“Then why are you still here?” Lindír hissed at the Countess. “Hide with your people.”
“No,” said the Countess. “You don’t see it, do you? Someone has to stand against them. Someone has to pay the price, else they will enact their vengeance upon us with the fullest of their wrath.”
“And you complain that I am foolish. Do you really believe that you can stop them alone?”
Halldis stared out at the North-west Wood, her expression solid as marble and dimly lit by the flickerings of distant fire. “My husband managed it. If he could do it, then so can I. And if I cannot do it, then none in my kingdom could, and you have doomed us all regardless of my actions.”
Lindír relinquished his grip on the castle wall, and circled about to face the woods. “Go. I’ll face them here.”
The Countess had to raise her voice to be heard from a dragon’s body-length away, especially with the wind rising with each passing moment. “Do not let your hubris be the death of you, Lindír!”
“My hubris is what brought this terrible thing upon you and your people, Halldis, you said that yourself. I have fought shape-changers and mages before. And I would like very much to see these Good Neighbors go blow for blow against dragon’s scales, dragon’s teeth, and dragon’s fire!”
The Countess tossed her head back and laughed, the shrill laugh of a warrior who faces terrible odds. “Very well then! We shall face them together! Between the two of us, I am sure that they will find some reason to stop!”
So Lindír crouched in his stable battle-stance, legs bent and spread, wings planted on the earth in preparation for rapid movement, tail whipping rapidly over his back. And there he waited. At first, there was only a profound anticlimax. The fires burned, men shouted, the wind whistled, and for all that the Good Neighbors made any kind of appearance they may as well have forgotten that that corner of their domain existed at all.
Then, one by one, the fires began to go out. It was a subtle thing, not easily noticed. The distant lights were not blown out like a candle or snuffed out like a campfire; there was no sound, no sign, at least not one which could be observed from so great a distance. To Lindír, it appeared more like the twinkling of stars, except that the forest fires would twinkle into invisibility and then not brighten again. One by one, the plumes of smoke guttered out, and bit by bit the fires which he had lit were put out. Before long the forest ceased to appear as separate trees, but instead took on the aspect of a black mass on the horizon. One might almost have thought it was a sinister mirror of the walls of Stokvöllur stretching out in either direction, were it not for the rough shape of foliage against the starlight.
The first scream came just as the last of the forest fires was extinguished. This was not a scream of battle, no scream of rage or even pain. It was a scream of terror, a keening thing that seemed impossible for a human throat to produce unless pushed beyond the ordinary physical limits by a fear too great to put into words. That first scream was a solitary note which broke through the murmurs of chaos in the night, so sharp and so loud that none could avoid it. But soon there came a second scream. And a third. An endless chorus of screams emanated from the Hvalheimer camps, not just the one where Lindír had spoken with Razan, but all up and down the Hvalheimer line the horrible noises came.
From near to the wall, Lindír could not see what was happening. Razan’s soldiers were being killed—for no man could produce such a scream without dying or bearing witness to death—but no matter how intently he stared at the nearest camp, he could see no agent of death. The tents and pathways of the camp were but silhouettes feebly lit by torches and bonfires, and against them he could see the feeble shapes of men running to and fro, but all those he saw were running away from an invisible killer.
But as Lindír glanced from the camps of the Hvalheimers–half-illustrated, merely sketched in the poor light–up to the forest looming behind them, then back and forth, he realized that the stillness was an illusion. He knew, by a long period of observation, the outline of the camp, and how it sat in relation to the forest behind it. He knew its depth, how many rows of tents could be seen, the distance in his eye from the foreground barrier of the camp trench to the background of trees. That distance had already been cut in half, and was fast shrinking.
It was impossible, but the more Lindír looked the more sure he became. The forest did not seem to be moving, but it swallowed the tents of the camp one by one, in the same way as a herd of aurochs might vanish one by one over the crest of a hill. Lindír could not tear his eyes away from it, having lost all control over them, and yet could do nothing to stop the Hvalheimer camp vanishing row by row.
Lindír was overtaken by mute terror. Every muscle in his body was wound painfully tight, frozen in place while trembling with tension. Even Lindír’s lungs struggled to pump the cold night air through his jagged teeth. There was a feeling of disconnection, his body and brain chiseled apart, with the brain stinging and alight with fear and panic, and the body a mere cold carcass without potency or influence.
In the dark, with only the pale sliver of a moon and a smattering of stars to see by, it was impossible to tell what was moving and what was still. As the camps of the Hvalheimers vanished, Lindír began to feel the illusion of movement. It was impossible that he was moving. But despite his claws being so firmly planted, something in the wind and the disorienting screams and the implacable stillness of the wood made him feel as though the ground were being swallowed up and dragged into the forest, and Lindír pulled with it.
And then there were no more Hvalheimer camps, only scattered soldiers who had dropped their weapons and doffed their armor in order to bring greater speed to their flight. They ran, dim shapes in the dark, across the bare plain which was the only thing separating Lindír and the wall from the wood. But even that plain was being devoured.
Even with his claws gripping the earth so firmly that they cut through it like flesh, Lindír’s stomach turned and rushed with movement. Closer, closer came the forest, and the screams at last began to die down as the throats of those caught within were muffled, stifled, and silenced. It was inevitable that the collision would come, and although his foe was the entire breadth of the North-west wood Lindír could do naught but spread his wings and prepare to loose his flames. The wind threatened to douse him with its fury, and the starlit plain vanished beneath the trees at an impossible rate, faster and faster and faster still, a charge, a stampede of trees that would swallow Lindír whole just like they had all the others, like they had Razan.
Lindír heard a roar, but he was not sure if it came from his own throat or from without. He could, at last, see the tall trunks of the forest before him, but they shuffled about and would not stand still. Until they did. The unstoppable advance of the wood stopped, close enough to Lindír that even in the dark he could see the ridges on the bark of the stiff-backed pines. His heart strained against his ribcage so fearsomely that it stung. The night was still and silent aside from a few muffled moans coming from somewhere far ahead. Lindír took shallow, rapid breaths, and the Countess sobbed behind him, both of them taking relish in the stillness.
Something moved in the corner of Lindír’s vision. Every pound of tension in his sinews, every wisp of terror in his consciousness, all found release at once. He leapt back, breathing forth a surge of flame to char the grass before him, and gasped with pain as his tail struck harshly against the castle wall.
And there, having emerged from behind a tree, stood a little old man with a curling grey beard and garish many-colored clothes. He did not speak a word, but his eyes glittered and shone like jewels in the half-light. One of those jeweled eyes winked at Lindír. Then he stepped behind the tree-trunk, and though Lindír waited a score of breaths, he did not appear again.
Lindír had exerted himself to the limit. He had been pierced, and struck, and bled a dozen human’s worth of blood onto the grass. He had emptied his belly of flame. He had been subjected to such terror as to nearly drive him mad, and his heart was sore. The moment he realized that the danger had passed, Lindír collapsed to the ground and promptly lost consciousness.
At midday the next day, Lindír awoke exactly where he had fallen. He was almost as sore as he had been the morning after his escape from the Red Citadel, and his scales were crusted with dried blood, especially where it had been allowed to pool on the ground. He did not wish to rise. Perhaps he would do as dragons were said to do and sleep for a hundred years. But then he remembered that he did not know if Razan had lived or died, and he battled a thousand stabbing pains to regain his footing.
Before him was a scene of utter carnage and desolation. At once, his thoughts turned to the coastline, to the scattered driftwood and strange sea creatures left behind when the waves retreated. That was the only thing Lindír could think of which resembled the land before Stokvöllur castle.
The trees which had come up almost to the edge of the castle had been no illusion, for their rotted and leafless trunks now lay scattered by the hundreds across the terrain. The earth had been churned and upset, the grass uprooted, stones cast about. As Lindír advanced, creepingly, into that desolate land, he found that he was not alone. People from Stokvöllur had come out to scavenge fuel, steal weapons and armor from the Hvalheimers, and bury the dead. And there were a great many dead, hundreds upon hundreds of dead, so many dead that their spilt blood filled the depressions in the torn earth and the effluvia of their decay made the air thick with the unwholesome miasma of rot. The lucky dead were those who had died by conventional violence: eyes pecked out by birds, limbs torn by rampaging stags, or else impaled from anus to mouth upon fast-growing saplings. The unlucky dead found their ends in ways too varied to list.
There were men whose bellies had ruptured, revealing piles of dead serpents. Others had been overgrown by the foliage, flowers spilling from their mouths and eye sockets, their green-tinted corpses twisted into poses of uttermost pain. In some places only the suggestion of bodies remained, the stones or the trees taking on the shape of twisted human forms. Some few corpses did not appear to have any cause of death at all; they had simply fallen where they stood.
Lindír walked amongst these dead for hours without cease. Ignoring the pangs of soreness in his limbs and the dull ache of his wounds, he patrolled the curse-riven grounds between the castle and the woods with all the solemn quietude of an ancient ghost. All of this was his fault, after all. He had killed humans before and he likely would again, so he felt little for these ones. But if Razan’s corpse lay amongst them, then he needed to find her. He needed to know.
So for hours Lindír continued his search. He focused on the far edges of the field, where she would have gone had she been in full flight when the Good Neighbors fell upon her, but out of a desire to not miss the place where his love had fallen, he searched everywhere. His search was made easier by Razan’s form. There were few Akunian corpses, and few women; so there were very few Akunian women indeed lying dead in the killing field. Whenever Lindír did find one, a stab of terror would pass through his heart until he could look upon her face. For hours and hours he searched, until his bones felt as though they were about to break and his muscles to snap. Only when night fell did he return to the castle.
Too weak to take to the skies in order to reach his tower perch, Lindír instead spent a painful few hours sleeping in the middle of the courtyard, before being awoken by a swift kick to the side of his head. He opened his eyes and turned, not wanting to raise his head, and found the Countess standing over him.
“I’m not going to move,” he said. “Unless you have brought a crane to carry me.”
“Your deciding to sleep in the way of things is about the least of our troubles,” the Countess said. “Where were you all day?”
“Looking at corpses.”
Halldis frowned. “Why?”
Lindír was too exhausted to concoct a lie. “Looking for someone. Al-Khanjar, the general. I wished to know if she was one of the dead.”
“Want to make sure you finish what you started?”
Lindír said nothing, his chest inflating as he took a long, languid breath.
“You have no need to worry about a second attack,” said Halldis, smiling slightly. “Half of the Hvalheimers are dead, and the remainder scattered and fleeing. As far as it matters for you and I, there is no more invading army. I am not going to humor you by pretending that you angered the Good Neighbors intentionally, but now that you have chosen to apply yourself, you’ve done quite good work.”
Lindír growled, a quiet rumble in the back of his throat. “I am glad to have been of service. Truly, killing in your name is the height of my dragonhood.”
“Indeed,” said Halldis. She folded her arms behind her back and gazed up at the stars, looking almost pleased with herself. “A dragon with honor, a dragon who knows loyalty? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Loyalty…” Lindír muttered to himself, his eyes fluttering closed. “Loyalty…”
…
Two months later, Lindír left Stokvöllur castle, never to return. In the dying months of summer, as the warm and wet faded to be replaced by a long, dry darkness, he launched himself from his tower perch and did not look back. It was not until he was half a day away, the castle far over the horizon, that he became sure that he would not return.
In truth, though his leaving was an act of impulse, it had been an act long in the making. What little friendship he had had with Halldis Fast-Tower had guttered and died after the end of the siege, leaving him dreadfully alone. As her ally, though, and the city of Stokvöllur’s local dragon, he nonetheless felt obligated to help. The closest thing to entertainment that he had in those two months was work. Sometimes they needed his strength, other times his flame, but with Lindír’s aid, the city made as much of a recovery as could be expected after the arrival of war.
But they never seemed to thank him for it. He earned no acclaim, nor friendship, not even the simple gestures that one might earn as the local carpenter or smith. And fighting in battle had earned him nothing either, nothing but a few new scars and nightmares about dark forests. He was supposed to have earned fame, legend, perhaps even a proper name for his deeds! But he had gained nothing. And the longer he worked, the more he realized that he would gain nothing.
And so Lindír left. It was a familiar existence that he returned to, though he had not lived that way in nearly three years, since before meeting Ámnistr. He became itinerant, wandering the length and breadth of the North, a wild dragon barely a step above the animals.
Things were somewhat different this time, of course. For one thing he was quite a good deal larger, and being at the tail end of his growth he was not nearly so hungry. And he had come to hate the idea of fighting. Though he was sometimes forced to steal livestock, he avoided it when he could, poaching wild animals or attempting to obtain meat via trade.
As a dragon, he did not have much to trade with. His great strength meant that he could do common labor, lifting roof-tiles onto churches and moving boulders out of fields, but he refused to be tied to one place for more than a day, so most common work would not avail him. Other times he effectively did the job of a mercenary. It seemed as though there was always someone in need of assaulting someone else. The big magnates would ask him to rid their lands of bandits, or intimidate their renters into paying their dues. Some villages were threatened by gangs of trolls stealing all of their food and drink, or troublesome knights who thought that murder and rape were their just desserts. These ones were the best, for knights and trolls were little threat to Lindír, and the celebratory feasts made for good meals.
Some villages—not many, but more than he had expected—offered him food out of the goodness of their hearts, or at least a healthy sense of respect. This was most common in the far North, in the place where no kings or counts ruled, where each village answered only to its own head-man or -woman. This was the case in one village, a small collection of wood huts clustered around a stream high in the hills, which Lindír arrived at nearly half a year later.
Lindír slowly spiraled down towards that village, wishing to make clear that he had no hostile intent. To his surprise, there was a welcoming party: half a dozen hunters with spear in hand, led by the head-man with an iron medallion on his chest. Lindír landed swiftly, displacing a herd of reindeer which had been using the field to graze.
“Hail, mighty dragon!” said the man with the medallion, in a thickly-accented version of a common Northern trade-tongue. “What brings you to our village?”
“Hunger,” he said. “I see you have plenty of reindeer, but I thought you might prefer it if I came to an arrangement with you about how to acquire some, as opposed to just stealing them.”
Immediately, the head-man burst into laughter, and after a brief explanation in what must have been their native tongue, the other hunters did so as well. “Unusually forthright for one of your kind, you are,” said the leader. “But we are always willing to offer hospitality to the flame-bringers. One of our bulls has grown quite old. Would that suffice for two?”
Lindír nodded. “Indeed it would.” He looked over the field, at the herd, at the village itself. He had never tasted reindeer before.
One part of the head-man’s statement took some time to sink in. When it did, when he realized what the man had implied, Lindír snapped to attention, rising from his haunches into a crouched posture of curiosity. “Two? Why did you say two?”
The head-man furrowed his brow in confusion. “The other one, who passed this way a short time ago. Was he not a friend of yours?”
“When? When did you see it? Which way were they going?”
The head-man evidently had seen nothing, for he was forced to confer with one of the other hunters. Lindír, who had spent the last few days in a haze of indifference, suddenly found himself anxiously shifting his weight from one foot to the other while he waited. Eventually, the man turned back to him. “A third of a day ago, we saw a yellow one of your kind. He was traveling the same direction as the path of the sun, but to the north,” he said, indicating that direction with his outstretched arm.
In an instant, Lindír whirled about. Pressing his wing-claws to the earth he sprang aloft, and with all of his strength, flew to the west. At long last, he had crossed paths with another of his kind.
I hope the other dragon is friendly
So does Lindír
I hope it's a lady, haha. After being burned by Razan, he deserves it.