Chapter 9
“This is it,” he whispered, his voice thin as dried vellum. “The primary brood-hollow. The origin of the blight.”
I paused at the threshold, scanning the vaulted gloom beyond. My sword arm was loose at my side, my fingers resting on the hilt of my iron broadsword. The strange, tranquil numbness that followed Julian’s tightening of the torc still blanketed my thoughts, wrapping my mind in thick wool. The questions that had clawed at my throat on the bridge—about my strength, about my broken memory, about the bronze sentry’s weeping golden eye—were buried beneath layers of cool, quiet obedience.
Yet my body knew things my mind could not name.
As we stepped between the jet gates, the scent hit me again. Not brimstone. Not decay.
It was summer thunder. It was sunlight baking on river stones, crushed cedar, and wild pine honey. It filled my chest like a long-denied drink of cold spring water, spreading a deep, radiant warmth through the marrow of my bones. For the first time since we had entered the caldera, my lungs did not feel starved; they expanded effortlessly, drinking in the volcanic air as if I had finally surfaced from a drowning sea.
“Sariyah.”
Julian stopped three paces inside the entry hall. His legs gave way beneath him, and he sank onto one knee on the glassy floor. The heavy scholar’s pack slipped from his shoulder, spilling brass scroll-tubes across the obsidian tiles with a sharp, echoing clatter.
“Julian!” I dropped to my knees beside him, my arms catching him before his forehead could strike the stone.
His face was ghostly, drenched in cold sweat, his slate-gray eyes dilated until the irises were barely visible. He looked so frail, so impossibly brittle in the face of this primordial mountain. The sight of him shivering in my grip wrenched my heart with an agonizing, protective ache. He had crossed an empire’s graveyard with me, starved with me, bled with me, all for the dream of a quiet valley with sweet clover and tall glass windows.
“I’m here,” I murmured, smoothing the wet, dark hair from his forehead. “You don't have to walk anymore. Stay behind me.”
“No,” he wheezed, his fingers trembling violently as he reached into his tunic. He fumbled inside his inner pocket, his breath coming in jagged, desperate gasps. “No... you cannot... an ordinary blade will not suffice. The hide... the heart-chamber is too deep.”
He drew forth a weapon I had never seen him carry.
It was a dagger, ten inches of dull, matte-gray metal that devoured the ambient light. Its blade was carved with jagged, spiraling grooves inlaid with powdered bone and dried crimson lacquer, and its crossguard was forged in the shape of two entwined serpents whose fangs bit directly into the hilt.
The moment the dagger cleared his tunic, a foul, metallic stench stung the air—the smell of stagnant grave-water and rancid lead. The skin along my arms prickled with instant revulsion.
“The Sealing Blade,” Julian rasped, holding the hilt out toward me. His hands were shaking so hard that the dark metal clinked against his silver ring. “Forged by the High Archons before the fall. Anointed with basilisk venom and null-salts. A mortal thrust to the throat-cleft will curdle her ichor in three heartbeats.”
I looked at the dagger. Every instinct in my gut recoiled from it. The metal seemed dead, an abomination against the sweet, ozone-rich air of the hall.
“Julian,” I hesitated, my hand hovering above the hilt. “Why didn't you give this to me before the canyon drake?”
His gray eyes flared with that sudden, sharp panic, darting to my face like trapped sparrows. “Because it is singular! Irreplaceable! It carries only enough venom for the Matriarch! If you had wasted it on a common scavenger, mankind would remain chained forever!”
His voice broke on the final syllable, cracking into a desperate plea. He caught my wrist, his freezing fingers pressing against my pulse point.
“Take it, Sariyah,” he begged, his eyes filling with tears. “Please. Do this for our future. For the valley. For me.”
The mention of the valley—of our quiet life together, of his gentle mouth against mine by the hearth—melted the hesitation from my limbs. I could not bear to see him beg. I could not bear the terror that reduced this brilliant, noble man to a trembling wreck on the stone.
“I’ll take it,” I said softly.
I took the dagger from his hands. The hilt was freezing, like gripping an icicle carved from rotten bone, but I slid it into the leather sheath at my belt beside my broadsword.
Julian slumped back against the jet portal, letting out a ragged shudder of relief. “Straight to the cleft below the throat,” he whispered, his eyes closing briefly. “Do not look into her eyes. Do not let her speak. She is the mother of all deceit.”
“Stay here,” I instructed, adjusting my sword belt and rising to my feet. “Wait by the threshold. If she wakes before I strike, the collapse will bring the cavern down. If things go wrong, you run south. Do you hear me?”
He looked up at me, his slate eyes dark, churning with a tempest of unspeakable, suffocating emotion—guilt, adoration, and a feverish, terrified hunger that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
“I won't run,” he whispered, his lips trembling. “I go where you go, my brave weapon.”
*My weapon.*
The word struck a strange, hollow chord against my ribs, but before the doubt could seed itself, I turned away from him and stepped into the Sanctum.
***
The Sanctum of the Sleeping Matriarch was not a cave; it was a cathedral of living, breathing light.
The ceiling arched hundreds of feet above, lost in a swirling canopy of golden vapor that rained faint, luminous spores across the floor. Beneath my boots, the obsidian tiles gave way to a vast, circular floor composed of translucent white quartz, lit from beneath by subterranean rivers of golden magma. The glow was soft, amber, bathing the immense hall in the warm, perpetual twilight of an autumn evening.
And at the center of the quartz floor, upon a dais of cooled volcanic gold, lay the Matriarch.
My breath caught in my throat. My feet halted of their own accord.
Julian had spent two years telling me tales of the draconic matriarchs. In his leather codices, they were depicted as monstrous vermin—scabbed, bloated leviathans with jaws dripping green bile, eyes filled with mindless sadism, hoarding the bones of slaughtered infants upon mountains of stolen gold.
The creature before me was none of those things.
She was magnificent.
She was larger than any siege engine, easily eighty paces from the crown of her horns to the taper of her coiled tail, yet her form was one of breathtaking, regal elegance. Her scales were not obsidian or scorched bronze; they were an incandescent, shimmering gold, catching the amber light of the magma and casting soft, radiant halos across the cavern walls. Four sweeping horns of pearlescent ivory curved backward from her brow like an imperial crown, polished smooth by centuries of flight through high, frozen clouds.
