Read Dragon's Fall :: Chapter 8

Anders woke to warm afternoon sunlight piercing his eyes even before he was able force them open, feeling like he’d lost a drinking contest to Marlay again— complete with throbbing headache and growing sense of nausea. Blinking rapidly against the uncomfortable brightness, the captain frowned as he found himself not in his chambers, but a forest, dangling almost upside down by what remained of his riding harness.

Well, that explained the headache and the nausea. Just how long had he been stuck like this?

Memory rushed back to him as Anders squinted down at the sky and guessed it was sometime in the afternoon, though with how clear it was, he wondered if it was the same day or not. Leaving that puzzle for later, the man glanced up at the ground and realized he was a good fifteen feet in the air, no easy drop from his current position if he didn’t want to risk another braining. “Ghain?” he called, twisting this way and that for some glimpse of his partner. “Ghain! Where are you?”

“Here,” called a distant, rumbling voice, followed by the sound of something large stirring, then beginning to move through the trees. The dragon appeared a moment later, shaking his big, broad head and scattering a few branches that had become tangled in his horns. There was turf and other bits of vegetation caught in his armored scales, but otherwise he looked fine to Anders’ experienced (though currently inverted) eye. “Where— ” Ghain began, then paused and squinted when he spotted his parter strung up like a rogue bit of laundry in a tree.

“Don’t just stare, all the blood’s going to my head!” Anders complained. “I’ll pass out again at this rate, come on.”

A low, rumbling chuckle escaped the dragon but he approached regardless, cocking his head first to one side, and then the other as he considered his partner’s predicament.

Impatient, Anders reached towards him and said, “Just lean your head over and I’ll grab a horn so you can lower me down.”

Ghain snorted. “Your arms will give out before you make it down; besides, you’re all tangled up. Now, hold still.”

The dragon leaned in, mouth open as he twisted his head further to the side and Anders realized what it was Ghain was going to do. “Watch the teeth, watch the teeth!” he exclaimed and went very still as his partner closed his mouth delicately around him and pulled. The dragon’s teeth were as long as Anders’ forearm in places and while he knew Ghain would never intentionally harm him, dragon mouths weren’t exactly friendly environs for something as soft and squishy as a human body. Luckily, said body was still clad in heavy plate armor, complete with scale mail everywhere the plate didn’t cover, but it was still a nerve-wracking moment.

Ghain was nearly fifty feet, nose to tail, which meant his mouth was more than big enough to fully engulf his partner if he tried, though he didn’t now, only used its most distant point to grasp him lightly around the middle where he was most heavily armored. Anders grimaced when the dragon’s teeth screeched unpleasantly against the steel while he got his grip and pulled, though he kept his commentary to himself so as not to distract his partner during the delicate process.

Luckily, the straps that had suspended the man from the tree came away easily enough once his weight was lifted from them, and with only a slight tug, Ghain was able to free Anders then lower him carefully to the ground. “Thank the first,” the rider wheezed gratefully as his back hit the forest floor and he allowed his head to do the same, registering for the first time that his helmet had gone missing at some point. Ghain’s sulfurous breath stirred the strands of his golden hair and Anders pushed the dragon’s snout away for a little fresh air as he took a moment to let all his blood sort itself out. His partner was probably right, if he’d tried to grab the dragon’s horn and support his own weight, his arms definitely would have given out and he’d have taken an unpleasant short-cut to the ground.

Physically exhausted but feeling wired by the unknown situation they’d found themselves in, Anders took a few more steadying breaths then forced himself upright, stretching and groaning as his muscles protested.

“Are you injured?” Ghain asked, sitting on his haunches with his wings folded neatly along his flanks as he regarded his partner with a large, bright yellow eye.

Anders grimaced as he rolled his head and felt his neck pop, then answered, “Don’t think so. Just a bit sore.” The captain looked up at the tree that had caught him, thoughtful frown on his face. It was huge, towering over Ghain by a significant margin, and had a line of shattered branches Anders suspected had slowed his fall before a sturdier one had finally caught and held him. “Straps must’ve broken in the storm, lucky I didn’t hit the ground, ” he remarked as he looked down at the lengths of leather still clipped into the sturdy belt he wore around his waist and tugged at them absently. They’d eventually failed their intended purpose, but at least they’d saved him in the long run. “Where’d you land? Everything still in one piece?” Anders asked as he turned his gaze to his dragon, double checking that his initial assessment while he’d still been halfway up a tree had been correct.

“I landed back that way, though we won’t get out through there, the hole I left in the canopy isn’t enough to get up out of easily. I seem to be fine otherwise,” Ghain replied, glancing first back the way he’d come, and then down at himself.

Anders grunted and nodded then slowly pushed up onto his feet, groaning again as he stretched some more before getting a good look at his surroundings. There was forest on all sides for as far as the eye could see, and while there wasn’t much in the way of underbrush, and quite a bit of distance between the individual trees, their canopies were thick and dense overhead. If absolutely necessary Ghain might be able to take off through sheer force, but doing that in the middle of the woods always risked tearing a wing membrane on an errant tree branch, and that was the last thing they needed. It was a miracle it hadn’t happened on the way down in the first place.

“Might as well start walking, I guess, find a place to take off so we can see where the blazes we landed,” Anders said after doing a brief check of his comm-spells and confirming that they were inoperable, no doubt well out of their range. “Smell anything promising?”

Ghain sniffed experimentally, then wrinkled his nose disdainfully and let out a huff that disturbed the leaves of the tree nearest him. “Nothing. Trees. Grass. There’s no wind here to carry anything else.”

He was right. Anders wasn’t sure if it was just a fluke of geography or a sign of how deep in the forest they were, but there wasn’t so much as the ghost of a breeze to be found stirring the leaves overhead. The air around them, while not hot, was oppressively warm and strangely tepid in a way the man wasn’t sure he’d ever experienced before. Still, they had to start somewhere, so after searching about a little and finding the captain’s missing helmet behind a nearby tree, Ghain picked a direction at random and started off, Anders astride his back once more.

The great dragon cut a weaving path through the woods, forced to change direction on occasion when the trees grew too close for him to pass, but kept going as straight as Anders’ compass could guide them in hopes of coming across… something. Anything. Something about the forest set them both on edge, but it wasn’t until they took a brief break so Anders could strip out of his armor and strap it to Ghain’s back that the man was finally able to put a finger on what was bothering him.

“It’s too blasted quiet,” he declared with a frown, worry only increasing now that he’d managed to peg what the problem was. It wasn’t just the lack of wind, either; now that he thought about it, the captain hadn’t seen a single squirrel or heard even one bird since he’d woken up. Besides him and Ghain, in fact, Anders hadn’t seen any living thing bigger than a bug that wasn’t a plant of some sort since he came to. “It’s not natural.”

Beside him, Ghain rumbled his agreement and stuck out his forelimb so Anders could re-mount, clearly ready to be on their way once again.

Eventually, the distant sound of the ocean caught both their ears and they eagerly made a bee-line for its source, Ghain pushing through tight gaps he might have gone around an hour before in his hurry to be free of the trees. Anders simply held on and kept his head down so it wouldn’t get taken off by an errant branch and heaved a sigh of relief when they finally left the tree line and burst out onto a long stretch of sandy dunes leading down to the sea. The emotion was fleeting, however, and turned quickly to dread as Ghain slowed to a walk then came to a a full stop at the top of a dune overlooking the water.

Scattered along the sandy shoreline were hundreds of whale bones; sun-bleached remains of entire pods that, seeming driven to madness, had thrown themselves onto the shore and perished there without resistance. Anders sat very still and quiet, regarding the scene with a deep sense of existential foreboding from his place on Ghain’s back.

The dragon remained frozen beneath him for a long minute until Anders finally broke the heavy silence and in a quiet voice, said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Ghain didn’t respond immediately, but took an uneasy step back, vast wings half-mantled at his sides as a subtle shudder rippled through his frame. “I-” he began, then stopped, voice quavering uncharacteristically. “How?”

Baffled, wondering if he was missing something, Anders leaned to one side a little in hopes of catching the dragon’s eye and asked, “What do you mean, how? Flap those great, flaming wings of yours and lets get out here! Plenty of room for a running start.” Rather than oblige, however, Ghain looked up, and then down the long, uninterrupted stretch of beach as if he wasn’t sure what his partner was asking him to do. Misgivings growing by the moment, the captain asked, “Ghain, what’s wrong? Talk to me.”

“I-” the dragon began, then hesitated again as he glanced back at his partner, and then down towards the morbid display around which the high tide still surged. Ghain gave his wings a few slow, unsteady flaps before mantling them again and saying, “I don’t… know how.”