“This is where we start, though, right? Where you’ve been before, with Alfhild?” Bjorn asks with a growl now as he crosses his arms. My First Drake is resplendent tonight in his classic outfit of black motorcycle leathers with a bombardier jacket, the white lambswool collar shining bright beneath the high moon. He’s towering and fit, his thick muscles bulging beneath his leathers in the moonlight.
Though I can’t take a single moment to enjoy it tonight.
We have Alfhild’s lair to find, and our twins to save; I nod, and we all face the door. Ström has it open in a moment with a clever twist of his magic; his Bone Magic loves all things cursed and magical and has figured out the minimal magical locking mechanism on this door in a trice.
I can even feel how Alfhild’s dark, devouring power is not in that door at all. What lingers here now is only the disaster of all the dead dragon bones still interred here.
A creeping horror of cruelty and death against Bloodwalkers and their mates.
“Fuck. This place feels a hundred times worse thanUnhaemmerten,” Bjorn growls now as Ström nods to the open gate and we all move forward to step in. Bjorn shoulders forward to enter first, always protective to the max, but it’s Baldur who gets the drop on him.
His lithe, willowy body zips past Bjorn in the night, his long blond hair braided tonight, swishing like a whipping ghost as he snaps past Bjorn. Bjorn scowls and snorts; but where he once might have lost his temper at someone showing him up like that, he only opens his hand ironically now, as if inviting Baldur inside.
Baldur’s already in, however, already raising his own cosmic-bright magic to make a light inside the cairn, as Bjorn motions us all inside. He protects our rear now as we come into a low rotunda of forbidding black granite.
No openings anywhere.
“If there are so many cairns, why are there no doors?” I ask as I grow frustrated now, feeling how time is far too short for my Third Drake and his twin. “Shouldn’t there be paths to each cairn, for the Blood Dragons who live in Copenhagen to visit their dead?”
“This isn’t a place for visiting.” Ström answers darkly now as he gazes around. As he raises his power in a midnight wave, dark crimson magic searing through his power, I finally see horribly intense curse-work on the walls.
Forbidding any dragon who might come here to visit those within.
“They were locked away, these Bloodwalkers and their mates,” Baldur says with a quiet intensity now as he sets his jaw, surveying the walls. “All their souls are still here, trapped inside their bones, forever in torment. Because of what was done to them… and how they simply cannot let it go.”
“These Bloodwalkers and their mates never returned to the Ancestors because of how badly they were tortured—and how much they want revenge,” I snarl now, bristling even more for war against Jarl Alexander Christensen than I was before. I know I’m right, as Aesa’s Truthstone flares on my chest now, snarling at what was done to all these ancient Bloodwalkers and their mates.
But even this is something to revisit another time.
“Ström?” I ask him now, because curses are Ström’s thing. He’s already on it, sweeping his dark, shimmering Bone Magic over each area of curses on the walls, inspecting them. After a moment, he’s done them all, the low rotunda not terribly large. Shaking his head, he looks at me again, his emerald eyes vibrant in the light of Baldur’s magic.
“This is pretty strong curse-work in here, but none of it is Alfhild’s.” Ström nods at one section of the wall, strangely blank of cursing. “All her shit must have broken when she died. This is our way in; the ancient cursing from the Jarls of Denmark is gone here, probably removed by her. This is the passageway to her lair. I’m certain of it.”
“So are we going in or what?” Bjorn waves an impatient hand at the curse-empty section of wall.
“We’re going in.” Again, Baldur is the one to push forward, leaving Bjorn in his wake. Setting a hand against the empty section of wall, he pushes on it, then scowls—then thrusts a tremendous blast of his magic at it, shattering it. Stone chips fly everywhere, as Bjorn and Ström shield me from debris. As the dust clears, a vaulted stone passage is revealed.
Bjorn is growling like a raging bear now as he turns towards Baldur.
“What?” Baldur asks him as he lifts an eyebrow.
“Just fucking shred us all with shrapnel, why don’t you?!” Bjorn snarls at him now, waving a hand.
“You got shields up in time.” Giving a tight smile, Baldur doesn’t back down from my ferocious First Drake’s fuming, as hot diamond and dark sapphire take his eyes. I know an altercation is going to happen between them, some dark night when we’re not already occupied.
But that night is not now, as Ström chuckles and moves on through. “Well, I suppose the way is open.”
Ström waves at us to come into the vaulted stone passage, though I pause now. Even as everyone else moves forward, I stand riveted, swamped by a sudden, tremendous sense of doom.
I know where it’s coming from; far off in the Jarl’s palace, I feel Mikkel wake from unconsciousness, feigning still being out so he’s not tortured anew. He’s barely conscious and I know my other drakes can’t feel him as well as I can, even though we share power multi-ways now.
But as the feeling swamps me of never being able to survive this, of how horribly I just fucked up everything, my entire life and all the people I love, I know it’s Mikkel.
They’re his emotions and they aren’t, as my own inner darkness roils with his now, swamping me at everything I may have to put my drakes through soon to have any chance at even battling the Black Dragon.
What the Jarl of Copenhagen is doing to Mikkel is small potatoes to what we might face next. Because the Dragon of All Souls isn’t evenremotely human, and it isn’t stopping, as a terrible sense of futility devours me now.
As everyone else enters the passage, I hide my intense upset from my bound drakes. One drake feels it, however. Stronger than the rest, Baldur’s gaze snaps around, his eyes burning opal-gold and crimson for battle now as that blue and diamond-white fire devours their center. Holding back, he comes to me.
