10. Run for the Tunnels
Astra's entire world begins to collapse...
Escape from Ice Mountain marks the start of an epic fantasy, one where a middle-aged fish-out-of-water librarian (and necromancer!) navigates love, betrayal, and the complexities of power as she struggles to embrace her destiny and uncover the mysteries of her own origins. Yes, there are dragons too! And also magical dogs. It’s gonna be awesome!
Previously: Bad omens everywhere as Astra and company return to Qordashi, fleeing the Yosoi…
The dragon screeched—there was no other word for the sound it made—and hopped towards Astra with its arms out, as if to grab her. The Am-Ayat soldiers formed a phalanx in front of her, bristling weapons like an annoyed prickly pig. The dragon stopped, huffed in what could only be seen as annoyance, and dropped down to all fours, snorting at the temple dogs who had gone from barking to silence, although they did not move away from Naboch. Astra noted distantly that the dragon was not wearing its pack, or the fire horn.
She pushed forward and shoved one of the soldiers aside, who was so surprised by the rear guard action from a nun that he stumbled and let her pass. The beautiful one was next to him and caught his comrade, staring Astra down with his amber brown eyes radiating disapproval.
“You! What are you doing here?” She shouted at the dragon, who sat back on its haunches and reached out for her again. She heard rustling behind her and a whispered order, and then three of the soldiers edged their way around the dragon, hopefully to go fetch Naboch and the rangers protecting her.
The dragon stopped, tilted its head up, and roared. Screams echoed through the monastery, from all directions, and when the roar had faded away Astra heard what had so many nuns and rangers scrambling, and it wasn't the dragon in front of her. It was the bangs and gongs of the large warning bells in the rangers’ towers, bells that Astra had never once heard rung outside of practice drills because no one and nothing had attacked Qordashi in over a thousand years.
“What is going on?” Naboch shouted as she was brought around the dragon, who continued to look up through the hole it had made in the roof.
More rangers ran into the courtroom, weapons held high. The Am-Ayat soldiers were still focused on the dragon, but seemed torn about what to do with Astra standing in front of it, blocking their way.
“Yosoi coming up through the valley, and snow dragons flying in from the south! We're under attack!” The lead ranger, a tall and dark skinned sibling nun, shouted at them as she ran in, then pulled up short. “What in the Six Hells is that?” She pointed her sword at the dragon.
Naboch turned on Astra. “Did you bring this dragon down on us?”
“This one? Probably. But not the snow dragons!”
“Astra!” Traz ran in, Zochur on his heels, both of them in clean travel clothes but still carrying their weapons, Traz with the sashes and belt back in place over the more familiar habit. “What is the dragon doing here?”
“I do not know!” Astra shouted.
“We need to leave, sibling superior, or hide in the tunnels.” The lead ranger beckoned her forward.
Naboch wrinkled her nose. “If the snow dragons are here, the tunnels will just become our tombs.”
“We cannot fight the dragons,” the ranger said apologetically.
Astra started when she felt a tug at her sleeve. It was the Beautiful Soldier. “This dragon cannot fly, not with its wings so damaged.”
It seemed like an odd thing to comment on, in the circumstances, but Astra nodded.
“The Yosoi, and the snow dragons…they are not here for it?”
Astra shook her head. “I doubt they knew it existed until they attacked us at the Gate of Tears.”
“Then they are after the Dragon's Grail,” he said to General Hiloh.
The general turned on Naboch and demanded the Grail. Astra tried to translate what the Am-Ayat soldiers had concluded, but it just made Naboch frown even more. “We do not have it. Qordashi has never, not even in myth, been its resting place!”
“I don't care about the damned Grail, sibling superior! We need to leave! The temples are the most visible targets from the air and the dragons will be here in moments!” The lead ranger shouted.
“The Yosoi will be here soon after that,” one of the other rangers intoned.
Naboch nodded once, then walked firmly past them and out into the main temple hall. The rangers followed her, radiating frustration, and Astra went to follow her as well but Traz grabbed her arm. The Beautiful Soldier stepped up and raised his sword, glaring at Traz, but Astra put up her hand to stop him. “What? We should leave!”
Traz glared back at the soldier before pulling Astra closer to the dragon, speaking softly. “Come with us.”
“Where? We are under attack! There is nowhere to go!”
“They don't want you or this dragon or me! Leave with us.”
The Beautiful Soldier was next to her again. “Tell the thief to shut up, take his pet dragon and run.”
“Thief?” Astra blinked at him.
“The notch, on his ear. The mark of a thief, given in the northern cities to those caught committing minor theft.”
Traz bristled. “He's calling me a thief. I recognize the word.”
General Hiloh walked up as well, giving the Beautiful Soldier the side-eye as he approached. “It does our quest no good to die here. We cannot fight off dragons and barbarians, not with the seven of us, not even with your legendary rangers.” He glanced at the fire dragon, who was sat on its haunches, watching them dully. “Or your dragon.”
“Let's at least get out of the temple,” the Beautiful Soldier said, and the General nodded. He motioned to the rest of their party and walked out of the room, but stopped at the doorway. Astra, torn between following them or staying with Traz, paused as well. It was a long, quiet moment over the whole monastery, which was finally broken by the shrill trilling sounds of snow dragons and the howls of Yosoi in the distance. Pandemonium broke out everywhere from the sound of it, and the rangers who had left a minute before ran back in, dragging Naboch and a few of her entourage with them, the temple dogs on their heels.
“Too late!” The lead ranger yelled. “Hiding in the tunnels is our only hope!” They were sprinting across the room, around the dragon who had become nothing more than an afterthought to most of them by that point, and heading to a heavy wooden screen off to the side of the throne's dais. Two ranger nuns shoved it out of the way, revealing a fairly large and ornately carved tunnel entrance, luminescent veins shining through it.
“I can hide you!” Astra shouted before she thought it out.
Zochur knew immediately what she meant. “No!”
Their cry was drowned out by a thump of a snow dragon landing on the roof, at the hole the fire dragon had clawed open earlier. It spewed its ice wind, which shattered the marble throne and the ranger standing closest to it, flying apart in a rain of bloody ice shards. The fire dragon jumped flat off the ground with a roar and leapt straight up, scratching the snow dragon's hide with its front talons before blowing a billowing, raging column of fire in its face. The snow dragon screamed in pain and fell away, rolling down off the roof from the sound of it.
“Tunnels!” The lead ranger roared and everyone moved together, Astra nearly tripping over pieces of the throne and the bloody chunks of frozen flesh before the Beautiful Soldier grabbed her arm to steady her.
“Go! Go!” Traz yelled at the fire dragon, who flapped its useless wings loudly before making another jump for the roof and crawling out, sending more roof tiles crashing to the floor.
Traz was glad of the slight delay her clumsiness bought her, as it made her and Beautiful Soldier the last into the tunnel proper. Astra broke away and reached out to touch the trace of glowing minerals in the wall.
“No, not here, further in,” she said, feeling the pull of the long-dead mass of creatures the minerals had once been, soaring through shallow waters, prey and predator alike, moving together as one current and dying together under the weight of a landslide or some other cataclysm that the barely sentient creatures would never understand, in life or death, but merging with it and mapping out the whole of the rock in Astra's mind.
“Ashtrakur!” Traz screamed in her face, startling out of her death vision. She gasped for air, feeling like she had come up from drowning. She was still walking, but they had moved deep into the tunnel, which was narrowing and getting dark, despite the moonstones in notches every few feet. Everyone was staring at her, from what she could see in the cool, dim light.
Without warning, the Am-Ayat soldiers and the three remaining rangers pushed past her, forming a wall of defense. Astra looked around, leaning on Traz for support. “No! Not here, not yet! Further back, just a little ways!”
“The Yosoi are coming, we cannot turn our backs on them,” the lead ranger said, holding her sword, standing shoulder to shoulder with General Hiloh.
“Tell your rangers it is an honor to die with them,” he said to Astra, who relayed the information numbly. The general snapped orders at Beautiful Soldier, who snapped a reply, but then fell back to stand near Astra and Naboch wordlessly. Traz and Zochur stood behind the soldiers and the rangers, a minor but determined second line of defense.
“No. No no no!.” Astra chanted, moving near the wall again as a torrent of Yosoi warriors, snarling and caked with blood and dirt, came into view.
In such close quarters the fighting was impossible to follow, and Astra did not try. She put both shaking hands on the rock and traced the dead through it, willing the lost souls of millions of long-gone creatures entombed forever in the rock to answer her, just once. She had not tried to move rock since the aborted attempt to carve out her own retreat cave when she was eleven, but it came back to her, the nausea and the fury and the power. Being so deep inside the mountain it was a risk but she demanded the dead to protect them, to shift the world to save them, offering their dim awareness the one gift she had to give: freedom.
Her magic lit up the glowing minerals along with what she was sure was the petrified skeleton of a massive sea demon. There were screams around her as the rock moved and cracked and shifted, large pieces of it smashing people as it fell. Astra felt a warm, unfamiliar body press up behind her, pushing her into the face of the rock, arms and shoulders wrapped over her as protection.
Then there was silence, and Astra had no idea whom she had killed.
NEXT: The Golden Inkstone Steps
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