Dragonslayer, Inc.

If we had ridden just a little faster, we would have been safe.

If he hadn’t stopped for a break at three in the morning, we would have been safe.

If we hadn’t had to fight that dragon, we would have been safe.

When morning light drifted across the land, we could nearly see Miyok. The air got warmer. We shrugged this off, but we shouldn’t have. The winds blew faster. They were southeasterly and fierce.

“We’ve made it past Firecane Bay, right?” asked Steph as a precaution.

“A while ago,” confirmed Ironwall.

We rode through lightly forested hills on our approach from the west. It was welcoming to find plant life. I took a needle from a tree and stuffed it in my pocket. Before I knew it, fifty needles had been whipped into my hair by the winds. “Guess I’ll take these too,” I said, not bothering to brush them away.

There was a palpable perception that we were in danger. We didn’t talk about it, but we sped up, and no one asked why. The forest got closer, but there was an impossibly steep hill between us and it. We had two options: climb it or take the long route.

My stallion was in the lead, but I kept waiting for Ironwall to turn away from the hill. He never did. I closed my eyes and listened intently to the clop-clop-clop of my stallion’s hooves, until finally, suddenly, we were at the bottom of the hill. It had no foliage. It had no greenery. It was rugged and unyielding. Navigating our way to the top was an endeavor we weren’t prepared for.

It would have been trying but not treacherous had we abandoned our horses and gone it on foot, but we needed those horses, or we felt we did anyway. Without them, our travel speed would slow tremendously, but more than that, we considered them our companions. They had personality and preferences, and at times, they felt more alive than we did. With our numbers having dwindled, we needed to not feel alone, and having these large, powerful, intelligent animals with us helped.

So we strived to find a way to climb with our horses, and we found one, but the going was slow. The pathway was wide enough for one horse and one rider at a time, no more. If I, who was in the front, needed supplies from Ironwall, who was bringing up the rear, I had to relay the message through Steph, who would then take the supplies and pass them to me. Unless the supplies in question were consumable, I had to pass them back after I was done, which was an additional hassle.

Even if the terrain itself had not been brutal, hassles like this would have been more than enough to throw a wrench into our sad attempts at progress.

We spent hours climbing that hill. In the end, they were frivolous hours, superfluous hours, wasted hours.

A burst of heat consumed the air. I thought it was going to burn my face to ashes. Another burst followed soon after. This air was over a hundred and twenty degrees. It was no laughing matter, though there is no doubt it was funnier than what it portended. We were halfway up the hill.

In the distance, a storm of fire pulled back the curtains of the horizon and roared into view. This had been a wet firecane when it hit shore. Now it was dry, having left the water behind. Grinning vilely, it ran forward without care or restraint.

I didn’t know it then, but this was a vicious storm even by the high standard of firecanes. An average firecane would have fizzled out before we could have seen it from that hill, but not only had this one not fizzled out, it had picked up power.

To our immense good fortune, it was not heading for us. If it had been, I would not be here to tell this tale. We were in line with the very tip of its eastern arm, and I barely survived.

The air temperature was rising, and those bursts kept coming, reaching temperatures clear above one hundred and fifty degrees. We couldn’t function properly, and neither could our horses. Ironwall’s steed bent its head in a bow before closing its eyes and succumbing to the temperatures.

“We have to get out of here,” I said, my eyes surveying the land, taking in what information they could.

“There’s a deep, dark cave not too far away,” said Ironwall. “It’s less than a quarter-mile away. We can make it.”

“And then what?” questioned Steph. “What if we hide in the back of the cave, crouch down, and get burned to crisps? Or… what if the cave collapses, and we’re stuck in there until we die? I have no problem with Death- the two of us have shared a few tangos- but I don’t want to die hiding. Let’s run for Miyok.”

“Run?” I said.

“Do you see that?” she gestured over the side of the hill to a series of rocky outcroppings.

“Yeah.”

“It’s our only way down.”

“Ironwall, is she right?”

“It’s the way I would go. It’s the quickest way. It’s likely the only way that won’t get us killed.”

“And there’s no way we can take our horses?”

“No,” screamed Steph, hopping onto the first outcropping. “Come on.”

My stallion was standing at the edge of a ridge. Hit by a bust of energy, I rammed against it, sending it barreling through the air. After squealing, groaning, and roaring, it went silent before smashing against the ground, sending up a cloud of dust.

“Why did you do that?” Ironwall asked.

“There’s a chance it could survive.”

“A low chance.”

“Even if it doesn’t, it’s a more humane way to die than being burned alive.”

“Are you ready now?” He floated onto the first outcropping. Steph was already halfway down the hill.

“Yeah.”

It was hard to move. It was hard to think. The heat was like a virus, infecting me from top to bottom. My hands had become numb. With every step, the air sizzled and the ground either slid away from me or rushed toward me. Twice, I found myself with a foot off the ridge and only barely managed to keep my balance. The third time, I did lose my balance. A little less than half of my body was left hanging into the abyss.

If any less of me had been supported, I would have fallen in. Fortune saved me. I held myself still, scared out of my wits. I didn’t want to move. It was a long way down. Ironwall was yelling at me, but I couldn’t hear him. I could only hear the disturbed screech of the firecane getting closer.

Steph had made it down the hill and was running top-speed to the forest, taking pleasure in outrunning death. The grass around her was catching fire, but she was never burned. She was never fazed. There was a peppy grace to her gait, as if she were impervious to fire and were making fun of its sad attempts to burn her.

“At least one of us is gonna make it out of here alive,” I said.

I tried to summon up the resolve to make a move, but I couldn’t concentrate. My heart was beating too fast, and my head was thinking too slowly. With the constant increase in heat, it seemed a simple matter to slump into a sleep from which I would never wake.

A burst of flame flew past my head, missing by two feet. I nodded. I smiled to make sure I could. I blinked and turned my shoulders away from the direction of the fireball. I slapped the ground with my right hand, which I then closed then opened then closed again while staring at it as though it were a blue aurora breaking through gray clouds.

When I opened it for the fifth time, another fireball was racing toward me. My inner demon, dormant for so long, sprang to life. I leapt twice- once to my feet, and once off my outcropping and away from the fireball.

From there, I was on the run. My arms pumped. My legs churned. My head bobbed. It was hard to think, so I didn’t. I reacted. Taking a more aggressive path than Steph, I stormed down the hill. There were ledges I landed on that collapsed into rubble the second after I jumped from them. Reaching the bottom of the hill, I threw my hands in the air, drew the dagger from my pocket, chucked it ahead of me, ran as fast as I could, caught it, and didn’t stop running.

I was gaining on Steph. The terrain was easy to cover- it was dry and flat. I didn’t have to take any detours, and my feet never sunk into the ground. Out in the open, there was no chance of a tree or power line falling in my way, blocking my path. I could run as fast as my legs and my inner demon could carry me.

My legs were getting singed- I think they were purple or black by the end of this- but my inner demon refused to relent. I had come to loathe the thing, and I had hoped I could get rid of it for good, but here it was, helping me out of certain death.

The air was now hotter than a human being is meant to handle even in the most extreme of times. I could feel my innards beginning to dry up and break down. The temperature had not stopped rising even as I was getting further away from the body of the firecane. The reason why became my menace.

A stray finger of fire, detached and furious and revolving at eighty miles an hour, was spiraling toward Steph and me. We ducked, but it knocked us on our backs. The flames burned my clothes to smithereens and forcibly removed much of my body hair.

My face was spared, but the back of my head was made bald. My skin felt like it was melting, and some of it was ripped from my bones by the winds, winds that were trying to flip me over and smother the front side of my body, forcing me to hold onto blades of burning grass to stay anchored.

The finger went on its merry way. It had only touched us for a minute or two, but the burns it inflicted were not so easily thrown under the rug. I only knew the finger was gone because I could hear it passing to the south and east. If I had been deaf, I might have stayed on my back for hours.

In a tragedy like this, you want to rely on the signals your body sends to your brain and your brain’s ability to interpret those signals. I could rely on neither. My body was so ravaged, it couldn’t decide if it was still getting burned, and my mind was scrambled. My inner demon refused to recede to the pieces of refuse in my soul where it typically lurked, but even if it had, being burned is profoundly disorienting.

I didn’t know who was ahead of me or who was behind me. I forget where I was and what my goal was. I forget what Icithan was. For a moment, I couldn’t even tell up from down or left from right. While I could hear the finger passing by, it took me minutes to discern what direction it had passed by in.

There was no way I could use logic or reason. There was no way I could realize there is no way that finger could have hung over us for more than a few minutes. The world was chaos, the rules had been thrown out, and I was in no position to draw rational conclusions.

When I turned over, uncontrollable pain usurped my senses. The burnt backside of my body was in no position to lay against the ground. I immediately sat up, but I didn’t stand up.

The air had cooled, but not by a lot. The lower air was cooler than the higher air. The difference was ten to fifteen degrees. It was the difference between extremely hot and unbearably hot. I kept my head ducked and took titanic gulps of that cooler air. These gulps were desperate and ghastly enough to make my body shudder and bulge and to make my arms rise up on my shoulders.

Moving on my knees was ineffective, so I took to crawling. My hands dug into the scorched earth. It felt dead, like its life force had been stolen. I had little experience crawling, but fueled by my inner demon, my pace was rigorous, though it was considerably less so once my inner demon faded, and I was left in control of my broken self.

The pain got more real, and the distance I had to cover seemed to increase as it decreased.

Tired, I dropped to my stomach and laid my face in the dirt. My throat was parched. Not only was I dehydrated, I was uncertain whether there was any water left in my body. Closing my eyes, I listened to my arms and legs pulse vigorously, like they were trying to make me act to improve my situation, but there wasn’t much I could do, and I hoarsely mumbled as much.

I turned on my side. It was uncomfortable, but the front of my body was getting tired. Without thinking, I turned onto my back. It was not long before a colossal scream rose up from my weakened lungs and I returned to crawling. I focused on movement instead of the pain, and it seemed to both lessen my injuries and make me move faster, so I kept at it until I reached Steph. It got boring, but relative to the other emotions I was feeling, boredom was a positive.

Steph had not moved since she was knocked off her feet. Her face was buried in the dirt, and her body was lifeless. Panicking, I wondered aloud, “Is she dead?”

To which she responded, “No, I’m not.”

Chuckling, I scampered over to her. “Are you gonna get up?” I asked.

“I can stay like this.”

“I couldn’t. Here- I’ll give you a hand.”

“That’s not necessary.” She popped up and patted down what was left of her wily hair. “How do I look? As ridiculous as you?”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

“You’ve been burned half to death. You shouldn’t expect to look like a model.”

“Fair.”

“Generally, you look as good or bad as you feel. You look bad, and I know you feel bad. Take a rest. That’s what I’m doing.”

“To be blunt, you look dead.”

“That fits. I feel dead.” Her voice, formerly sharp, sounded as grungy as an uncleaned chimney.

As we sat a foot apart, our feet in the dirt, our heads tilted upward, the firecane ripped through the hill. Steph’s horse was killed and launched airborne as a flying ball of fire and hair. The top half of the hill- the half we had been unable to climb- was detached from the bottom half and reduced to a cloud of dirt, which was sprinkled throughout the land in a filthy rain.

The cave Steph had warned us against did not escape unscathed. It and the cliffside it stuck into were written out of existence by the pen of fire. “Thank you for saving my life,” I said. “Thank you for saving all our lives.”

“You’re welcome, but I don’t know if the other two made it out all right.”

“They did.”

“Why do you think that?”

I didn’t have an answer- I was speaking instinctually- but I soon got one. In the distance, cast in light by the whipping flames, I could see them riding on my stallion, which had miraculously survived its fall. Its gait was slow and limping, and there were scars spattered across its body, but it was faster than either Machen or Ironwall could walk, and it exuded this ephemeral battle-born majesty.

They didn’t see us, so I asked Steph if she could yell for them, but she said she couldn’t, so I blared out a few key phrases in a tone not unlike that of a foghorn. The thing about foghorns, however, is that they’re very loud. Ironwall heard me first and turned without thinking. He was not commanding the horse, which surprised me.

That honor went to Machen, who heard us seconds later and rode our way. There was a conflicted composure to him that was apparent even in his posture. If energy is fire and depression is ice, he was possessed by water and steam.

Stepping off the stallion, he rubbed its bloody coat and thanked it. This wasn’t because he loved horses or this horse in particular or the job it did ferrying them across the firefield, though all three are true. He didn’t want to look at Steph. He knew he would have to talk to her, and he wasn’t ready for that conversation.

This was apparent to the three of us. Ironwall was about to make a comment, but I beat him to the punch by a half-second, saying, “What are you doing?”

My words entered his ears, rolled around in the turgid sea at the pit of his stomach, and settled into his digestive system. Coughing, lifting his head, and bearing a grin, he said, “Thank you, Steph.”

She didn’t make light of him. Her eyes met his, and she responded, “It’s my pleasure.”

“I know I have a lot of thinking to do, a lot of growing up to do. I’m not who I used to be, and I shouldn’t try to be.” He set his hands, which had been cupping his pockets, on his scarred thighs. “I don’t know who the new me will be, but he’s gonna respect you. I’m sorry for being kinda repulsive. I wasn’t trying to be an arrogant fool, but I ended up that way. I love you. I will always love you. I have loved you for years. But if you don’t want to have a relationship with me now- or ever… okay. I’ll accept that. I’ll stop making a fool of myself. Whatever happens, I’m going to be a better person. Forming a new identity for yourself is one of the hardest things there is to do. I know. I’ve tried and failed in the past. But I’m gonna try again. Thanks to you, I’ve realized I have to.”

Rubbing the beginnings of a tear from her eye, she flashed a thin but glowing smile and said, “I appreciate you saying that. It… it means a lot to me.”

She didn’t know what to say.

I wish the feelings that moment created could have lasted. It didn’t directly involve me, but it made me happy anyway. I wasn’t only happy for them: I was happy that in the midst of this apocalyptic, irrational, vengeful firestorm, there could be a spark of humanity, decency, and reflection.

Alas, it could not be sustained.