"Whenever you find yourself in a high place, make certain to honor Heng. Feel his light, and know he sees you."

Gungar Horris, priest of Heng

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It wasn't long before the forest again ended. Ki’margarhara was close enough I could see the blur of his neck over a nearby hill. Marg bristled and I put a hand on his arm.

“Look, it doesn't even know we're here. Just think of it as climbing a tree. He's about as smart as one.” I assured him, and he loosed a reluctant chuckle.

I put on a show for Marg, but I was shaking myself. There were no more excuses. This time, I went up or I went down. We passed into the dragon’s shadow, an entire river of darkness in the later afternoon light. Or even a river of the dragon’s own black blood. Was being in its miles of shadow corrupting? Would my broken claw grow back a dragon’s talon?

It took surprisingly long to reach the dragon’s feet. Three claws curled out to the side, like it had stepped on an ogre’s ribcage. The fortress held still while its neck arced across the sky and cropped trees like a cow did grass.

My heart caught in my throat. Marg looked like a child besides just those ivory talons, and I a discarded doll. The levers of my neck didn't even pull far enough to focus my view on his head. I was short! My head was never meant to be that far off the ground!

“You know that if I didn’t think you could do this, I wouldn't have gone so far for you.” Kelk nudged my shoulder.

“What, making friends with people ready to kill you isn't every day for you?” I weakly smiled. “Maybe that's just me lately.”

“Not sure I would call you a friend just yet. But I suppose I admire what you have accomplished today. Here, this might be necessary.” Kelk handed me his axe. It was a one-hander, though a touch on the heavy side. Across from the axe blade, there was a smaller pick, something that could be stabbed through a convenient eye hole or catch a weapon. Or pry a long-buried sword out of a fortress-sized dragon.

“Not sure you should admire everything.” I took the axe and turned it over a few times in my hands. I would still get a rash touching it directly due to the iron content, but it was good steel. It would hold up fine to anything I did. I looped it through my belt and took a few final checks. When I could delay no longer, I approached Marg.

“Last chance to back out.” I said, hitching my claws into his skirt.

Marg remained silent and shook his head. He looked haunted when his eyes explored the dragon’s acres of craggy hide. We were mere feet away now, close enough to see the insects crawling among the moss and lichen that coated that stony skin. The dragon made no indication of noticing us. It seemed to be done eating for the day, and now just stood still, head slowly waving back and forth like a sunflower in a breeze. Did it ever sleep? Was it perhaps sleeping now? Were a dragon’s dreams as dark as the abyss it fell from?

“Yuh take duh sword.” Marg scooped me off the ground and placed me on his back. “Uh wurk un huldling un.”

“If he bleeds, don’t touch it.” I nodded. I already felt bad about pressuring him into coming. I would handle the riskiest part, as much as the thought disturbed me.

I felt the back muscles beneath me flex when Marg took hold of a mossy stone. This was what I was hoping for. As weakened as much of his body was, Marg still had the back muscles of a climber. We moved slowly but surely, Marg carefully feeling out handholds under the moss. The ground slowly moved away, until Kelk and Shiro were just blurry little blobs. I turned and focused upwards. No thinking about what was below. Only in front of me. I scanned the cliffside for any sign of a foreign object. There was a birds nest over my head, and a dozen feet down there was a branch that had somehow become stuck to the creature, but no sign of a sword. We continued.

Soon, Marg’s hand overlapped with the ridge of Ki’margarhara’s shoulder blade, and we clambered up onto the first spot we could simply stand. The dragon’s shoulder was broad enough that even Marg had plenty of room to stand, and the rest of the way up the back was a gentle slope, like the rolling hills below. Marg sat down to rest, but I scrambled the rest of the way up on my own. The shadows were growing long. I had seen how humans moved at night, and I was pretty sure ogres were the same. We couldn’t afford to climb in the darkness, and I definitely wasn’t staying here overnight.

Where did Ki’pokiki tell me the sword was? I thought. I think she said specifically where it was. His neck?

I looked to that towering trunk. Even from the dragon’s back, it seemed endless, sprouting like an enormous tree and just continuing up and up into the clouds. For a moment, I forgot myself. It was beautiful, in a way. Artistic, the way Ki’margarhara’s shapes flowed together, the line of his body like a river. Could such a creature really be a vessel of chaos?

When I admired that sweeping tower, something caught my eye. It took a few blinks to understand what it was. A splotch of unusual colors, a blotch on the world. Green that was almost blue, and around it, black. That was it.

It stuck out like a tiny tree branch, leather grip long rotted away to reveal the metal below. Every exposed inch, from the small hand guard to the disk-shaped pommel, was coated in blue-green patina, layered in painterly strokes by the ages. The “golden sword” was bronze. Its embedded state created a discontinuity in Ki’margarhara’s hide, a swollen carbuncle that pressed outwards, shoving aside stone in favor of a thinner scales. The dragon’s body had never truly swallowed up the sword, and instead seemed intent on rejecting it entirely.

I winced when I drew near. My own skin prickled, like I had just been stuck with envenomed splinters. Perhaps Ki’margarhara was too mindless to feel pain. I certainly hoped so. This would likely finally draw its attention to me, otherwise. I climbed just a bit and found a squishy mass where the sword entered flesh, like black tree gum somebody had already chewed up. I decided not to touch it in case it was still dangerous. It was difficult to know what parts of a dragon would and wouldn’t be toxic.

Unfortunately, here came the worst part. Our fabled hero hadn't made things easy on us and stabbed his foe in the spine. Instead, the sword was planted firmly in the side of the neck, hanging with nothing but sky between the blade and the ground. Unconsciously, my eyes dipped downwards. I couldn’t even see Kelk and Shiro anymore. They were too blurred out at that distance. For an instant, I lost all sense of distance. The green below and the green around me spun together in a dizzying mass. I dug my claws into the moss to keep my balance.

I took a few deep breaths and looked up to avoid a repeat. The sun was touching the mountains now, painting the sky with broad swaths of orange and pink. There were great towers across Gurngamos dedicated to the god of the sun, common points of pilgrimage for people who sought the blessings of Heng. Was I so close to his watchful eye now? If he was real, was he watching me on the back of this dragon? I hoped so. A god of order would surely defend his children from an incarnation of chaos.

Back to the shoulder blade I clambered to fetch Marg. I tied one end of our rope around his wrist and the other around my waist. After a few tugs from me and one from him that sent me sprawling, I was confident it would hold. We returned to the neck and I began feeling out a path. Marg offered a silent prayer to Heng, apparently feeling the same divine influence I had. Hopefully the words of a true believer would reach him if mine had not. I slowly worked my way around the vast neck until I was directly below the golden sword’s hilt. My toes found footholds and I got to work.

My first attempt was to wrap both hands around the sword’s hilt and pull. I already expected it not to budge with just my miniscule goblin strength, and unfortunately, I was correct. I would have better luck trying to pull the entire dragon around. I released the hilt to fumble at my waist until I felt the sting of steel. A bit more fumbling, and Kelk’s axe was in hand. Slowly I raised myself up to the blister the sword sat in. I was hoping not to rely on this. Freeing the sword from the dragon’s hide with a minimum of pain was my ideal. Well, this would be a good chance to collect some blood at least. Carefully, I scraped away some of the gummy dried blood with the hook end of the axe. 

At first there was no change, but at some point I opened a vein. Black blood bubbled out, flowing by what seemed to be its own whim. Little sticky tendrils reached out like the eyestalks of a slug and I had to pull back to avoid being touched. Patches of moss blackened and fell off the dragon at the blood’s merest touch. It was more disturbing than I had anticipated, flowing upwards and outwards and in every direction it wanted, rather than heeding the call of the earth. How was I supposed to bottle this!?

Frustration bubbling up when the blood simply refused to drip into the bottle I placed under it, I went back to trying to get the sword out. I had scraped away enough of the scab to work the axe’s hook under the sword’s guard. It fit tight and I began to lever it out. With a series of hideous squelches, the sword began to slide out, but so did torrents more blood. Streams of pitch black ooze splattered straight down at my feet. I yelped and jumped to dangle off of the hilt by one hand. I gasped and sputtered and below, tendrils of blood waved out, nearly reaching my toes. I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t on a creature, I was on a world unto itself, with its own rules. I hadn’t learned the rules, and now it was time to pay.

My grip was rapidly weakening, and worse, I felt a deep shudder running through the dragon’s body. Was it beginning to take notice of the pain in its neck? What could I do if it was?

Learn. Adapt. Do what you have been doing till now. A mind came unbidden in the back of my skull. How does the blood follow me, for example?

I blinked. That was a good question. An award-winning question, even. I put away the axe to swing up higher, out of reach of the blood. None of it came my way. It didn’t have eyes, so how did it find me? I perched on top of the sword and waved a hand in front of the oozing sore. Immediately, sticky strands reached out and I had to withdraw to avoid contact. Did it react to everything like that? I withdrew my axe again and did the same motion. The blood didn’t react. Did it only respond to living things? It made sense, I supposed. Magic only worked well on plants and animals, and dragon blood worked the same. It couldn’t corrupt steel. Curiosity overcame my fear for a moment. I needed that blood.

I scrambled at my bottles again, freed one, fumbled It. The glass spun away into the abyss. Dammit. I was rushing. I forced myself to slow down, carefully pulling the rope sash off of my shoulders. Using my hand as bait, it was surprisingly easy to lure the blood into the bottles. I simply had to hold my hand behind the glass and let the blood flow in. Apparently the blood wasn't any smarter than the dragon it came from. Honestly at this point I was grateful. This didn't need to get any weirder.

I was able to get 4 bottles of inky ichor. The rest were too small to be safely filled, at risk of overflowing. The container’s danced against my chest as the blood tried to escape. It was distracting, but I had regained enough strength to get back to what I was doing. I lowered myself on the left side of the cut, where the blood hadn’t begun to spill. Again I hooked the axe’s spike end into that tiny gap between flesh and metal and wrenched at it. Finally, with a final splatter of blood and rumbling groan, it slid free. Unthinking, I reached out to grab it, and instantly a spot of black appeared on my hand.

It had me, and I slid into darkness.