Chapter 17: A Dragon's Trust
The growl began as a low vibration, a tectonic shifting deep in the earth. It wasn’t external. It came from the massive, scaled body beside him, thrumming through the stone floor and into Dan’s bones.
Dan jerked awake, heart hammering against his ribs. The cavern was dark, the fungi’s pulse slow and sleepy. Dargo was dreaming.
The dragon’s great head twitched, his lips peeling back from fangs longer than Dan’s forearm. A hiss of steam escaped his throat pouch, and the claws on one forelimabunched, scoring deep, screeching grooves into the bedrock. The low growl built, gaining layers—a sound of primordial rage and something else, sharper: distress.
Without thought, Dan moved. He scrambled from his own nest of furs, the new, soft tunic whispering against his skin. The bond was a live wire in his chest, buzzing with fractured, violent imagery—flashes of white stone spires, the smell of burning feathers, a sensation of terrible, rending loss. It wasn’t just a dream; it was a memory, tearing its way to the surface.
He didn’t hesitate. He walked right up to the seething mountain of dark scales and pressed himself against the hot, leathery hide at the juncture of Dargo’s neck and shoulder. He shoved his hands flat against the scale, ignoring the heat.
“Hey,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep but firm. “Stop it. You’re here. You’re in the mountain. It’s just stone and fungus and me.” He poured every ounce of calm he could muster down the bond, not as a magical push, but as a stubborn, unwavering fact. Safety. Warmth. The present. The here. The faint, lingering scent of the healing salve. The quiet drip of water. Here.
Dargo’s body stiffened. The growl hitched, stuttered. One gold eye, slit like a dagger wound, snapped open. It fixed on Dan, blind with nightmare fury for one terrifying second. Dan held his ground, kept his hands pressed tight, kept channeling that simple, solid sense of here.
The fury bled away, replaced by confusion, then a slow, dawning awareness. The eye focused. The massive head lifted slightly off the ground, turning to look at the human tucked against his neck.
Dan didn’t move. “Bad dream,” he stated softly, as if commenting on the weather. “It’s over.”
For a long moment, Dargo just stared. His breathing was still ragged, pumping great bellowsful of heated air through the cavern. The tension in his coiled muscles was a palpable force. Then, with a sigh that gusted Dan’s hair back, the dragon lowered his head. Not to its previous place, but closer. His snout came to rest gently on the furs just beyond Dan’s feet, so close Dan could feel the warm, mineral-scented breath washing over his legs.
A sound started, so deep Dan felt it more than heard it. It began in the dragon’s chest, a resonance that traveled up through the scales under Dan’s hands. A low, rolling purr. It was the sound of settling stone, of a contained furnace, of absolute, contended stillness. The last of the nightmare’s shards melted away under that steady vibration.
Dan, still leaning against him, let out a shaky breath of his own. His knees felt weak. He slid down to sit on the furs, his back resting against Dargo’s neck. The purr continued, a physical anchor in the dark.
“You’re a strange creature,” Dargo’s voice rumbled, not through the air, but through the contact, transmitted through scale and bone. It was muffled, private.
“Takes one to know one,” Dan mumbled, his eyes already drifting shut again, lulled by the warmth and the profound, rumbling quiet.
“Hmph.”
When Dan awoke again, it was to grey, predawn light filtering from the high cavern entrance and the smell of something cooking. Dargo was human-shaped, crouched by a small fire he’d coaxed to life on a flat stone. His braid was neat again, his expression its usual guarded granite. The only sign of the night was the slight, favoring stiffness in his movement as he turned a skewered piece of rabbit.
“You snore,” Dargo said without looking up.
“You have apocalyptic night terrors,” Dan retorted, sitting up and stretching. The memory of the purr vibrated in his memory. “I think I win the polite conversation topic.”
A ghost of a smirk. “Debatable. Come eat. The landslide’s curriculum begins today. It requires calories.”
After they ate, Dargo led him not to the vault, but to the open area by the obsidian pool. The water was perfectly still, a dark mirror reflecting the glowing fungi.
“Summon it,” Dargo commanded, leaning on his staff. “The armor.”
Dan focused. He reached for the feeling of the scales flowing over him, the click of the chest plate, the quiet support. He willed it to come.
Nothing happened.
He grunted, trying harder, his face screwing up with effort. The air remained empty. The pool remained undisturbed.
“You are begging,” Dargo observed. “You are asking politely for it to please come out and play. The armor is not a servant. It is an extension of your will. You do not ask. You decide. You decided to wear it yesterday to protect what is yours. Decide now.”
Dan took a breath, shutting his eyes. He stopped asking. He thought of the contractors. Their cold eyes. Their translocator orb. The smell of Dargo’s burning hide. A spike of protective anger, clean and sharp, lanced through him. He didn’t want the armor. He needed it. It was his. It was him.
A ripple passed over the surface of the obsidian pool. From its depths, a shadow disengaged, flowing up and out of the water like ink taking form. It streamed across the cavern floor and up Dan’s body in a silent, liquid wave. In three heartbeats, he was clad in the iridescent scales, the world slightly muted, his own breath loud in his ears.
“Better,” Dargo said. “Now make it do something useful. See the stalactite?” He pointed a long finger to a thick, tapered spike of rock hanging from the ceiling thirty feet away. “Break it.”
“From here?”
“The armor can amplify force. You are not just throwing a punch. You are projecting intent. You want that rock to break. So tell it to break.”
Dan looked at the stalactite. He imagined the solid stone snapping, crashing into the pool. He focused that image into a command, a demand, and funneled it through the gauntlet. He didn’t throw a punch; he just willed it.
The air in front of his clenched fist shimmered, warping like heat haze. A concussive thump, silent but felt in the lungs, echoed through the cavern. A three-foot section of the stalactite sheared off cleanly and plunged, with a tremendous splash, into the obsidian pool. The remaining stump vibrated, shedding dust.
Dan stared, stunned. He hadn’t even moved.
“Kinetic projection,” Dargo nodded, as if grading a satisfactory experiment. “Crude, but serviceable. The focus required is immense. You will have a splitting headache after three of those. But it is a surprise.” He limped a few steps closer. “Now, the real lesson. You have a new tool. The enemy knows your old ones. So we change the game entirely.”
He spent the next hours drilling Dan not in swordsmanship—Dargo dismissed blades as ‘pointy theatrics’—but in movement. In using the armor’s preternatural quiet and traction to move wrong. To run up a sloping wall for four steps to dodge, to drop into a silent crouch behind a boulder too small to hide a normal man, to use the clawed gauntlets to climb sheer surfaces with terrifying speed.
“They will expect a mage, or a dragon,” Dargo said, watching Dan scramble upside-down across a rock overhang. “They will not expect a gecko with a grudge and the ability to punch through stone from twenty paces. Be the gecko.”
Dan dropped, landing in a silent crouch. “This is insane.”
“It’s asymmetrical. It’s annoying. It wins.” Dargo’s eyes gleamed. “Now, again. And this time, do not sound like a bag of hammers when you land. You are a shadow. Be silent.”
By midday, Dan was drenched in sweat under the armor, muscles trembling from unfamiliar use. Dargo finally called a halt. He was paler than usual, a sheen of sweat on his own forehead. The leg was clearly paining him.
As Dan released the armor, sending it flowing back to its vault in a streak of shadow, Dargo lowered himself onto a rock, breathing carefully.
“We need to know what they’re doing,” Dan said, gulping water from a skin. “They’ve had time to regroup. To plan.”
“I know,” Dargo said, his gaze distant. “My scouts have been watching the lower valleys.”
“Scouts?” Dan blinked.
“The bats. The mountain foxes. The old raven who thinks he owns the eastern crag. They see. They whisper. The information is… fragmentary. But clear enough.” Dargo’s jaw tightened. “The church did not send more hunters. They sent a delegation. Led by a Prelate. They have made camp in the ruins of the Riverwatch Outpost, two valleys away. They are not hiding. They are waiting.”
“For what?”
“For parley.” Dargo spat the word like it was poison. “They have asked for a meeting. Under a flag of truce.”
Ice trickled down Dan’s spine. “It’s a trap.”
“Obviously. But it is a formal one. They follow their codes. The Prelate himself is there. That is… significant. And dangerous.” Dargo looked at Dan, his gold eyes hard. “They are not coming in force to kill me. They are coming to judge, to offer terms, or to declare a formal crusade that would bring half the continent down on this mountain. They want to see me. To see what I harbor.”
“Me,” Dan whispered.
“You are the ‘unlicensed magical artifact,’” Dargo said, his voice flat. “The aberration I have ‘stolen’ and ‘corrupted.’ Their doctrine is clear. To peacefully harbor an abomination is as great a sin as being one. They want to look me in the eye and see if I will hand you over to be purged. My refusal is the justification they need for holy war.”
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the drip of water. The comfortable training, the strange intimacy of the night, shattered against the cold, political reality.
“What do we do?” Dan asked.
“We go,” Dargo said, pushing himself to his feet with a grunt.
“What? Into the trap?”
“Into their theatre. They want a performance? We will give them one. But not the one they expect.” A slow, dangerous smile spread across Dargo’s face, all sharp edges and dark promise. “You are not an artifact, Dan. You are my ally. My strategist. My gecko. So, we will go. And we will show the good Prelate exactly what kind of landslide he’s trying to stand in front of.”
He leaned on his staff,
The smile vanished, replaced by sheer, focused practicality. "But first, we practice the performance. You need to be more than familiar with that armor. You need to be bored with it. It needs to be like breathing." He pointed back towards the vault passage. "Summon it. We're going outside."
"Outside? It's daylight."
"Your enemies won't only attack in the convenient dark, Dan. The armor's color-shift will help, but you need to feel the sun on it, learn how light plays across the scales." Dargo’s gaze was uncompromising. "Move."
They spent the afternoon on the wind-scoured peaks high above the main cavern entrance. Dan learned the armor’s limits were largely his own. He learned to judge leaps across crevasses, the claws finding purchase in granite where no human hand could grip. He practiced the silent, kinetic punches until his head throbbed in time with his heartbeat, shattering glacial pocks and old, fragile stone.
Dargo observed from a perch, a dark statue against the endless sky, offering curt corrections. "Your footfall is still too heavy. You think like a two-legged creature. Think like you have four. Distribute your weight." Or, after Dan botched a landing and rolled, "Graceful. Like a dropped sack of potatoes. Again."
But between drills, Dan played. It started as testing—could he hang from an overhang by just the claws? Could he run laterally along a vertical rock face? The armor responded to clear intent, its traction supernatural. He found he could stick to sheer surfaces for terrifying, exhilarating seconds before pushing off.
He became, as Dargo had ordered, a gecko.
Dargo watched this experimentation with a silent, gauging intensity. On the third day, as a misty dawn bled into the valleys, the dragon shifted. The air compacted, heat shimmered, and then the massive, dark-scaled form stood on the ledge, larger than the cottage Dan grew up in. Dargo stretched, his wings momentarily blotting out the weak sun.
"Come here," Dargo's voice echoed in his mind, the bond-thrum more pronounced in this form.
Dan walked to the ledge's edge. The drop was stomach-lurching, a thousand feet of nothing to a jagged ravine below. "What?"
"You've been a gecko on rocks. Now be a gecko on something that moves." Dargo lowered his neck, presenting the broad, sloping plane of his scaled shoulder. "The armor will hold you. I will not fly. But I am going to the Sunspire Ledge. It is three peaks over. You will come with me."
Dan’s mouth went dry. "You want me to... climb on you? While you walk?"
"I want you to stay on me. However you can manage it. Use the claws. Use the adhesion. Do not fall off. It would be a long, noisy, and ultimately messy descent." A plume of smoke curled from one nostril. "Consider it advanced terrain training."
Heart hammering against the dark scales of his chest plate, Dan approached. He placed a clawed hand on Dargo’s shoulder scale. It was warm, like sun-baked stone, and each individual scale was the size of a dinner plate, with deep grooves between them. He dug the points of his gauntlets in and pulled himself up.
The world tilted. Dargo moved with a casual, tectonic grace, beginning a steady, ground-eating walk along the spine of the mountain. It was nothing like climbing rock. This was alive. Muscles shifted and rolled beneath the hide. The rhythm was unpredictable, a living earthquake.
Dan scrambled, flattening himself. The wind ripped at him. He drove his claws into the gaps between scales, not enough to pierce, but to anchor. He willed the armor’s soles to adhere. It was a constant, frantic calculation of physics and fear. He inched forward, moving towards the relative stability at the base of Dargo’s long neck.
He wasn't riding. He was clinging for his life on a moving mountainside.
"Your panic is loud," Dargo's thought came, amused. "And useless. Breathe. Move with the motion. You are not fighting me. You are a burr. A very nervous, prickly burr."
Dan gritted his teeth, forced a breath in. He tried to feel the rhythm, to let his body loosen and absorb the shifts instead of resisting them. He made it to the neck, wedging himself in a sheltered hollow where two massive vertebrae met. The view was catastrophic and breathtaking. The world streamed by below, a tapestry of deep shadows and sharp, sunlit rock.
Dargo traversed a narrow ridge no wider than a cart path, a sheer drop on either side. Dan squeezed his eyes shut, then forced them open. Be the gecko. He focused on the texture under his hands, the steady, powerful pulse of the dragon’s life through the bond, the sheer, undeniable reality of it.
By the time Dargo settled onto the flat, windswept expanse of Sunspire Ledge, Dan’s arms were trembling with exhaustion, but he was still there. He unhooked his claws and slid down, his boots scraping on stone.
Dargo shifted back, human form coalescing from scale and smoke. He was breathing deeply, a flush of exertion on his cheeks, but his eyes were sharp. "You stayed on."
"Barely," Dan panted, releasing the armor. It fled back towards the distant vault, a streak of shadow against the rock.
"Barely counts. You understand the difference now? Between stone and a living thing? Between a wall and a weapon?"
Dan nodded, still catching his breath. He did understand. The armor wasn't just for hiding or hitting. It was for surviving landscapes that shouldn't be traversed, for turning the body of the world—or his ally—into a path.
"Good." Dargo looked out across the ranges, towards the distant haze where the Riverwatch Outpost lay. "Because when we walk into that tent, they will see a human and a limping man. That is the performance. But in your head, you will now know something else. You will know you can cling to a dragon’s back in a gale. You will know you can walk on walls. That knowledge will be in your eyes. And it will make them uneasy."
He turned, starting the long trek back. "We leave at first light tomorrow. The Prelate awaits his audience." He glanced back, his expression unreadable. "Try not to look like a sack of potatoes when we arrive."
The trek back was silent, filled with the crunch of gravel underfoot and the weight of what tomorrow meant. Dan’s muscles ached in new, educational ways, every twinge a lesson in leverage and survival. Dargo’s limp was more pronounced on the descent, a tightness around his eyes betraying the pain he’d ignored during the drill.
Back in the main cavern, the familiar damp heat was a relief. Dargo didn’t head for the furs. He moved toward a wide, flat slab of dark basalt that jutted into a shaft of afternoon sun, its surface worn smooth by centuries. The Sunning Rock.
With a grunt of effort, he shifted. The transformation was slower this time, muscle and bone rearranging itself with a weary sigh. When it was done, the massive dragon lay curled on the warm stone, one wing slightly unfolded to catch the light. A low rumble, not quite a purr but something deeper and more fatigued, vibrated from his chest. He laid his great head down, a puff of dust rising from his nostrils, and closed his eyes. The vigilance was gone, replaced by the absolute, vulnerable stillness of a creature taking essential heat.
Dan watched for a moment, the command from the vault days echoing in his head: learn the terrain of Dargo’s body. This was his chance. It wasn’t just about the upcoming parley. It was about everything that might come after.
He approached quietly, the armor still dismissed. This was a survey, not an assault.
He started at the hind leg, the bandage hidden beneath scales. The area around it was tense, the plates locked tight even in sleep. A bad spot. Vulnerable. He moved forward along the flank. The scales here were larger, as big as shields, and overlapped like sophisticated plate armor. The grooves between them were deep. Perfect handholds. Secure.
His fingers trailed over them, feeling the surprising warmth, the slight give of the leathery skin beneath. He rounded the curve of the massive ribcage. Here, just behind the foreleg, was a shallow depression where the scale pattern swirled. It was sheltered, partly overhung by the joint of the wing. Cover. If something came from above, he could wedge himself here, protected on three sides by dragon.
The sun shifted, a beam lighting the column of Dargo’s neck. Dan moved there. The scales were smaller, tighter, like exquisite mail. He pressed his palm flat against the side. The pulse beneath was a slow, world-moving thud. This is where he’d pressed himself during the nightmare. It felt like the heart of the storm, powerful and strangely confidential.
On a whim, he scratched gently with his fingernails, following the grain of a scale.
The deep, resting rumble shifted pitch. It deepened, smoothed out, becoming a resonant, concrete purr that traveled up through Dan’s feet. A shiver of pure instinct ran through the dragon’s form, a slight loosening of a coiled tendon near the shoulder.
Dan’s eyebrows rose. He did it again, a little firmer, in the same spot.
The purr intensified. It was a sound you felt in your molars. Dargo’s head, the size of a cart, nudged imperceptibly closer, seeking the pressure. The spot was just below the jaw hinge, where the rigid scale gave way to something softer.
Noted, Dan thought, a strange, quiet triumph curling in his chest.
He continued his reconnaissance. The base of the skull was a fortress, all armored plates and spines. No good. The wing-joint itself was complex, a landscape of layered, knife-sharp edges and thick, elastic membrane. Dangerous. But where the leading edge of the wing met the body, there was a seamless channel, a natural gutter. He could lie there, anchored, if Dargo was in flight. The idea was ludicrous and thrilling.
His mapping complete, Dan simply stood in the sunbeam beside the sleeping dragon. The heat was immense, baking into his bones. The purr was a constant, grounding frequency. He leaned back against the warm, pebbled hide, feeling the rise and fall of breath that moved his entire world.
He didn’t hear Dargo wake. He felt it. The purr stopped. The breath hitched, changed rhythm. The great gold eye opened, slitted, and focused on him not with alarm, but with a weary, knowing intensity.
“Taking inventory?” Dargo’s mental voice was gravelly with sleep.
“Just learning the landscape,” Dan said quietly, not moving from his spot. “A gecko’s got to know his stone.”
Dargo was silent for a long moment. The eye closed. He adjusted his head, presenting more of that spot below his jaw. The purr rumbled back to life, louder now, an unmistakable invitation.
“See anything you liked?” The question was a dry murmur in his mind, laced with a vulnerability so well-hidden it was almost invisible.
“A few strategic points,” Dan said, his own voice softening. He reached up and scratched the spot again. The purr crescendoed. “Some defensible positions.”
“Hmph. Good.”
The sun slid another degree. Tomorrow hung over them, a blade yet to fall. But here, on the warm rock, with the dragon’s consent humming under his fingers, Dan felt a fierce, terrible clarity. He knew the terrain. He knew where to hide. He knew what the mountain liked.
They were ready.