I stretched I found that a lot of my aches and pains were gone. My chest wound and my side felt fine, and the ache that had built in my feet over the days was gone. Even my wing had barely a twinge, though I’d had enough mandatory seminars on sports medicine – and personal experience – to know that I shouldn’t rush an injured joint. Other than my stomach I felt pretty good!

The dragon was happy about being home, but the hunger made her very cranky. She, of course, figured that we should just go and eat whoever was on guard at the humans’ camp, assuming they were still there. I had other plans.

It was early in the night when I left the cave. I wondered if I had sensed that somehow, and that was why I’d woken up. Nearby there was a plateau from where I could walk to the mountain spring that I’d found in my first few days here, and climbing across to it only took about twenty minutes. From there it was a short walk to the spring. There I filled up on water. Then I started sniffing.

There was a herd of mountain goats that lived here. I’d tried hunting them when I was new to the whole “dragon” thing, but I never caught one until I found one that was injured and couldn’t run away from me. Now I was a little more experienced and a little more comfortable in my own skin, and I’d been practising thinking like a dragon. I was going to use all my tools, and I was sure that I wouldn’t have a problem. Assuming that I could find them, that is.

That’s where the spring came in. I had been thirsty, sure, but the goats also used it, and they were smelly. It didn’t take me long to pick up their scent, and then it was just a matter of following my nose.

Again, I was not and have never been a bloodhound. It wasn’t quite as straightforward as finding a scent and following it straight to them. I had to go all over the place, losing the scent and backtracking, realising that the herd must have stopped somewhere and then turned back, and getting way too close to way too many piles of goat crap. But in the end I found them. It took two or three hours, but there was plenty of night left.

They weren’t all sleeping like I’d expected. Most of them were huddled up together under a rock overhang, but some were walking around, munching on scraggly grass and bushes and apparently not caring at all that it was the middle of the night. Some kind of guarding instinct, perhaps? Whatever the reason, it was lucky for me.

Having some of them separated from the herd made things easier. It meant that I didn’t have to grab one from the middle of their huddle, which might have sent the rest running off in a panic. Instead I looked over the loners and picked a smallish one that looked a little rough around the edges. That’s what predators were supposed to do, right? Pick off the sick and the old, so that the herd stays healthy? Well, these were pretty much my goats, and I wanted there to be a healthy herd of mountain goats here for as long as I stuck around.

I crept up on the old girl carefully, freezing when one of the other goats stopped and looked in my direction. It must not have seen me, and I continued as it went back to eating. Then I waited, watching my target until she got in a good position. My patience paid off as she strolled behind a large boulder, where none of the others would be able to see her.

The last time I had hunted goats they had avoided me easily, even though I could fly. This time, I wasn’t going to give her a chance. Instead of sneaking up on her I melted into the dark, flowing around the boulder invisible and without a sound. I became solid right behind her, and she only knew that something was wrong when I lunged for her neck.

That was a bit of a mistake. Mountain goats have much stronger necks than a rabbit, and my plan of biting through it failed. Lesson learned. Things got noisy. I did get a great grip though, which I took advantage of by leaping onto her back and using my weight to bring her down. From there I shifted my bite to her throat, which cut off the screaming.

After that it was just a matter of waiting. I was too strong for the old goat to get loose, and with my jaws clamping down on its throat almost all the way to the spine it quickly went unconscious. I heard some worried mewing from the herd, but nothing that sounded like a panicked rush. Things had gone well.

As I lay there, waiting for my prey to expire, I felt just a tiny bit bad. Nothing like the first time I’d killed, though. I’d gotten used to killing animals faster than I would have expected, and that fact made me relieved more than anything else. I needed to eat. It was as simple as that, and if I could not feel terrible every time I got a meal, I wouldn’t question it.

Once I was sure that the goat was well and truly dead it was time for the second part of my plan. I didn’t just dig in. Instead, I got up and started dragging my kill back towards the plateau near my cave. Ideally I would have liked to bring it to the ledge, but this would have to do. The goat was heavy and my neck didn’t appreciate the weight, but I got it there, leaving a trail of blood and fur behind me. Only there, close to home, did I eat.

And then, after eating enough that I wasn’t hungry anymore, I stopped. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done. The dragon was outraged, not seeming to understand why there was no more meat going down our gullet. When we fed or fought the dragon became basically feral, and so did I. Unless, of course, I resisted consciously like I had done now.

“Food!” the dragon roared in my mind. All my instincts told me to let go and gorge myself, but I stayed strong. The point here was to see if I could eat enough to feel sated, without going into a coma for the next several days. Besides, the air was much cooler up here and I hoped that the goat would keep for a little while. If not, well… I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but I was pretty sure that the dragon, and my body, could handle slightly spoiled meat.

With my stomach full but not filled to bursting, and against the angry protests of the dragon, I crossed back to the cave. Then I went back to my hoard, laid down happily, and went back to sleep.

*****

When I woke up I was hungry again, and my wing felt as good as new.

Note and a question: So, I wanted to introduce another reason for a dragon to collect and maintain a large hoard. Not only because it makes them stronger, but because it can literally keep them alive. What do you think?