The Crucible of the Dragon God

and she was only going to get one chance at beating it.

There it was again, she thought, entering the cavern that opened out from the mine tunnel, a complex arrangement of giant hammers and blades, arranged vertically and horizontally, that completely lined the bridge crossing the chasm in the centre. It was no simple chasm, either. The rock walls flanking it had been carved into the shapes of giant dwarven faces whose roaring mouths randomly belched great fiery clouds of breath, hot enough to have singed the wood in the trap mechanisms over the years into hard, carbonised masses.

Kali couldn't help but admire the workmanship. The first time she'd had laid eyes on the construction she'd imagined it had once been named 'The Bridge of Doom', 'Chasm of Chaos' or 'Gauntlet of the Gods.' But she hadn't liked the sound of any of those — so instead she'd called it 'Dave.'

Like the earlier traps, Dave would once have been negotiable with relative ease, but the rot of years had left some of its components askew, others working faster or slower than they should, still others partly broken loose from their matching components and set into motion by the movement of the mechanisms around them. As if that were not bad enough, the bridge itself looked as rotten as hells, likely to collapse under foot anywhere and anytime. The whole thing was as unpredictable as hells. One wrong move and she was over the side. One small miscalculation and she would be crushed to death or sliced to pieces. There was absolutely no room for error.

Kali narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath, studying for a final time the patterns of movement in the trap. She flexed her bad leg and pinwheeled her arms, loosening up her muscles. And then she swallowed. And then she ran.

Kali roared as her feet slammed onto the first few slats of the bridge, bouncing forward immediately as she felt the aged wood creak and give beneath her weight. As she bounced, the first of the trap's death-dealing devices came at her.

Kali eyed the trajectory of the whirling blade as it span towards her and then actually ran towards it, flipping herself above and over the blade at the point metal and flesh would have met. The forward flip had to be timed slightly later than she would have liked — and she felt a sharp sting as the blade's edge sliced her thigh — but the delay was necessary for her to be able to meet the next of the bridge's dangers.

Righting herself, Kali landed on the upperside of a hammer that had just slammed down in her path and then balanced precariously on it as it began to rise. She did not let it take her all the way, instead she used its height to leap diagonally across the bridge so that she grabbed and clung onto a hammer rising on its other side. This, too, she rode until the very last second, allowing another blade to pass beneath her and then punching herself away from her perch as the hammer clicked in its mooring and slammed down.

She was between blades and hammers now but she didn't have a moment to rest. The instant she landed one of the dwarven heads belched fire towards where she was crouched. Kali didn't hesitate, snatching up a blade that had broken from its mechanism, she shored herself behind it, using it as a shield so that the fire was deflected past her on both sides. Then, the instant the fire died down, she used the now glowing blade as a wheel, rolling with it and behind it beneath the next hammer on the right side of the bridge.

The hammer came down hard, buckling the circular blade and straining the mechanism, but Kali had already dumped the metal and used the temporary jam to crawl swiftly beneath the area where the hammer would otherwise have impacted. This, in turn, enabled her to roll beneath the next circular blade before coming upright and flipping herself forward once more as its companion followed through a moment later.

Kali was moving fast and she was almost through to the end of the bridge now. She could barely contain the surge of elated adrenalin that accompanied that knowledge, because there she saw some kind of wooden elevator, as she knew she would, and all she had to do now was…

Wood splintered suddenly beneath Kali's feet and she fell forwards, cursing. The curse had barely left her lips before there was a sudden, heavy whoosh from her left hand side and the last of the mechanisms — a great hammer that swung across the bridge — came straight at her. She tried to throw herself out of its way, back into the space between hammer and blades, and would have made it safely, apart from the one small variable she had forgotten to factor into her equations. Making her leg thicker by as little as an inch, her splint made contact with one of the whirling blades she had already negotiated. Its teeth bit into the wood and cloth strip, ripping at it and tearing it away.

Kali felt her whole body vibrate bone-jarringly and then, as the teeth of the blade spat the splint out, found herself being flipped dizzyingly through the air back towards the hammer. There was no time to reorientate herself and, in the second she tried, the swinging bludgeon slammed directly into her front, knocking her, stunned and winded, cleanly off the bridge.

It could have been worse, she supposed, she could have lost the leg, but that was actually quite academic right now because she wasn't getting out of here. The place had become her tomb after all.

She looked down at the stalagmites and boulders that were now rushing towards her, estimated she had only a few seconds before she hit, and closed her eyes.

She slammed into the cavern floor. But it didn't hurt half as much as she'd imagined it might.

What? she thought.

Instead of the hard rock Kali thudded onto — and through — a layering of planks, that once upon a time must have been set there to prevent unwary miners stumbling into a dropshaft. They were so rotten she passed through without harm. Another layer was almost immediately beneath them, and then another, level after level of shoring. As Kali plummeted through, her momentum slowed slightly each time.

Kathuck, kathuck, kathuck.

It seemed to go on forever, and Kali was beginning to think she might die of suffocation as opposed to anything else when, at last, she slammed through the last of the layers and crashed, flat on her back, onto a small hillock of rotten wood on some deep, deep tunnel floor.

She lay there for a second.

'Ow,' she said.

And then she flipped herself upright, ready for whatever trap was going to be thrown at her next.

But there was none. Kali knew instantly that this place was different to Be'Trak'Tak. It looked different, felt different and even smelled different. And that could mean only one thing. The whole area she'd travelled through to reach Munch's mine had been riddled with other such excavations, and this had to be one of them. She'd broken through into another mine. And what was more, there was light ahead.

Wasting no time, Kali dusted herself down and began to move towards it, trying all the time to suppress the presumption that what was she looking at was an exit. After so long it was just too much to ask for, surely? And it was. Following the light to its source, Kali came upon against a solid rock wall.

No, wait, not solid. There was something there.

Kali's disappointment upon discovering that the light source was not an exit was mitigated slightly by the fact that it seemed to be no kind of natural light, and she found herself intrigued. Also she saw that it was not one light source but two, only seeming to be a whole because they were embedded in the rock close together. No, not embedded, she realised as she examined them further. The lights seemed to be attached to something else embedded in the rock, something bigger that a roof collapse had buried at some time in the past and that had remained undisturbed since. The question was, how long had it remained undisturbed? Kali studied the collapse with a professional eye, noting the visible fossilisation, the settlement of the larger pieces of debris, and the compactness of the scree around them, which was absolutely solid. A very long time, then, she concluded. The only problem now being that, if that were true, how in all the hells could the lights — whatever they were — still be glowing?

She used her gutting knife to work away at the scree surrounding them, eventually revealing two small, orange orbs that seemed to throb beneath her touch, prompting a dull headache as they did. Suddenly, she realised what they had to be. Unless she'd missed her guess, they were some kind of power source for the thing to which they were attached.

Kali slapped the area she had revealed around the orbs tentatively, and then a little bit harder, and then harder still until her palms hurt. No doubt about it. Metal, and solid — apparently armoured or, at least, reinforced. But what on Twilight was it? She took a few steps back so that she could see the thing more fully and, with a pulse of excitement, realised that that the metal object was mounted on some kind of rotating tracks as if it might ride on them — move on them, in fact.

Kali continued her excavation anew, pulling now at larger stones and rocks that were embedded in the scree and then rolling each down over their predecessors until the pile was too big to accommodate more. But that didn't