39 – A Splinter Beneath the Skin

The shaft opened without warning.

One moment Ashley was plunging through the column of scorched rock, wings beating hard to drive herself faster. The next, the walls vanished entirely, and the world opened wide around her.

The chamber swallowed distance.

For a moment, Ashley could only fall into it, wings flaring as the passage spat her out into open air.

The space below her stretched so far in every direction that her eyes refused to make sense of it at first, all red-lit walls, broken ledges, and depth that seemed to keep unfolding the longer she looked.

This volcano has more rooms than a five-star hotel. Has to be magical. Smulknefire said he was guarding this place. Ancient dragon, secret chamber, age-old duty. This mountain has to have some deeper meaning than I thought.

Then she spotted Smulknefire below.

His crimson bulk cut through the air in a broad arc, massive enough that any rational part of her brain should have marked him as the biggest thing in the room. Instead, the chamber reduced him. It made even him look small, and the realization hit her with a jolt.

He swept behind something at the center of the expanse and disappeared from view for the span of a breath.

Only then did Ashley truly look at what stood there.

At the absolute center of the chamber, the Eternal Flame burned.

Except it wasn’t fire. It wasn’t magma.

It was a crystal of impossible red, towering higher than anything she had scale for. A slow light pulsed through it, deep and steady, pressing against her eyes. Around its jagged edges, the air shimmered and warped as though the world struggled to hold its shape.

Not even the tallest skyscrapers of her world could compare.

Ashley circled the crystal in a descending spiral, tracking Smulknefire as he dropped lower around it.

The dragon dove at Aury with one massive foreclaw.

Her familiar, if she could still call him that, slipped aside at the last instant, the talons missing him by a breath before they slammed into the formation.

The blow landed with a crack that rang through the chamber, and the surface rippled outward from the impact as if it were made of dense liquid.

Aury moved with the shock instead of fighting it. He twisted beneath the recoiling talons, his sword sweeping up in a bright, brutal arc, and the blade caught Smulknefire across the forearm, carving deep enough to tear a roar from the dragon’s throat.

Crimson scales burst loose and spun through the air like shattered metal, and black ichor spilled after them, streaking the stone below.

“Oh, come on. Again?”

Smulknefire slammed his wounded claw down, shaking the ground beneath Aury’s feet, and the sound that rolled out of him was no longer only pain.

It was fury.

Ashley stopped circling.

She snapped her wings in and dropped, raising the staff as she aimed herself between them. The red glare of the Eternal Flame swallowed the edges of her vision as she shot down along the crystal’s side, close enough that its jagged surface flashed past in blinding shards of light.

A dark shape protruded from the crystal ahead of her.

At her speed, Ashley registered it only when she was almost on top of it.

She twisted hard, one wing scraping dangerously close to it, and the object sliced past her shoulder with barely an inch to spare.

For one sick instant, she thought it was another attack, but the brush of it felt wrong. The skin over her shoulder prickled beneath her armor, crawling as if the thing had touched her after all.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Then she craned her neck as she fell past it and saw what had nearly taken her head off.

“The lance.”

It was driven deep into the crystal’s side, jutting from the Eternal Flame like a splinter lodged beneath skin, black from tip to shaft and wrong against all that pulsing red. Darkness spread from the wound in thin veins, threading through its heart as if the weapon were poisoning it from the inside.

Ashley’s gaze caught on the pommel, where the black metal had warped into a softened, uneven shape that made her stomach tighten.

That was what Smulknefire had seen, wasn’t it? Or what he wanted to see. The pommel had softened, yes, its black metal warped at the edges as if the dragon’s fire had finally begun to eat into it. But after years of Smulknefire pouring flame into this place, that tiny deformation felt less like proof than a cruel joke.

How could it have melted so little?