Page 24 of The Dragon’s Captive

“Claiming territory,” Vilka said. “It has been centuries since Avastias reigned here. He must once more see what is his to take. When he has taken the measure of his territory, he will begin to feed.”

“What does he eat?”

“Everything,” Vilka said. “Animals, grasses, trees, rocks, even the earth itself. There is a reason why these creatures are known as world eaters. Our world is formed by their appetites, mountains, valleys, and plains.”

“Um… he’s getting really near the portal,” Kate said, her fingers wrapped nervously around Vilka’s broad arm. Holding on to him made her feel a little better.

“It is not large enough to allow him passage,” Vilka said. “He is almost certainly curious about it. I doubt he has ever seen one.”

Kate watched, holding her breath as Avastias approached the portal and with his wings still beating in the air, stopped like a massive hummingbird and put his head through it.

“Oh, my god!” She screamed the words, imagining the sight as it would be playing out on the New York skyline. A massive dragon’s head appearing through a glimmering portal. God. The panic and chaos would be widespread.

Avastias pulled his head back into the dragon realm and Kate breathed a sigh of relief. It was a very short spell of respite, however. The world eater circled the portal, once, twice, three times, built up some speed on its massive wings—and then flew directly into the portal. The little glimmering slit was not nearly large enough, but it expanded as the beast burst through, allowing the massive dragon to pass from the world entirely. In less than a minute, it was gone, the tip of its scaly tail disappearing with one final gleam from the portal’s walls.

Kate turned to Vilka, a look of horror plastered across her face. “We just unleashed an ancient dragon on New York!”

“You just unleashed an ancient dragon on New York, whatever that may be,” Vilka said grimly. He was standing there stoically, watching events unfold with a certain detachment that she envied in that moment. “You just plunged two worlds into crisis. Congratulations, Kate; in a few short days you have managed to undo centuries of peace in the dragon realm—and decades of whatever truce existed between our world and the human world with it.”

He spoke with a disturbing calm, and when Kate looked into his face she saw that he didn’t look mad. He looked so far beyond mad that he was entirely calm. The worst had happened and they were standing in its wake, caught up in a chain of events that was, undeniably, her fault. He had tried to stop her, but she had not listened and now it seemed that the technology she had so proudly pursued was going to ruin or maybe even take the lives of thousands.

Kate couldn’t quite understand it; maybe she couldn’t even admit it to herself.

The flock of dragons that had been in thrall around the world eater turned as the world eater disappeared from the world, sheared away from the portal and headed back toward the fortress in an exhausted cloud.

“What do we do? How do we get it back?”

“Some things, once done, cannot be undone,” he said. “They must simply run their terrible course.”

“Vilka! There has to be something!”

“Very well. If you insist on saving humanity from the wrath of a world eater, there is something to be done,” he said. “Someone can bait it from your world, return it to the dragon realm, defeat it in battle and return it to its den.”

“Oh,” she said. “Sounds, um… difficult.”

“No more difficult than tearing a hole in space and time and waking him in the first place, I am sure,” Vilka sighed. “Really, Kate, I did not think this situation could have been worsened, but thanks to your efforts, it has. Avastias rising almost certainly has the elders of our people en route to our door. Their wrath would have been terrible enough when they realized the circumstances of his awakening, but now when they arrive, they will have the additional question of what we’ve done with the creature.”

“Well, I guess I’ll just explain to them,” Kate said simply. “That’s all anyone can do.”

“The elders will not be interested in your explanations. They will want to know how a human stole an ancient dragon.”

“I didn’t steal anything!”

“Well, we had a world eater here, and now we don’t,” Vilka said. “And the difference between those two things is you. Believe me, I know how they think. They will be furious at the waking of the beast, and even more furious at its loss.”

“Then we get it back,” she said simply. “Before they arrive.”

“This is not like baking another cake because you ate half the first one, Kate,” he growled. “We cannot simply put part of the world eater back in the cake tin and hope for the best.”

“No, but if we get it back, that will make things better. And maybe… what if you got your dragons to reconstruct the mountain where it escaped? I mean, can they really tell that it’s gone? If we close the portal, it will be like nothing ever happened.”

“Aside from the nightmare of a species wreaking havoc on the human plane,” Vilka said, his tone thick with sarcasm. “Yes, precisely as if nothing ever happened.”

“I’m just trying to help,” Kate said. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not as if you had a sign saying ‘huge dragon, do not wake’ on the mountain! I didn’t intend for this to happen, I was just trying to get back home. If anything, this is your fault.”

“How is this my fault, precisely, human?”

“You should have let me go when I told you to.”