Chapter 28: The Hunters' Approach
The fire’s crackle was suddenly the loudest sound in the world. Dargo didn’t repeat himself. He didn’t need to. The look in his gold eyes—a predatory, absolute focus—was instruction enough.
Dan moved. Pain flared in his side as he scrambled to his feet, but he shoved it down into a small, manageable box. He grabbed their meager supplies—the water skin, the near-empty food pouch, his knife. He tucked them against the cave wall in the deepest recess, where the bioluminescent moss thinned to vague, sickly speckles.
“Kael, come on,” he hissed, keeping his voice low but urgent.
The young dragon, awakened by the shift in the air, needed no encouragement. It scrambled towards Dan, its claws clicking softly on stone, its injured wing held tight. It pressed itself into the corner, making itself as small as possible, its opalescent scales seeming to dull in the shadows.
Dargo stood between them and the cave mouth. He didn’t look back. His form began to blur at the edges, a distortion in the firelight. There was no dramatic explosion of scale this time. It was a silent, terrifying expansion, like watching a shadow detach itself from the wall and gain density and fang and claw. His human form was simply gone, replaced by the massive, dark-scaled bulk of the dragon, filling the front half of the cave. The firelight danced across obsidian plates, revealing nothing.
With a careful, deliberate motion of one foreclaw, Dargo hooked the makeshift sled and dragged it across the sandy floor, positioning it haphazardly in front of the niche where Dan and Kael hid. It wasn’t much cover, but it broke their silhouette.
He then curled his enormous body, a living wall of scaled muscle, around their corner. His side rose and fell with a deep, slow rhythm that moved the very air. He lowered his head, his snout inches from Dan’s crouched form. The heat radiating from him was a forge’s breath.
“You must be silent. Darkness only hides from the unlistening.” Dargo’s voice was a subterranean rumble, felt more than heard, a vibration in the bones and the stone.
Then he was still. Utterly still. Not a twitch. Not a blink. The intelligent fire in his great eye winked out, leaving only a dark, depthless orb that reflected nothing. He became a piece of the cave itself, a geological feature.
Dan held his breath. Kael had ceased trembling, going rigid with a fear so potent it was like a scent. Dan could feel the young dragon’s rapid heartbeat through the stone at his back.
Outside, the skittering stopped.
The footsteps that replaced them were not the heavy tread of booted soldiers. They were lighter, almost… curious. A scuff, a pause. Another scuff.
A voice slithered into the cave. It was low, guttural, and wrong. It didn’t speak the common tongue. The words were clotted and thick, full of hard consonants and glottal stops that made Dan’s skin crawl. It was the language from the dispatch, the language of the workshop.
Kael let out a sound, the faintest whimper of pure recognition, instantly choked off.
The voice fell silent. Listening.
Dan’s hand found the cool metal of his knife hilt. It was a pathetic comfort. He closed his eyes, relying on his other sense. He pushed his awareness outward, past Dargo’s scaled barrier, past the sled.
He felt the metal first. The buckles on the sled’s canvas. The iron nails in the door-wood. Then, further out, at the cave entrance… something else. A concentration of worked metal. Small, complex. Not a weapon. A collection of delicate instruments, linked together. One piece vibrated with a faint, persistent hum that made his teeth ache.
A seeker. But refined, amplified.
The voice spoke again, closer now. It was just outside the ragged entrance. This time, it used the common tongue, but the accent was grotesque, as if the speaker had learned the words by breaking them.
“The storm bites. The stone is cold. A fire would be… wise.”
The speaker was fishing. They’d seen the light. Or sensed the residual heat.
No one moved. Dargo was a statue. Dan imagined him as a cliff, ancient and unmoving. Kael had buried his snout under his good wing. Dan willed his own heart to slow, his breathing to be non-existent.
A shape blocked the faint grey light of the entrance.
It was not a soldier. It was a man, but so heavily wrapped in layered, dun-colored furs and hoods he seemed shapeless. In one hand, he held a long, staff-like device of polished brass and dark wood. At its tip, a delicate crystal latticework cage held a softly pulsing purple ember. The seeker.
He took one step inside, then another. His boots crunched on the gravel at the cave’s mouth. He stopped, his head turning slowly, scanning.
He saw the remains of their campfire first. The embers still glowed faintly red in their bed of ash. His head tilted. He took another step, his boot nudging a charred piece of wood.
His gaze traveled past the fire, over the seemingly natural pile of the sled, and to the massive, dark shape curled beyond it. To the untrained eye, in the poor light, Dargo looked like a rock formation, a bulge of shadow where the cave wall met the floor.
The man’s eyes lingered there for a long moment. The seeker in his hand didn’t change its pulse. He took a slow breath, scenting the air.
He smelled wood smoke. He smelled dried meat. He smelled the faint, coppery tang of Dan’s dried blood on the old bandage tossed near the fire.
He did not, apparently, smell dragon.
“Gone,” the man muttered to himself, his voice raspy. “Left in haste. Wounded.” He poked at the fire with his staff, scattering ashes.
He was buying it. Dan felt a sliver of unreal hope.
Then the man’s foot caught on the edge of the sled. Not enough to move it. Just a slight scuff. His gaze dropped.
He saw the pattern in the sand. Not footprints. Drag marks. Wide, deep grooves leading from the entrance directly to where the “rock formation” lay. The grooves ended at Dargo’s side.
The man froze. His eyes tracked the grooves. They lifted from the sand to the massive, textured “stone” they led to. He stared at the pattern of scales, now discernible not as rock, but as intricate, overlapping plates. He stared at the faint, misty plume of condensed breath that escaped from one shadowed nostril.
Time stretched, thin and brittle.
The man’s reaction was not panic. It was a slow, dreadful understanding. His shoulders slumped, not in defeat, but in a kind of weary acceptance. He didn’t run. He didn’t scream. He very slowly, very deliberately, raised his other hand—the one not holding the seeker staff.
Dan saw the glint of a small, cylindrical object. A signal flare.
The rumble started so deep it was inaudible at first, a tremor in the ground. Then it grew, a seismic growl that rose from Dargo’s chest and filled the cave, vibrating the sand, shaking loose dust from the ceiling.
The man had time for one clear, horribly calm thought. He spoke it aloud, his eyes locked on the vast, opening golden eye before him.
“Well,” he sighed. “That complicates the report.”
Dargo moved.
Dargo moved.
It wasn’t the cataclysmic charge Dan expected. It was a strike of horrifying, economic precision. The massive head snapped forward, jaws parting wide. There was no roar, only the wet, abrupt sound of shearing meat and crushing bone. The man with the seeker simply ceased to exist between one blink and the next, his signal device clattering harmlessly to the sand beside his dropped staff.
The cave was silent again, save for a single, thick drip.
Dan stared at the seeker staff where it had fallen, the purple ember within its crystal cage still pulsing softly. It was pointing directly at them. Kael made a low, distressed sound, pressing harder into the stone.
Dargo’s head swung back. His massive tongue, black and forked, flicked out once, cleaning a speck from his razor-like teeth. The intelligent fire was back in his eye, cold and assessing. He looked from the staff to Dan, his meaning clear.
“Kill the light,” Dargo rumbled, the words vibrating through Dan’s boots.
Dan didn’t hesitate. He focused on the delicate crystal lattice, on the unnatural ember inside. He didn’t try to crush it. He imagined the fire within as a tiny, captured star, and he gently, firmly, invited it to go out. He pulled the heat from it, not violently, but completely, absorbing the energy into himself until it was just a dead, dark pebble in a cage.
The purple pulse died. The cave darkened, lit only by the faint glow of the moss and the last red embers of their fire.
“They hunt by resonance. That device was a beacon. Its silence will tell them more than its signal ever could.” Dargo’s form began to shrink, the scales retreating, the giant shadow condensing back into the shape of a man with a tight braid and eyes that held the afterimage of violence. He walked over to the discarded signal cylinder and crushed it under his heel with a final, gritty crunch.
“They’ll know he’s dead,” Dan said, his voice hoarse. He finally remembered to breathe.
“They’ll know he found something that disagreed with him.” Dargo toed the seeker staff with his boot. “They’ll be cautious. More cautious. It buys us hours, not days.” He looked at Kael, who was uncurling slowly. “Can you walk? Truly walk? We cannot stay here.”
Kael struggled upright, testing his weight on his legs. The set wing was a straight, clean line now, but obviously weak. “I can walk,” the young dragon whispered, though he swayed.
“Good. Dan, douse the fire completely. We move in the dark.”
Dan knelt by the firepit. He placed his hands over the ashes and did the opposite of what came naturally. He drew the remaining warmth into his palms, not to use it, but to simply erase it. The red glow faded to black. The warmth in the little cave vanished, replaced by the mountain’s deep, penetrating cold.
They gathered their things in silence. The mood had shifted. The brief respite was over, shattered by the skittering of pebbles and the guttural voice. They were prey again, or something like it.
Dargo led them out of the cave. The storm had lessened to a persistent, icy drizzle. The world was shades of charcoal and deep blue, the rocks slick. Kael moved carefully, his claws finding purchase where human boots would slip. Dan’s side was a constant, grinding ache, a rhythm of pain to match his footsteps.
They traveled along a treacherous goat track that clung to the mountainside, the wind plucking at their clothes. No one spoke for a long time. The only sounds were their breathing, the scuff of foot and claw on stone, and the endless sigh of the wind through the passes below.
After an hour of brutal, uphill climbing, Kael broke the silence. His voice was small against the vastness. “The one you killed. He was a Listener. That is what the copper-toothed ones called them.”
Dargo didn’t look back. “What did they listen to?”
“Everything. The stones. The air. The… the blood in the veins. Their machines heard the magic in things.” Kael’s words came in a rushed, confessional whisper. “They listened to me for days. To find the song of my shape. To make the collar that stole it.”
Dan felt a chill that had nothing to do with the drizzle. The dispatch had mentioned ‘resonance disruptors’. This was the research. This was what they were going to use against the lair.
“Did they find it?” Dargo asked, his tone lethally casual.
Kael was quiet for several steps. “I do not think so. My song… it was too quiet. It was scared. It hid.” He let out a shaky breath that smoked in the cold. “But they have other songs. Older songs. From scales they have collected. They are louder.”
Dargo stopped walking. He turned slowly, his gold eyes catching a sliver of moonlight breaking through the clouds. He looked at Kael, then at Dan, his expression unreadable.
“They have scale samples,” he stated. It wasn’t a question.
Kael gave a single, miserable nod.
A memory flashed in Dan’s mind: the scout camp ledger, the entry for ‘materials shipped’. Three crates, black iron, sealed. Contents: mineral samples. He’d thought it was ore. It wasn’t ore.
“They have pieces of you,” Dan said, the realization sour in his mouth.
“They have pieces of many,” Dargo corrected softly. The wind tugged at his braid. “Enough to tune their machines to the resonance of our kind. To make the mountain itself ache for us to leave.” He looked up the path, toward the hidden peaks where his home lay. “The attack in three days isn’t just a military strike. It’s a surgical cut. They mean to paralyze us first.”
He started walking again, his pace quicker, more urgent. “We need to move faster.”
The path began to level out, opening onto a high, windswept plateau scattered with boulders the size of houses. The clouds tore apart above them, revealing a sliver of moon and a spray of hard, bright stars. The air was painfully thin and clean.
In the distance, carved into the very face of the next peak, Dan saw it. Not an entrance, but a suggestion. A vast, shadowed arch of natural stone, so large it seemed to swallow the starlight around it. It looked less like a door and more like a mouth.
Dargo followed his gaze. “The Sun-Rock Spire,” he said. “We are close.”
From behind a nearby boulder, a figure stepped into the moonlight.
It was another Listener. This one held no seeker staff. He held two long, wickedly curved knives that gleamed with a viscous, non-reflective coating. He was already in a fighter’s crouch, his breathing controlled, his eyes—visible over a wrapped scarf—fixed on Dargo with an eerie, fearless intensity.
“The echo went silent,” the Listener said, his voice a dry rasp. “But the quarry leaves a trail of whispers. The stone tells stories.”
Dargo didn’t break stride. He walked toward the man, his hands empty at his sides. “Tell me a story, then.”
The Listener moved. He was fast, unnaturally so, a blur of dun cloth and gleaming metal. He feinted low, then went high, aiming for Dargo’s throat.
Dargo’s hand shot out. He didn’t block the blade. He let it slice deep into the meat of his forearm, and his fingers closed around the Listener’s wrist. There was a crack like a stepping on a dry branch.
The Listener gasped, but didn’t drop the knife. His other hand stabbed upward in a vicious arc.
Dargo jerked the captured arm, using the man’s own momentum to pull him off balance. The second strike missed. Dargo’s free hand clamped onto the side of the Listener’s head.
For a second, they were still, a grotesque tableau. Then Dargo twisted his hips and slammed the man headfirst into the granite face of the nearest boulder.
The sound was final. The body slid to the ground.
Dargo looked at the deep gash on his forearm, welling dark blood. He wiped it casually on his trousers, then bent and picked up the dead man’s dropped knife. He examined the coated blade, sniffed it. His lip curled.
“Wolf’s bane and shadow-root,” he muttered. “Slow. Painful. Clever.” He tossed the knife over the edge of the plateau. It vanished without a sound.
He turned back to Dan and Kael. “They’re converging. They know our direction. The plateau is a trap. We run for the arch. Now.”
He didn’t wait for agreement. He shifted.
This time, it was not the silent expansion of before. It was a violent, rapid transformation, scales erupting, wings unfurling with a sound like a great sail snapping taut in a gale. The massive, dark-coloured dragon stood before them, panting gusts of steam into the frigid air. He lowered a foreleg, creating a ramp to his shoulder.
“Up. Both of you. Kael, cling tight. Dan, find a plate and hold on. Do not let go.”
Dan didn’t think. He climbed up the offered limb with relative ease—despite the twinge from his ribs—his fingers finding gaps between the great scales. He hauled himself into the seat at the base of Dargo’s neck, lying flat with the satchel pinned between his stomach and the scales, gripping a protruding scale ridge. Kael followed, clambering up with less grace, settling behind Dan, his dulled claws finding secure purchase.
Dargo rose. The world dropped away dizzyingly. With two powerful strides and a downbeat of wings that thumped the air from Dan’s lungs, they were airborne.
The plateau shrank beneath them. The arch grew, becoming immense, a gateway to a deeper darkness. The wind ripped at Dan, screaming in his ears. He pressed his face against the scale, squeezing his eyes shut against the terrifying, exhilarating speed.
From below, a faint, piercing whistle cut through the wind’s roar. Then another, from a different direction. Signals.
They were seen.
Dargo tilted a wing, banking hard toward the arch. Another whistle, closer. Something glinted in the starlight—a projectile, too thin to be an arrow, arcing up toward them from a hidden ledge.
Dargo folded one wing and dropped like a stone. The missile passed through empty air where his neck had been. He beat his wings once, hard, surging forward again. The arch loomed, a black maw now only a hundred yards away.
A second projectile, then a third, shot up from the cliff face to their right. Nets. Weighted nets of fine, glistening chain.
Dargo roared. It was a sound of pure, defiant fury that shook the mountains. He breathed out.
Not fire. A cloud of swirling, ink-black vapour, dense and churning, erupted from his jaws, spreading between them and the nets. The weighted chains hit the cloud and simply… fell, their mechanisms clogged, their trajectories ruined.
They shot through the edge of the dispersing cloud, and then into the absolute darkness of the arch.
The screaming wind ceased. The temperature rose sharply. The only sound was the heavy, echoing flap of Dargo’s wings in a vast, enclosed space. Dan dared to open his eyes. Pinpricks of soft, blue-green light appeared far below—more bioluminescent moss, lighting the floor of a cavern so enormous its ceiling was lost in shadow.
Dargo descended, landing with a soft, ground-shaking thud on a smooth stone dais. He lowered his shoulder, allowing them to slide off. Dan’s legs trembled, almost buckling. Kael crouched, panting, his eyes wide as he stared into the familiar, colossal hollow of his home.
Dargo shifted back. He was breathing heavily, a sheen of sweat on his brow. The cut on his forearm still seeped. He ignored it, staring back the way they had come, toward the star-framed arch now hundreds of feet above and behind them.
“They will not follow here. Not tonight,” he said, his voice echoing in the cavernous silence. “The Spire has its own protections. Older than them.”
He turned, his golden eyes sweeping the glowing, empty caverns that spiraled away into the mountain’s heart. The silence was profound, waiting.
“We are home,” he said, and the words were not a comfort, but a warning. “Now the real work begins.”
The cavern air was thick, smelling of warm stone and something older, like damp cedar and ozone. The blue-green glow from the moss patches painted everything in shifting, aqueous light. Dargo finally looked at his arm, peeling back the torn leather of his bracer. The gash was deep, the edges an angry purple where the coated blade had bitten. A thin, dark tendril of venom was visible against the darker blood, crawling up a vein toward his elbow.
“That needs dealing with,” Dan said, his voice too loud in the vast quiet. He shrugged the satchel off his shoulder, wincing as the motion pulled at his own injury. “The kit. Your paste is in there.”
“It’s a scratch,” Dargo muttered, but he sat on a low, smooth hump of rock, extending his arm toward the light from a large moss cluster. His jaw was tight.
Dan rummaged, finding the water skin and the small leather pouch. He also found the neat sewing kit he’d packed weeks ago, needles and strong thread meant for repairing gear, not flesh. He uncorked the water. “This will feel fantastic.”
He poured. The water hit the wound and diluted the sluggish blood, revealing the full damage. The poison had slowed the bleeding but left the flesh puckered and pale. Dargo didn’t flinch, but a muscle in his temple jumped. Dan took a clean strip of linen, dampened it, and began wiping the wound clean with a methodical, firm pressure. He worked in silence, his brow furrowed in concentration, carefully clearing away the contaminated blood and the last remnants of the strange coating.
Kael watched, utterly rapt. He had crept closer, his head low to the ground, his large eyes reflecting the glow. He observed every movement: the drip of water, the dab of the cloth, the way Dan’s fingers, calloused and capable, probed the edges of the cut with a detached precision. The young dragon’s breath misted in the cool air.
From the pouch, Dan poured the last of the gritty grey powder directly into the open wound. This time, Dargo did react—a sharp, involuntary hiss of breath through clenched teeth, his free hand curling into a fist so tight the knuckles turned white. The paste sizzled faintly, fighting the venom’s residue.
“Now the fun part,” Dan said, threading a needle. He heated the tip briefly with a thought, a tiny, focused spark at his fingertip to sterilize it. He didn’t ask permission. He just began.
The first pierce of the needle through tough skin made Dargo’s arm twitch. Dan pinned the flesh steady with his thumb, his other hand moving in small, efficient passes. In, out, pull the thread taut. In, out, pull. His stitches were uneven but strong, drawing the lips of the gash together into a harsh, dark line. Each tug was a deliberate, tiny violence.
The silence stretched, filled only with their breathing and the soft, wet sound of the needlework. Kael’s fascination was a palpable thing. He had never seen such careful, manual repair. In his world, wounds were licked clean or endured. This was an art of patience and intrusion.
He finally broke the quiet, his voice a hushed, curious whisper in the cavern. “The human touches you without fear. He puts his hands in your blood.” He tilted his head, scales rasping softly against stone. “Are you two mates?”
The needle froze halfway through a stitch. Dan’s head came up. He blinked, staring at Kael as if the words were in that guttural language and he’d just parsed their meaning. He slowly turned his wide, startled eyes to Dargo.
Dargo had gone preternaturally still. The cold, ancient mask of his features didn’t crack, but something behind his gold eyes flickered—not anger, but a sheer, blank astonishment that was somehow more profound. He looked from Kael’s ingenuous, waiting face to Dan’s shocked one, and then down at the needle suspended in his arm.
The cavern hummed around them, the moss-light pulsing softly on three faces locked in silent, perfect stillness.