Jean Rabe - The Lake of Death

Grannaluured and Churt split to the right and left, angling around the sivak. Behind them both, Ragh saw, Feril was stirring. She lifted her head and stared through Churt’s legs to see the dwarf whom at first glance she thought was Campfire. Feril pushed herself to her knees and peered closer to see an inky pool spreading away from Campfire. The dying fire was just enough to illuminate the shadow.

“Dhamon!” Feril murmured. She jumped to her feet just as Ragh let his dwarf form melt away. “Needle, Churt, don’t fight them! You can’t win!”

“Them?” Churt glanced at her, shrugging his broad shoulders. “I only see one enemy, just one wingless sivak, and soon it’s going to be wearing my body. ’Cause if I remember right, sivaks also take on the form of what kills them.”

“It’ll wear my body! I’ll be the one to kill it!” Grannaluured argued.

“Needle, leave them be!” Feril called.

“Them?” Grannaluured echoed mirthlessly. What she saw next made her gasp, however, as the inky shadow that was Dhamon grew into a shimmering dark cloud expanding and contracting behind Ragh. The mass of shadow grew legs and wings and a serpentine neck that stretched above the sivak. “Dragon! A dragon!”

Dhamon released his aura of dragonfear, so Churt whirled and tripped, picked himself up and ran, heading to the south and disappearing into darkness. Grannaluured froze, trembling, legs locked, the skillet slipping from her fingers. The color drained from her face. Ragh and Feril were affected too, but held their ground.

“The dragon won’t hurt you, Needle.” Feril stepped behind the dwarf and put her left hand reassuringly on her shoulder. “He’s a friend of mine.”

“D-d-d-dragon’s a f-f-friend?”

“Yes, and I promise that he won’t hurt you. I swear!” Feril exchanged looks with Dhamon, who gradually suppressed most of his fear aura. As he did, the elf stepped in front of Grannaluured and walked slowly toward the dragon.

“Feril…”

“My arm’s broken, Dhamon, but I’m all right.” She told him that during the quake her arm had become trapped between shifting rocks. “I got it out. I can make stone move,” she explained. “It’s how I knew I could get the scale if it was wedged—making the stone flow around it so I could pull it out.”

Dhamon nodded. His old friend Maldred was able to perform the same magic with stone. Feril hadn’t been so accomplished with her nature magic when he knew her years earlier. He wondered what other surprises she had in store.

“I tried climbing straight down, but everything was shaking so badly. I ended up crawling like a baby to get here. Churt and Needle set my arm.”

Cuts crisscrossed her face and arms, and there were welts on her legs from where rocks had pelted her. She was favoring her right side, and Dhamon suspected she might have cracked some ribs. A nasty bruise decorated her cheek.

“I feared you were dead,” Dhamon said. Even though he spoke softly, the ground rumbled, and Grannaluured, all but forgotten momentarily, whimpered in fear.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, Dhamon. Terribly foolish of me to go in there tonight. Unforgiveably foolish. Feldspar would be alive if I had waited. My curiosity and eagerness be damned. Too much ale, too much…Feldspar shouldn’t have followed. Now I’ve blood on my hands.” She tilted her head down sorrowfully. “Maybe Campfire would be alive too.”

“Doubt it,” Ragh said. “Campfire was looking to die.” The sivak glanced at his clawed hands, blood still drying on them. Then he looked to the female dwarf, who was still wide-eyed and shaking. “What are we going to do about her, Dhamon?”

Feril raced to Grannaluured’s side. “Needle? You’re going to do nothing about Needle.”

“Got to do something with her,” the sivak pressed. “Can’t leave her here alone, can we?”

The female dwarf blinked, looking up dully at Feril. “D-d-dragon. We should run.” Her legs had stopped shaking, but she was still locked like a statue.

The complicated explanation tumbled from Feril’s lips, about how Dhamon was once a man and had been cursed by a shadow dragon to become a dragon. How he could turn himself into a shadow form. How they were in the mountains looking for an overlord’s scale that might help make Dhamon human again.

Grannaluured didn’t catch everything, and Feril had left plenty out in her effort to explain quickly, but the explanation seemed to be enough to get the dwarf to relax slightly. She took a few tottering steps and breathed deeply.

“Dhamon won’t hurt you,” Feril repeated. “I promise.”

“Churt?” Her words were coming out strangled. “Where’s Churt?”

“He ran,” Feril said. “The dragonfear took him.”

Dhamon nudged Ragh with the tip of his snout, so that the unprepared sivak stumbled forward. “Oh, so I’m elected to go look for the stupid dwarf? Wonderful. Fine, fine. I suppose it’s better than staying around here and staring at an old maid dwarf who probably isn’t going to serve a decent dinner now.” He jogged off into the darkness, in the direction Churt had fled. “Shouldn’t be that hard to find him. Dwarves have stubby legs. He can’t have gone too far.”

Several minutes later Feril was helping Grannaluured stoke the fire. Dhamon stayed nearby, and though the dwarf could see him clearly—and he certainly looked terrifying—gradually she seemed to be calming down.

“D-d-d-didn’t see you come out of the mountain with that scale you were looking for, Feril,” Grannaluured said. She had seated herself by the fire, back propped up against her pack, eyes glued warily on Dhamon. She twitched each time he moved, but she made no attempt to get away. “Too old to run,” she told Feril. “If that dragon’s gonna get me, isn’t anything I can do about it.”

Feril smiled sadly. “We found the scale, but it was cracked, useless. We need one that’s undamaged if we’re to have any chance to make him human.”

“Turning humans into dragons? Turning dragons back into humans? I’ve seen some odd things in my time, but I don’t think that’s something I want to be seeing.”

Feril put a hand on the dwarf’s shoulder, stroking it gently. “I’m hoping to see it. I’ll not give up on Dhamon. I’m determined to find another scale.”

The nervous Grannaluured tried unsuccessfully to appear at ease. “Might be more scales in those mountains. If there was the one, why wouldn’t there be more? The quakes could have busted them all, I suppose. Yeah, ruined the mine, probably ruined just about everything in this part of the mountains.”

Dhamon had been edging closer until his head was directly over the fire. He could feel the warmth on his barbels. He savored the warmth, happy to feel something other than pain. Grannaluured, eyes wide, watched his every move.

“My elf friend Obelia…” Feril began. She was going to tell the dwarf about the Qualinesti spirit in the flask in her backpack, but a look from Dhamon warned her against it. Perhaps Dhamon thought the dwarf had dealt with enough this day—a sivak, a dragon, the quake, and the loss of two of her companions. She didn’t need to know that a Qualinesti ghost rested a few feet away, swirling his fingerbones around in water taken from Nalis Aren.

“Dhamon, we have little choice,” she said. “We have to try the swamp.”

Grannaluured spoke before the dragon could. “So interesting the lot of you are. So very, very interesting.” The gray strands that had come loose from her braid looked like cobwebs in the firelight. “I think maybe I’d like to be going along with you, Dawnsprinter. Bet you could use a cook…though I doubt I could fix enough of anything to fill up that dragon. Yeah, I should come along. The sivak’s right. Don’t leave me here alone. I might be helpful in a swamp.”