Page 36 of The Dragon’s Captive

This battle had been played out a hundred times before, and a hundred times the world eater had consumed his challenger and taken the bones of his victim to the grave beneath the mountain, but Vilka had no intention of losing this battle. Avastias was ancient, a singular mind set on defeating his challenger, but Vilka was lit with the determination to protect everything that was his—two kingdoms to which he laid equal claim. He was more dragon than he had ever been, but he was more human too.

They met jaw to jaw, wrestling with massive teeth, bodies rolling ferociously in the air as they fell toward the ground at terminal velocity, wings tucked back to allow for the dive that would come down to one element: which of them would fail first, which nerve would give way and attempt to save itself.

Boom!

The world eater hit the ground hard enough to leave a crater, Vilka atop it, his teeth in the creature’s throat, finding the semi-soft flesh below the plates of the world eater’s chin.

Dust hung in the air about them, suspended with the force of their impact. In the minutes it took to clear, the entire world seemed to shake with the fury of their battle. Avastias’ roars of pure rage made the grass turn white and die, blades scattering for miles, blowing on the winds of the world eater’s battle.

There they wrestled, teeth flashing, claws slashing, their great bodies rolling over the landscape, carving it anew with raw ridges and valleys. They wounded one another repeatedly, blood flowing in rivers down the valleys made from their battle.

With a screech of fury, the world eater took to the air again, but Vilka would not allow that. He launched himself on the creature’s right wing and shredded it into a hundred pieces that fell across the land. Everywhere they made ground was immediately alight with fire, black billowing clouds and brilliant flames consuming the territory.

Into the earth. That was the only place the world eater was going. Vilka fought fiercely, standing the heat and the pain, biting and slashing until finally he laid his jaws at the world eater’s throat and tore with all his strength. His jaws were immediately covered in a cascade of ancient blood and the world vibrated with the agony of Avastias.

It was the final wound. Avastias did not attack again. The great dragon dragged itself back to the ruins of the mountain from which it had emerged and began to burrow, scales flashing as it buried itself deep into the earth, a new mountain forming above his defeated form.

When the skies cleared, Vilka lay in human form upon the scarred ground. His body was marked with deep wounds from which he was bleeding all too profusely. He had bested the ancient, but the victory had come at great cost. His body was broken in a hundred places, bones and flesh ripped and torn and he could feel his soul slipping away.

“I am going to be so fucking angry at you if you die.”

He heard Kate’s voice coming to him as if from another world. He could not see her, for she was not there, but he could feel her as surely as he could feel his own bloodied wounds. She was at the very core of him. She was his heart and his soul. She was the cord that connected him to this realm and the next and he held fast to her memory as his eyes closed and the darkness flooded in.

CHAPTER 17

“Idon’t know anything about the portal,” Kate said for the fiftieth time. “I was off work for a few weeks because I had a really horrible cold, and then obviously there was a state of national emergency with that massive dragon. I mean, wow. That thing was huge!”

The dark-suited men sitting on the couch in her new apartment looked very out of place with the otherwise bohemian low budget décor. They were not the first to visit her and she knew they would likely not be the last. The government investigation was in full swing, desperate to uncover the source of the portal. It was a tense time, but Kate was used to keeping her actions out of the light of discovery.

“If you could stick to the facts of your own accounting, ma’am, we have reports of you activating a device attached to a high-flying kite which sent a surge through the grid and shut down the portal.”

“If that was true,” she said, “then I’d be a hero, wouldn’t I? Stopping that giant dragon from eating people?”

“You knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes.”

“Something did,” Kate agreed. “But it wasn’t me.”

She was telling the lie so well she was almost starting to think that it was true. Maybe she never had been in the dragon realm. Maybe she never had met the man named Vilka. If it wasn’t for the fact that the news still couldn’t help showing the same footage of Avastias circling Manhattan over and over again she would have really wondered sometimes.

“We know you were there,” the bespectacled man said. “Your fascination with dragons is long recorded and many of your colleagues pointed toward your disappearance taking place shortly before the appearance of the portal.”

“Everyone is fascinated with dragons! There’s a whole television channel devoted to them and about a million websites. If you’re going to blame someone interested in dragons, you’re going to have to blame a whole lot of people.”

“There are a lot of people who like dragons,” the interrogator agreed. “But there are very few of them with any kind of ability to access the materials necessary to potentially enter the dragon realm.”

“Ah, I see,” she said, her tone thick with sarcasm. “So I entered the dragon world, found the most massive dragon of all time, made it come through a giant portal in the sky—which I guess I also must have made, huh—and then I flew back on a different dragon and then the big dragon went away and I closed the portal with a giant nuclear electrified kite. Wow. I would have been so busy, no wonder I have a cold.”

“There’s no need to give us any kind of attitude, ma’am,” the agent said. “We’re just doing our jobs.”

“Looks like you’re looking for a scapegoat,” Kate said. “It makes way more sense that the dragons opened the portal and maybe closed it behind them with some weird thing, or I don’t know, maybe the really big dragon was running out of space, like a goldfish in a goldfish bowl, you know? They actually need like a full tank to be happy, several hundred gallons and a really good filter…”

“Ms. Ferrier!” the agent snapped, interrupting her. “We did not come here to talk goldfish.”

“No, you came to accuse me of conjuring a giant dragon,” she said. “I know more about goldfish than I know about dragons, that’s for sure.”

“We have eyewitness accounts of a woman with red hair riding a red dragon,” the agent persisted gamely.

“Yeah, and if I went online I could have eyewitness accounts of flying saucers and little green men, but nobody is being interrogated over that,” Kate snapped. “Look, this is getting really tiresome, okay? And I’m still not feeling well. Are we done here?”