A Dragon's Kiss
Zero watched plumes of waxy rock flow down the tower’s stem, heard the screaming pops and massive cracks as stone heated and exploded.
This is a fictionalization of a DnD campaign. Catch up from the start here.
Out of the tower and into the valley. Zero tripped into powdery snow so deep it swallowed him whole. Rough hands yanked him up to his feet, dusted him off. Huffing. Everyone breathed hard.
The valley loomed in the white, blue, gray and black of a wintery night. The snowfall had erased the path they had carved up the hillside just that evening. Couldn’t see far, the snow fell fast.
“What… was that?” panted the dwarf.
“Quiet, quiet,” the scholar rasped. He jabbed a shaking knuckle up at the tower, which protruded out of the cliff face that held this valley in darkness.
At first, all Zero saw through the snowfall was the light, like moonlight, a halo around the head of the tower. Then he realized it was flickering, moving, like some giant child had plopped a boulder into a ponderous lake of silver. And once he saw the shadow—unmistakably the silhouette of a dragon—dash across the turret he realized what he was looking at.
“Dragonfire,” Irwin breathed.
“It’s melting,” echoed the dwarf.
It was. Zero watched plumes of waxy rock flow down the tower’s stem, heard the screaming pops and massive cracks as stone heated and exploded. He felt fey, remembered only firework celebrations back home, imagined he was there, home, holding a warm cider.
The hunter, the only one of them with any sense, took Zero and the dwarf by their shoulders, dragged them against the cliff face, into shadow, safe from the burning light—and gaze—of the dragon.
“What happened?” the hunter growled after all of them—Zero and the dwarf, Irwin, and the scholar, and Hape the two-headed troll—were huddled together against the cold rock. “What happened?”
Zero felt Irwin glance at him, felt the dwarf do it too, felt the scholar’s eyes dart around, land on him more than once. Fuck it. They all already knew it was his fault. This kind of thing was always his fault.
“I—” he croaked. Their eyes snapped on him like bones. “—was… I found a piece of…” he extracted the token from his pocket: a coin, gold, embossed, probably nickel on the inside, from more than a thousand years ago, when dwarves still lived in this land, before the dragons drove them out, easily sold at a market for six to fifteen pieces, to a collector for more than seven-hundred.
The scholar, with a yelp, batted it from his hand. Flatly, it sank into the snow. “Light no fire, carry no gold,” he rasped. It was a saying, from long ago, among the superstitious; dragons could smell gold from a hundred miles away, see fires burning from even farther. If that were so then why had only one dragon come to this tower? The waste teemed with them, but only one had smelled the coin? How many saw the fire burning straight overhead?
“Fool,” howled the hunter. And they pummeled him.
“Damn fool.”
“Selfish—”
“Idiot, do you ever think before you—?”
“Never should have brought a squimmish little thief—”
“Squimmish? He’s a blundering drunk.”
“We ought to leave you here in the snow.”
“A death too fast for—”
They hadn’t even noticed that Ezeroth had slipped out of the squabble, that they were all just yelling at each other. They didn’t notice him either when the tower exploded, the blocks in the tower’s stem heated, ruptured like limestone pebbles in a cookfire—but louder, so loud deathly sheets of snow cratered into the valley. The dragon roared, distantly, perhaps with glee, and molten stone every way like a star shower, searing neat wounds into the snowy side.
Ezeroth was kicking around in the snow for his coin when he found it, a piece of rubble so hot it had burned away the snow around itself for a foot in each direction. It was a chalice with intricate etching along the handles, pure silver. A ruby stone in the side, flanked by two amethysts. Worthy of a king, sold to a king for thousands, for the price of a house, a place in court.
He felt dizzy, couldn’t have stopped himself from grabbing it had he thought of a reason to. He lurched down and seized it with both hands, didn’t realize the searing heat it held until he’d taken in it close enough to kiss.