by Bryant Reil
Her first obstacle was a stream. It was shallow but fast. She looked for a way to cross but there was no bridge in sight and none marked on her map. There were rocks poking up, but they were wet and slick. Still, she was spry. Kyla removed her shoes and tucked them into the waistline of her pants and took a leap. The first hop ended gracefully with her feet slapping on a large wet rock, and she scouted for another. Hop. Slap. Hop. Slap. Though it was fun, she imagined how much easier this trip would be if she could fly like Aura.
Everything went well until the final hop. She made the jump easily but the stone was loose and tilted to one side. She squealed, waving her arms to find her balance, but finally slipped into the water. She crawled out, sputtering and wet, and as soon as she got to the far bank she unraveled her blanket to inspect her supplies. Her extra clothing and food were drenched, and the blanket was both wet and muddy. Luckily the parchment had been wrapped in the center and was mostly unharmed, aside from a few damp spots. Still, this was going to be an uncomfortable trip without proper supplies. Kyla sighed. She considered returning but was determined not to fail on her first big assignment. She knew how to find food in the wild and had slept outside many times growing up. She chose to press on.
She made it through the first night only to have it rain the following morning. After the rain she couldn't find any wood dry enough to light a proper fire; not that it mattered much, as her firesticks would be useless until she could dry them out. She had to spend the following night sleeping in tree branches to keep herself off the cold, wet ground. The following day was warm, at least, but as she drew closer to the mountains the night felt colder. On the fourth day she finally reached Mount Thoma. She was tired, sore, and caked in mud and bugs. Her stomach ached from hunger, as the only food she had been able to find was some mint leaves and a few mushrooms. Now she stared up the mountain. She had not thought about an entrance. How did one get inside? From the top? She didn't have the energy to scale it, but could see no other way as she stared at the grim ascent.
It was embarrassing, Kyla thought, for an elf to be so exhausted after a journey through the wild. They were the guardians of the forest, after all. Her trek felt like a bad dream, and she thought perhaps this wouldn't be the relaxing career she had hoped. She was dehydrated, hungry, and feeling a bit sick. Her head felt like someone had taken her brain and replaced it with swamp water. She knew she was doing things and stuff was happening, but her mind was turning to mush. One foot went in front of the other. Her eyes pointed down so she didn't lose her footing. Soon the ground became rocky which made walking a little easier, even though she had to scramble over the steeper parts. Then she got to the scree. She hated the scree. Every step she took slid back and she had to crawl to make any progress. She licked the back of her hand. Sweat. Moisture. It was delicious. She crawled a few more yards. She gave her hand another lick. It was now caked in dirt. Gross. She shook her head to remember where she was and what she was doing. She looked up. She wanted to be up there for some reason. Did she live up there? Her house was in a tree somewhere. Aura lived in the sky. Yes. She was going to Aura's. She had to press on. Aura needed her. She forced herself to stand up and move forward.
Kyla was halfway up the slope when she collapsed face-first into the loose rocks.
***
It was dark when Kyla awoke. She put her fingers to her eyes to make sure they were open. Was she blind? Or dead? Neither choice was pleasant. She patted her body. She was still dressed and covered with a thick blanket, and could feel bits of straw poking through her clothing. Around the make-shift bed was a cold stone floor. A castle, perhaps? Or cavern? Her mind raced back to her most recent memory, which was a blurry montage of a terrible hike. She lay back to consider her options. At least she felt more alert, having slept, and she thought about her situation, mostly to avoid having to do anything as her body was sore.
Kyla dozed off again and was awakened by a deep humming. At first she thought it was the wind but as it grew louder there was a clear melody. Then there were heavy footsteps. So heavy, in fact, that as they drew closer Kyla could feel the vibrations in the floor. She had the urge to hide, but as she couldn't see for all she knew she was already well-hidden. She held her breath for fear of being heard.
The humming and thundering footsteps continued to grow louder. She retreated under her blanket, peering out over the top. Soon she saw a flash of orange light, and another, and again, each growing in intensity. Then she heard the roar of flames and saw stream of fire blast by an opening in a far wall, briefly illuminating the room. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the worst. What was the worst? Death? There were worse things than death, she was sure, but couldn't come up with any. She hoped whoever was coming couldn't come up with any, either.
Kyla screamed as a large head appeared in the opening and snaked around the corner. It was scaled and had long fangs. She thought it was a giant snake, at first, but the head and neck were soon followed by a large winged body. On the one hand, at least it wasn't a snake. On the other hand, it was a dragon.
Chapter Seven
Denzig
The dragon's appearance was all the more fearsome because Kyla could only intermittently see it between bursts of flame from its nostrils as it breathed, and the orange light and the shadows created a hellish ambience. Between breaths the room was completely dark, but the dragon's yellow eyes glowed slightly and made the great beast even more ominous. The giant head stretched forward for a better look, and Kyla scrambled from her bed of hay with a shriek but tripped over something and fell to the hard cavern floor. She crawled along on her stomach, looking for a place to hide, but soon found herself against a wall. She huddled against it, hiding her face in her hands.
“No need to be frightened.” The dragon's voice was deep and gravelly and echoed of its own accord, and echoed again as it traveled throughout the cavern. “I simply would like to have you for dinner!”
“No! Don't eat me!” Kyla cried. She had always heard that prior to death there were flashbacks of one's life. This did not seem to be true, because all she could think about was how much she didn't want to be gobbled up by a dragon.
The dragon paused and snorted a blast of flame toward the ceiling. She could see the eyes staring at her in the dark, and closed her own so she wouldn't see the beast take its final strike. Then the dragon started chuckling.
“OH! I see how that could be misconstrued. No, I'm not going to eat you, my dear. You looked famished so I made you a meal. And elves can't see in the dark, can they?” Kyla didn't dare open her eyes, afraid to discover those last words were some trick, or perhaps a sign of her own descent into madness.
“Algianix Avarissimil!” the dragon uttered. It was ancient Elvish. Kyla could tell, even with her eyes closed, that the room was filling with light. She finally dared a peek and saw a white orb floating in front of the dragon's head which lit the room as bright as noonday. The dragon was looking at her, smiling through dripping teeth.
“I learned that spell from an elf wizard,” he explained. “Here, let me ease my visage for you.” Kyla didn't understand that, but the dragon shrank in size and sat back on his haunches. He was still large, but now perhaps only a couple feet taller than herself. “See? I can walk on two legs, like you!” He shifted his weight from foot to foot to prove his balance. His voice was softer too, now that he wasn't so large.
It took Kyla a few minutes to decide the dragon wasn't going to eat her after all. She looked back at him as he rubbed his foreclaws together. His tail wagged back and forth over the stone floor and sounded like metal scraping over rock. She saw the thing that she had tripped over was her own blanket roll, which was a few feet from the pile of hay where she had been sleeping. The dragon coughed.
“Look, I know this must be a little frightening. I don't get to entertain many visitors in my cave, and haven't seen an elf in years. Have you come from Whitehall? I dare say I've never seen any of the fey there before.”
By fe
y he meant her, she knew, but elves considered it a rude appellation. She wasn't about to challenge his choice of words, however. She slowly stood up. “I'm from Aspengrove,” she squeaked, trying to be brave but sounding rather like a mouse being stepped on by an ogre.
The dragon scratched its chin with a long talon. “Aspengrove...Aspengrove...not around here is it?”
“Not too far. Opposite side of Equinox, about the same distance, I guess. I mean, I grew up in Aspengrove, but I attend Equinox now.”
The dragon snorted. “Well, odd that I found you passed out by the back entrance. Why did you come?”
“I was supposed to bring a message to...to...” Kyla opened her blanket and found the scroll. It was bent out of shape and she could see the dampness had bled some of the ink, but it was still legible. “Denzig. I have a message for someone named Denzig.”
“I'm Denzig.” The dragon squinted suspiciously. “Who sent it?”
Kyla shrugged. “I don't know. I got it from some fairy.”
She handed Denzig the note, which he opened with a frown. His brows furrowed as he read it, so that by the time he was done he looked upset. Kyla worried he might renege on his promise to not eat her. He balled the letter up, tossed it in the air, and with a blast of flame reduced it to ash. He turned back to Kyla.
“No offense to you, of course. 'Don't kill the messenger', that's what I say. It's a mistake I shan't make again.”
Kyla felt fortunate she was not the first bearer of bad news.
“I hate to burden you with work issues. Let's just eat. You look like you have been through quite an ordeal. If you didn't wander here from Whitehall, how did you get here?”
“I walked.”
“What? All the way from Equinox?”
“Yes.”
“Why, is the portal broken?”
“Portal?”
“Yes. Every government site has a portal. Equinox has one. I have one. It's down the hall. A lot faster than walking.”
Kyla let out a stream of curses that could even burn a dragon's ears.
***
“So you go down to the human settlement?” Kyla asked as she helped place the settings for the table. “I thought that was illegal or something.”
“Not illegal. Dangerous, perhaps, and in the olden days I would have to kill or be killed. But nowadays they don't believe in dragons, or elves, for that matter, and they are gifted at selective blindness.” Kyla stared at him stupidly until he explained. “That means they see what they want to see. I put on some human clothes, and, most importantly, carry a lot of money. People would never accept me as a dragon, so long as they could come up with a different explanation. The people that do recognize me tend to end up in special hospitals if they tell anyone about it. Though, I have to say, I do keep myself well covered to minimize the risk.”
“What's it like?” Kyla wondered. It was a mild curiosity; humans looked similar enough to elves to not be very interesting, though she knew little about them besides their reputation for being messy.
Denzig placed a plate and utensils out for himself and Kyla as he spoke. “Oh, they're a peculiar bunch. They've made up their own view of the world and hold to it. The ones who don't agree are ridiculed. They think the world just runs all by itself! Like magic! Except then they turn around and claim they don't believe in magic! Well, it keeps them out of our hair. Let's eat!”
Kyla recognized much of the food, though it was prepared in an unfamiliar manner. The largest platter Denzig called a Turducken, which was a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. He had filled the insides of the chicken with ground sausage. She left most of this for Denzig, for she supposed a dragon needed a lot of meat, and she preferred vegetables. For this there was a salad, which was familiar, though Denzig had a dressing which smelled of vinegar and had a taste she had never experienced. It was tolerable but not particularly exciting. Her favorite part was the little tomatoes, as she had heard of them but never tried one. There were also cubes of white cheese which she rather liked.
Once she had her fill of vegetables Kyla decided to explore some of the other options. There was a dish called lasagna which was unlike anything she had ever eaten. It was full of sauce and meat and cheese and something called 'pasta', which was like bread dipped in water and tasted better than she imagined it would. She loved the flavor but found the dish too heavy to eat much. Her favorite part of the meal was dessert. Her family seldom ate dessert, and when they did it wasn't very sweet; but Denzig had something called a cheesecake, which was covered in cherry sauce. This also felt heavy in her stomach, but she loved it enough that she asked to take the extra back home.
“Well, I need to cook like that more often. I've been decimating the local mountain goat population lately,” Denzig laughed at the end of the meal. “Though, to be honest, I bought a lot of this at the grocer's.” Kyla's stomach ached, but an ache on a full stomach was a lot better than an ache on an empty stomach. She slumped back in her chair.
“I could live like this,” she told Denzig. “I might like living here, if it weren't so underground.” Now that Kyla's mind was off food and fatigue, it was becoming more concerned with the enclosed environment, though it was easier to overlook now that she was safe and fed. “Um...so what do you do here, exactly?”
“Oh, this is a ventilation site. You know, of course, how much pressure builds up below the surface as the fire elementals move the mantle around.”
“Of course.” Kyla had no idea but didn't want to appear a fool.
“Well, that pressure has to come out. So I monitor it and when it gets too high I release some magma out of the volcano. It's a pretty good job, really; I haven't had to do anything for four hundred years.”
Kyla thought it sounded pretty boring. Better than handing out flyers, though.
“Now the pressure's built up again and the Minister of Public Works is on my back to set it off. But you see, Whitehall is just down the mountain, and the shape of the mountain is such that if I vent it, the lava will flow right down on top of them!”
“Oh no!” Kyla exclaimed. She had no particular love for humans as Denzig seemed to, but it would be tragic to have all those creatures killed.
“Oh no indeed. I've been asking the Minister to send someone to fix the mountain for years. I knew this was going to be a problem. Well, they don't care about humans. But I do. These ones, anyway. There are a couple I wouldn't miss, but many are my friends! And Mrs. Galbraith makes the best apple pie I've ever tasted.”
“Well, can't you do it yourself? I mean, you're a dragon. You're huge.”
“I'm a fire dragon. You want me to burn stuff, fine. And sure, I guess I can dig, but that's a lot of digging. And it's more than that. You need an expert or you might just cause a rock slide and crush Whitehall anyway. They-my bosses-they always tell me it's too low a priority. Not enough staff, they tell me. Well, when thousands of innocent lives are a low priority, I tell you something's wrong.”
Kyla thought about this. “I might know someone who can help.”
Denzig sighed. “Forgive my pessimism, and I hope that maybe somehow you can help, but I've been trying to get this done for years and now I only have two days.”
“Two days! What happens in two days?”
“That letter you gave me – it said that if I don't set the volcano off by Sunday evening I'm fired. And then you know what – they'll replace me with someone who doesn't mind killing humans to get the job done. Well, uh...I'm sorry, in all this excitement I forgot to ask your name.”
“Oh. Kyla.”
“Well, Kyla, if you can do this I owe you a great debt. You'll need to hurry, though. Even if you can find a team to do it, I don't see how they can do such a big job in time.”
“That's the easy part,” said Kyla. “As long as I can use the portal to get back.” The hard part, she thought, was going to be the apology.
Chapter Eight
Kyla's Talent
Fortune smiled on Kyla.
Against great odds she found the battered lunchbox in a trash can in Lug's break room. Saul, with some coaxing, agreed to restore it as best he could in exchange that Kyla set him up on a date with Eunoe. Eunoe refused, of course, but Saul did give Kyla partial credit for trying, and did a half-job. He made the box functional, though left it battered and dented.
She examined the artwork. It truly was a lovely picture. Two unicorns in an enchanted meadow, with a fairy sitting on a toadstool at the side. She decided she really might carry such a lunchbox, if she ever thought to carry one at all, as elves mainly wrapped their food in leaves or cloth. She wondered at the minotaur's distaste for it. He had commented that it looked like it was made for little girls. Yet why would a little girl need a lunchbox? Did minotaur children have jobs?
Lug's address was easy to find in the student directory. He had an uncommon name, it turned out. He lived in a subterranean complex which Kyla had not known existed, and could only be accessed through a small wooden building near the proving grounds. She thought a residence for earth elementals would have a larger entrance. She waited out front for a time, not wanting to enter the enclosed space and hoping she might see Lug coming or going, but realized she needed to brave the subterranean quarters or risk standing outside all night. She took some slow, deep breaths, closed her eyes, and walked through the door. It was much smaller than Denzig's cave, and her head rushed as she descended the stairs. Once she reached the bottom the hallway opened up and gave her some relief. The corridors were abuzz with students walking or flying in all directions. Most of the denizens were brownies, gnomes, and other creatures smaller than herself. Lug was a giant among his neighbors.
The doors all looked the same but like in Haven Hall were numbered. She found Lug's room and knocked. The door was metal and heavy and made little noise as she rapped her knuckles against it. She wondered if he could hear it. Then she noticed a string hanging from the ceiling and when she pulled it a bell rang. The door creaked open a sliver.
