Blinked once.
For a second, nothing. Then the orb rose, and the ground under me vibrated. Up, up it went, rising higher and higher until I thought it couldn’t go any further, and yet it did. My face angled back and back and back until I stared nearly straight up.
There, so far above,twoblue orbs now glowed in the darkness, each perfectly positioned to form a symmetry.
Slit eyes. Angular. Set at the side of the head.
A reptilian face.
Elisabet had taught me about reptiles, shown me their drawings in books. They were the world’s most ancient creatures, here before bears or birds or humans. Most were small, but some were large—longer than us by a few feet. Not too large to be hunted.
We had long ago wiped them off the surface of the world. Hunted, killed, eaten.
But this…
“Ssyth… kaer faen.” The words erupted in a sibilant hiss, slithering across stone and striking into my ears. “Vas ssu… ssen skavor?”
That sounded Faerish. I couldn’t parse the words, only the feeling: sharp, piercing anger. The kind of anger felt with the entire body, like lightning’s passage.
The fear was like nothing I’d experienced. Not when the wall fell, or when the wraiths sliced my people apart, or when I faced Rhiannon’s swords and her driving magic.
This was primal, ancient, inescapable by the reasoning and logic I’d always used to get myself out of a knot. This was nothing like standing before the spiritstag; in a god’s presence I’d been paralyzed by awe. Here, I felt only a prey instinct. I felt likemeat.
Dragon. This creature could be nothing else.
“Ssu… zhent nokh,” the voice hissed. “Ssu… zhent kuhl.”
A third light appeared, just between and below the two blue eyes. A ball of blue light, flickering and dancing inside the throat of an enormous maw lined with teeth.
Blue fire. Blue death.
So much of it.
Dorian stepped up beside me, his arm darting across my body as though he could stop the approaching hell. “Vesth. Ssa… Carysvyrn.”
With his other hand, he pulled aside the neck of his jerkin. The spiritstag’s brand appeared, the lines of it glowing into the darkness of the cave. Brighter light than the key I held. Bolder than a midday sun.
The blue flame flickered, flickered in the creature’s enormous maw, held in a cruel suspension.
Then, with aching slowness, it receded. Disappeared.
“Var ssa ne szyl… ssu-sol?” the voice said.
“Ssa Vae-morn, velCarys,” Dorian said. “Ssa szyl sol… Orakh.”
A pause. The icy eyes shifted—locked onto me.
Then, so fast I could hardly follow, the head arced down, forward. Toward me.
From the darkness, a black, gleaming maw appeared in the crystal’s light. Nostrils as large as me, the tips of white teeth emerging from a narrow jaw still three times as wide as me.
The maw hovered so close, I could have reached out and touched the pointed end of one of those teeth. The eyes were glacial, shifting pools of blue not ten paces away.
“Speak, child of storms,” the sibilant voice said. “Let me hear your fear.”
I didn’t have words. Right now, I barely had functional legs.
Speak. Speak.Speak.