Ral’draig made no move as Delyth approached, but the warrior knew she had been seen. The great, blue-silver eyes followed her, a strong, winged figure carrying a satchel and a black sword strapped to her back. Delyth had never felt so small before, not even standing in the roots of the mountains. Still, she kept her shoulders straight and her eyes on the great, winged serpent. She would not be afraid.
“Come closer.” Ral’draig’s voice was silken and purring. “No mortal has approached me so boldly in some four centuries.”
Delyth stepped forward until she stood in a half-circle of white scales, the dragon’s body mounding around her in much the same way as the mountains above the common plain. Though Ral’draig moved about her, the warrior held still, her heart hammering. She was being examined, the great head swiveling with interest.
What would happen should she be found wanting?
There was the brush of hard dragon scale against the skin of a wing, and then the great dragon’s eye was before her, wider than a splayed hand and slit-pupilled. The blue-silver depths seemed to writhe, to twist and billow beneath the surface. Metallic and restless. Clouds one moment. Mountains the next.
Delyth did not breathe but stared into the eyes, shoulders tense. She would not flinch away. Minutes passed thusly, woman and beast locked in some silent exchange.
Then, Ral’draig blinked and lifted her great head away.
“You are more magnificent, Dawn Dragon, than even the finest stories profess.” The warrior was proud when her voice did not shake or stutter, but the dragon merely snorted.
“Why have you come, little sister?”
Little sister.
Something warm in the pit of Delyth’s stomach bloomed. She was as much kin to the great dragon as she was any human, and the knowledge mingled with her awe and reverence for Ral’draig.
Let all those who had scorned her see her now.
Little sister to dragons.
Delyth swallowed back her pride and answered solemnly. “I have been sent by the Goddess Enyo to trade for something she desires.”
A ripple of arching spines passed down the dragon’s back, and she bared sword-like teeth in distaste. “You are a daughter of the Great Beast, small as you are. We do not serve.” She arched her neck, silver-blue eyes flashing white behind the curl of smoke rising from great, scaled nostrils. In the depths of her open maw, tongues of flame licked deep purple flesh.
Delyth was running out of time.
“I swore an oath to save someone I loved, and now I must serve.” She did not phrase it as an excuse, but rather as fact, dark and unpleasant as it was.The words tasted of smoke on her tongue, the anger behind them a burning, mephitic thing. She had managed not to remember for a while this time. To forget that she was alone and choice-less.
The dragon hummed a breath of sulphuric air, carrying with it the odors of blood and metal. It was a mildly disappointed sound, as though she had fancied the idea of swallowing Delyth after all. “It is… good to guard what is yours, though why did you not use your teeth and claws, little sister? You smell too much of battle to be a coward.”
“Enyo shared a body with my beloved. To attack the Goddess would have harmed her.”
The dragon shook herself, sending a rippling pattern of reflected light dancing across the warrior in a myriad of colors. She seemed on the verge of a decision, glancing back at the cave where a black dragon slept. “And so you placed treasure above your freedom?” The great dragon’s scaled face softened the faintest amount, her scaled lid drooping. “I… We have made this mistake as well.”
Delyth blinked in surprise. What could possibly bind the freedom of so great a creature? If anything, the dragon was freedom itself, all power and feral violence.
“We will give you two tests, little sister, to prove that you are worthy of the bargain you seek. Now listen closely. I will not repeat myself…”
⥣ ⥣ ⥣
Delyth descended into the encampment in the blue hour, that hazy time between sunset and dusk. It was exactly as Ral’draig had described.
The stench of piss and blood and stale ale rose from shoddy tents of poorly scraped furs. They were centered in a clearing still black with the fire used to destroy the plant and animal life that had once grown there. Half-devoured carcasses lay beside old cooking pits, wreathed in flies. Debris lay everywhere.
In the midst of this strode some twenty men and the women they had forcibly taken from seaside villages farther south. Their faces were grime-smeared, their clothing torn. All was dirt and filth and negligence, and none more so than the leader seated in the center of the camp.
The self-stylized Pirate King sat naked but for stained trousers, his right hand wrapped around a skein of ale, his left around the arm of a frightened girl. He was brown from prolonged exposure to the sun, his torso rippled with muscle and matted hair. He stood when Delyth landed before him and lifted a wicked ax from the dirt beside him.
“Well, aren’t you a strange fucker?” He spat and shoved the girl away. She yelped, striking the ground. “Boys, this is why we don’t fuck animals!”
He laughed crudely at his own joke, but the warrior made no move to respond to it. Instead, she delivered Ral’draig’s message from a face like stone. “The Dawn Dragon has heard the beasts of this land and named you a blight upon it. Some filth cannot be cleaned, but only scoured away.”
Calamity was in her hand, its call now familiar. Her blood sang with it, and already she was rushing along that tunnel in which wind roared in her ears, and nothing was visible but the patterns of battle and dying bodies.
She was a daughter of the great beast, and she would be a beast that night.
“Ya hear
