Dragonslayer, Inc.

“You talked about there being an easier way through here. How much easier is it?” I asked.

“Do you want to me to be frank?” responded Ironwall.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“It’s not that much easier. Go ahead: groan. Get it out of your system.”

“You’re a horrible person.”

“Maybe. Trust me, I wish there was an ‘easy way’ as much as you do. But there’s not. There are two ways. There’s the difficult way, and there’s the impossible way. I know the difficult way.”

We were standing on a ledge that overlooked a five-hundred-foot drop. Rock vultures flew below us. The rising sun was gradually illuminating the jagged rocks that we had spent so much time and effort climbing over.

“Still think you made the right decision, making us climb all this way after we were already exhausted?”

“Yep.”

“Are there any Slayers who aren’t stubborn?”

“Not that I know. It’s basically a requirement.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Have you ever regretting becoming a Slayer?”

“No. Of course not.”

Frowning, he said, “Don’t be afraid to answer honestly.”

“It’s complicated. Running off to Andes was the best decision I ever made. It was great to learn I had what it took to become a Slayer, and it was even greater to become one. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things I regret. I regret leaving my family, especially my sister.”

“What’s her name?”

“Acady. She’s a couple years younger than me, but she’s really mature. You’d like her. She’s no-nonsense.”

“Do you think she’d like me?”

“More than I do. Just watch out for Mom. She’s not a fan of the Slayers.”

“Then maybe it’s for the better that you didn’t tell her. I don’t imagine that conversation would have gone well.”

“I’ll have to tell her eventually.”

“Assuming you survive this trip.”

“I’m not dying.”

Ironwall broke out laughing. “I wish I had your confidence, kid,” he said.

“I wish I had joined the Slayers at a different time. I wanted to make money, slay dragons, and save people, not chase a behemoth across the outskirts of the world. I didn’t ask for this.”

“None of us did.”

“What are you gonna do after we kill Icithan? Take a boat out to the Nicos Islands and stay there for a year?”

“If we kill that thing, I’m retiring.”

“Why? You can still slay ’em better than anyone.”

“I’m flattered, but I’ll be an empty shell of a person by the end of this. I’ve been through this once before. That’s more than enough. You’re not meant to go through these things twice.”

“Then why are you?”

“Throughout my life, I’ve worked tirelessly to make Andes and Dragonslayer, Inc. the best they could be. I’m not perfect, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I’ve done my best. With they money I make, I could have retired after I slayed that one-hundred-and-fifty-footer and lived the rest of my life in comfort. But I didn’t. I kept grinding, kept striving for a better tomorrow. There was no way I was going to let that dragon get away with destroying it all- not just everything my generation’s done, but everything the generation before me did, everything the generation before them did, and so on, going back hundreds of years. I refuse to sit back and watch that happen. If this trip kills me: fine.”

It was the most animated I had ever seen him.

Taken aback, I solemnly said, “That makes sense.”

“Buck up, Coran. You have something to gain from all this. If it weren’t for that dragon attacking HQ, you wouldn’t be anything more than a lowly Dragonslayer-in-training now, if that. If you’re part of the team that slays this behemoth, you’ll become a legend. You’ll be inducted into the pantheon of greatness. Isn’t that what you always wanted?”

“Sure,” I answered, closing my eyes and fidgeting.

When we entered the cavern, we did so from an underground entrance. There was a highly visible above-ground entrance, but Ironwall warned us away from it and pointed toward an off-color stone knob.

Machen pushed it in. The ground rumbled before splitting asunder to reveal a stone staircase that descended into inky darkness. Paradoxically, it was both unspeakably ancient and impeccably pristine. There was zero decay.

“Has this been maintained?” I asked, sitting on the first stair and running my hands over its icy smoothness.

“How could it have been?” said Machen. “It’s impossible.”

“More Litriol?” Steph pondered.

“Yep,” responded Ironwall. “Watch your step.” A ticking sound started. “That’s not good.” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Hurry. You do not want to be on that staircase when the ticking stops.”

We hustled down the stairs. On the walls was a scrambled mess of murals and etchings. Unlike the stairs, they had faded with time. Some were hardly visible. They had been made over centuries. Some were formal- elaborate paintings of kings and dragons, queens and serpents. Some were informal- inane sketches or markings of dates.

I wanted to examine them closely, but I didn’t get the chance. The ticking kept getting faster, and the despair in Ironwall’s voice grew. Over and over again, he yelled at us to keep running. Whenever we talked, he told us to stop talking. Whenever we slowed down, he told us to speed back up. He was relentless.

He didn’t tell us what would happen when the ticking stopped. If he did, we would have panicked.

Buckets of sweat poured down his body. His hands got clammy. He opened and closed them with chaotic rigor. His skin was turning colors. Not enough air was reaching his lungs. When he saw the end of the staircase, he pumped his fists and went even faster. By this time, the ticking sounded like a fly incessantly buzzing in your ear, or else like fire from a machine gun. He lunged off the last step and landed in a heap on a cold silvery floor.

Just then the ticking stopped. The rest of us were still on the staircase. Wheezing, Ironwall told us, “Run like your lives depended on it. They do.”

It did not take me long to figure out why. The walls were closing in on us, and they were moving fast. A wind of energy catching me, I sped up and jumped. For a split-second, I thought I was going to fall short, land on the final step, and spend my final living seconds cringing in pain as my body was crushed by the encroaching walls.

In the end, this was not my fate- I landed hard, but I landed on the floor- but it was the fate of a fresh-eyed female Slayer who had just been a little too slow. I didn’t see her body, but I heard her bones break and her muscles squish.

Our thirteen had quickly become eleven. Her best friend- a wiry, stoic twenty-nine-year-old woman with hair the color of volcanic ash- began bowling inconsolably, as did the aunt-like Slayer.

“Just like that,” Machen whispered, looking behind him. He was the last one to make it out alive.

“Did this… happen to you before?” I asked Ironwall.

“Yes, to a friend of mine. He was limping. He had been hurt by a dragon. Once the ticking started, I didn’t pay him a thought until the walls crushed his body. I was too busy trying to save my own skin, and I barely managed to do that.”

“Who was that staircase designed for?” asked Machen. He had recovered from shock and was trying to catch his breath. “Professional athletes? A normal person has next to no chance of getting through that.”

“If you ask me,” said Ironwall, “it’s a trap. You’re not supposed to be able to make it down. That’s why whoever built this staircase left that knob out in the open. They wanted people to meander down the staircase, then get crushed. On the flip side, the abundance of etchings from outsiders suggests that there may once have been a way to turn off the trap. I don’t know if such a thing still exists. It might have gotten destroyed over time.”

Steph was not listening to him. She was curled up in a corner, her head buried in her knees, her hands skimming the ground. Drying tears were stuck to her face.

“Shut up,” she yelled. “Please shut up. I don’t want to hear you babble on about knobs and cultures. A Slayer just died, and she died in the most painful way possible. Can’t we take one moment to feel sad?” She laid on her side. “This is your fault, Ironwall. You said this was the easier way. You made us think it was going to be all right. You were wrong. I don’t know what traumas the other way holds, but they can’t be worse than this. If we had gone the other way, that woman would have still been alive.”

After considering several responses, Ironwall said, “If you want to take some time to yourself, go ahead. I’ll be quiet. This offer applies to anyone.”

“Thank you,” she muttered.

I stretched out and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling. I could hardly see it, but I could make out general shapes and lines. There were gems embedded in the ceiling, but I couldn’t see them until a slight ray of light made its way down past the closed staircase and made them shine like stars on a rural night.

When this happened, I cracked a half-smile and wondered why I wasn’t feeling sadder. I tried to mourn my fellow Slayer, but I couldn’t summon up the necessary feelings of loss and regret and emotional pain. This bothered me.

I felt more misery for the guy we left at the end of that footpath, and he could have still been alive. Not only that, but he actively refused to climb any further, while the only thing this woman did wrong was run a little too slowly.

Maybe I felt the way I did because I was too soaked with adrenaline for her death to register to me, but more likely, it was because there was nothing I could have done to help her, whereas there was plenty I could have done to help him.

After our moment of silence was over, I bounced to my feet and examined the walls that crushed her, the walls that nearly crushed us. “I suppose there’s no going back,” I said.

One of the Slayers gasped and said, “But what if we run out of food? What if we run out of water? It’s a long way to the top, right?”

“Relax,” said Ironwall. “We have enough food to last us, and trust me, you don’t need to worry about water.”

We entered the cavern proper. I couldn’t see far or much, but I could see enough to know it was a vastly more beautiful place than I had imagined. Granted, as I imagined it as this foul, perverse labyrinth that gobbled up travelers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that wasn’t saying much, but it was a gorgeous place regardless of expectations.

The cavern walls were textured and colorful. Some of them were even patterned with these graceful spirals that looked like ocean waves breaking on shore. The water that ran along the cavern floor was sweet-smelling, translucent, and warm. The chemicals used to produce makeup are found in large quantities in this cavern. Against my better judgment, I drank some of the water. I expected it to taste dirty or even poisonous, but it was surprisingly decent. The Litriol had purified it.

Segrabi Cavern remains one of my favorite places in this world. I haven’t even mentioned its best feature, a chalky pigment that runs along the walls and ceiling. It’s one of my favorite substances in the world. Initially, though, it was a pigment I was indifferent toward. I had not yet discovered its secret.

When Steph stubbed her toe on an unceremoniously positioned stalactite, she complained, “Can’t this place be any brighter? You can’t see anything.”

“You could hold onto me,” said Machen sleazily. “I’ll keep you safe.”

“Anyone besides Machen have a solution?”

“Hey. I was just trying to help.”

“No, you weren’t. Cut the shtick.” Using the direction of his voice as a guide, she kicked him in the shin.

In the darkness, he didn’t see this kick coming. It knocked him down. Before getting back up, he said, “My love’s right. Someone needs to find a way to brighten up this place.”

“I’m still not your love, and I’d really be surprised if we could get light in here. How would that even work?”

“Like this,” said Ironwall with relish. He reached into his pocket and grabbed a book of matches, one of which he took out and struck on the side of the book. After a couple tries, the match was set alight.

“You’re kidding, right?” grumbled Machen.

“Not to rain on your parade, Ironwall,” I said, “but one match isn’t gonna help much.”

“You’re wrong.” He took the match and pressed it to the pigment, which burst into emerald green fire, a fire that spread faster than any I had ever seen. To Steph, he slyly added, “Are you surprised?”

“Yes,” she said, wonder in her eyes. “Yes, I am.”

Soon miles of cavern were lit with emerald-green fire. There was no way we were going to be hurting for light in the near-future. I could see for forever. It was as bright as a cloudless morning.

I was blown away.

After the wonder had washed over us, Machen asked Ironwall, “How long did it take for you to discover that little trick?”

“Not long at all actually. The old guy who led our group had learned about it from his father, who had come up here with his father as a youth. When he showed it to us, I was about as blown away as you are now. Of course, one member of our party made the mistake of leaning on the walls as they caught fire. The end result wasn’t pretty.”

Ironwall navigated us through the passageways. After a while, it became a miracle to me that anyone had managed to get through without any light. Maybe no one ever had. There were cliffs to fall off. There were holes to fall in. And while the cave’s dragons had been exterminated, there were slimy green salamanders and giant black bat-owls and all manner of other unsightly creatures to be attacked by.

That was to say nothing of the hundreds of crossroads we encountered. There were times when we had to choose from one of nine different tunnels. Even if you had a map of the tunnels, it would be impossible to follow in the darkness. Knowing you need to take the third tunnel from the right is meaningless if you can’t find the third tunnel from the right, or you think it’s the second tunnel from the right.

We didn’t have a map. We just had Ironwall’s memory. He had the best memory of anyone I have ever met, but he was still just a human being. He wasn’t a computer. He couldn’t store hundreds of directions in his mind, and the some of the directions he had stored weren’t even optimal. “We didn’t exactly take a good route when we came through here last time,” he admitted.

More often than we would have liked, we had to rely on Ironwall’s instincts, which were surprisingly on-point but nonetheless flawed. Once, we stumbled into a nest of dog-sized ants. Not wanting to be disturbed, they began attacking by the dozen. They were fierce fighters. Their main method of attack was to trip us up, then grab onto parts of our bodies with their incredibly strong jaws, then bite down as hard as they could. These bites were horrific and poisonous, as a Slayer found out firsthand. The queen of the ants chomped into her leg.

In the end, we were able to save the leg, but for the remainder of her life, it was this grotesque, deathly purple. We started calling her ‘Purpley’ or ‘Purple Leg’. It never got worse, but it never got better.

Aside from that one incident, we were able to slay the ants with relative ease. It was one of our first major fights as a group, and we performed admirably. We weren’t as cohesive as we could have been, but we didn’t get in each other’s way.

The highlight of the confrontation came near the beginning. Machen and I were working side by side when suddenly I killed three ants in quick succession, let off a loud scream, and lost control of myself. I went on a rampage, killing dozens of ants. Machen stepped back slowly and gave me an odd look. His right eyebrow went up, and his pupils dilated. It was such a bizarre look. To this day, I tease him about it.

We did not kill all of the ants. After we had slain a few hundred, they stopped attacking and retreated into their nest. It took us hours more to get to what I would consider the midpoint of our destination, but we did not make any more major mistakes. Ironwall almost led us into a sea of blue quicksand-like goo, but he backed out just in time.

This midpoint was a lake. It was the largest lake I had ever seen. I could stand on one bank and not catch even a glimpse of the other. This astounded me. It was like an underground ocean. Every lake I had ever seen was small and insignificant, more akin to a pond or a puddle than the great lakes of yore.

“Jump in,” said Ironwall, taking his shirt off to reveal his muscled stomach. “The water’s fine.” He dived in, and most of us followed, leaving our clothes at shore.

Hitting the water, a burst of warmth rushed through my body. It was like I was taking a hot bath. I laid on my back, my ears just above the water, and closed my eyes.

As I did, I heard a bellowing waterfall nearby, and I became confused. I hadn’t seen any waterfall. Without opening my eyes, I asked Ironwall, “Where’s that noise coming from?”

“There are two major lakes in Segrabi. They have official names, but I don’t know what they are. I just call this lake ‘The Warm Lake’ and the other lake ‘The Cold Lake’. They’re separated by a thin wall that has some hidden- yet substantial- holes in it. I’ve been across that wall.”

“And?”

“I spent five seconds there before hopping back across as quickly as I could. It’s unbelievably cold. If you ask me, it’s the coldest place south of Curam. It’s not that much warmer than Life’s End. The waterfall is gorgeous though, and it’s flanked by these columns of ice crystals that look like they were delicately crafted by a master artisan.”

“Good to know,” said Machen. “Maybe I’ll toss Coran over there and watch him freeze to death.”

“Maybe I’ll toss you over there, and block the wall so you couldn’t get in.”

“Hah. That wouldn’t stop me. I’d find another way. There is none more resilient than I.”

“Good luck,” Ironwall scoffed. “You’d have to go through what I think I called the impossible route.”

“Is it really impossible?” Machen queried.

“If you’re a superhero,” said Ironwall, “then no. If you’re a regular human being, than yeah, it’s pretty much impossible. Since conditions got noticeably worse there in the latter part of the century before last, there have been exactly two reported cases of individuals surviving it, and there’s a chance both are liars.”

“Are there any places on this journey that aren’t lethal?” asked Steph.

“This lake,” said Ironwall, chuckling grimly. “There’s not much else. Maybe Mulsor Highlands.”

“How did the world get this bad?” I pondered, opening my eyes.

“No one’s sure exactly. If you ask me, there’s no one to blame but us- humans. We are not creatures that generally comprehend the grander scope of things. When I came back from my trip, I tried to explain what the rest of the world was like, but no one really understood me. They picked up general, superfluous details, but the grander stuff, the stuff that matters? They didn’t get it.”

After seconds of silence, he swam away, and Steph dove down. It was just Machen and me.

Not long after I realized this, he shoved me hard enough that I lost my balance and tumbled onto my chest. My eyes, nose, and mouth were soaked with water. My fear of drowning pounced back into my chest. I began to sink.

Defiant, I swooped up to the surface and smashed Machen in the face with my fist. “What was that?” he responded, cringing. “You uncultured little plebian.”

“Don’t say that wasn’t called for. The water and I do not mix.”

“Speaking of your bizarre outbursts, what happened to you when you were fighting those ants? You looked like you were possessed.”

“I kind of was. It’s a thing that happens to me whenever I’m fighting a substantial threat. To be honest, it terrifies me.”

“So it’s like a superpower.”

“Not at all. It’s darker than that.”

“So it’s like you’re unleashing your inner demon?”

I got a heady rush then. He had gotten it exactly right.

“My inner demon,” I said, sighing. “I like that. I think I’ll call it that from here on out.”

And so I did.