Snow ✓

The Last Dragon

It wasn't until he reached Myst that he lamented his missing coat. He slowed outside the first house and wrapped his arms over his gooseflesh, his quick breaths leaving him in wil-o'-the-wisps as he listened to early risers bustling about their homes and chicken coops, casting shadows in the thin fog. A few quit their chores to watch him pass, and he wondered if they recognized their neighbor from over the hill in the dark, his face swollen and head bruised. He wondered if he looked as haunting as he felt. No one raised a hand in greeting, inquired about his forlorn state or the ship that had descended louder than a tornado on the outskirts of town. All looked away, not so much like he was a sight they couldn't bear, but as if they had heard something and, in looking up, had found the street empty.

He hated them.

A rooster crowed when Elis' cherrywood door finally came into view. It was cracked. Mat pushed it open and, having forgotten about the bell, gritted his teeth as the chime plucked his already taut nerves. All was dark and silent inside. He moved over the threshold, blinking away the dark. He thought to call out to Elis, but the place had never felt more cold or empty.

The wizard was gone.

Mat lit a lantern and moved down aisles, shining the light on the vacant faces of toys and casting long shadows over the furniture inside miniature houses; all of it hauntingly still. Mat kept an eye out for a blink, the turning of a head, the dash of a tail around a corner--movement of any kind, but not a toy stirred, the only sound the creaking of the floorboards under his boots.

He paused at Elis' worktable. Going through the drawers, he found it had been emptied of all parchment, pen and ink. Half expecting the mural to be gone, all fingerprints of any discernible identity wiped clean, he raised the lantern to the mortar to find a familiar violet gaze staring back. He marveled at the thought that Snow may have met her by now.

Been cut open by her by now, a voice not quite his whispered.

He shook his head to dispel the thought and moved back down the aisle of mini architectural masterpieces, pausing at the crumbling castle tower, home to the glass dragons. Two clutched the rock wall, unmoving, their jaws agape in silent snarls, the light lending a gleam to their scales and a luster to their eyes. Aloys was missing.

Mat kept moving, on the hunt for a clue, for proof that the tinker was innocent. He hung a right at the end of the aisle and squeezed through to the back corner with the bookshelves, a sharp reminder of Elis' gift to Snow.

A gift for the doomed, the voice niggled, interrupted by a faint and sporadic scratching. Mat inclined his ear and wondered if it wasn't the sound of him cracking up. He turned and raised the lantern, letting the noise guide his hand toward the opposite wall where the halo of light roved over the base of the shimmery ripple on the mural, and below it—Aloys clinging to the brick, scratching at the mortar.

Mat inched closer. "What are you doing serpent?"

Aloys swung his head around and gave a sharp mewl. Its wings were flaccid, its grip kept slipping, and its jaw was agape like the others but emitting a steady plume of smoke. Mat raised his hand to pet the dragon's scaly back with his knuckles, but when he touched it, the dragon started to fall apart, scale by scale, then quickly all at once to the floor with a hiss and a puff of smoke. Dumbstruck, Mat stared at the heap of smoldering shards and felt an abrupt pang of sorrow tear through his chest. He had found one last drop of magic and it had disintegrated at his touch. All tangible proof that anything fantastical had once barged into his life had gone.

Eyes burning with the threat of tears, he took a step back and for the first time noticed that the mural wasn't the one he remembered. Paint had been hastily applied to cover the trees and fuzzy tear in the atmosphere, though a floating orb or two still peeked out from between brush strokes. In their place, a blue sky and mustard-yellow field, in the midst of which stood an alabaster girl smaller than his pinky finger—that's where Mat's eyes landed like a stone tossed into a riverbed. Her head was tilted up and her hair was wild about her featureless face covered in colorless lesions; it was where Aloys had been scratching. Mat moved back, hoisting up the lantern to illuminate the black airship, perfect in its likeness, hanging over the girl like a sinister mobile. In the background sat Gran's cottage. It could be a portrait.

His head pounded with the implications that Elis knew what he couldn't possibly know without a stake in the matter. His vision wobbled as a biting heat coiled in his gut—he needed to get out. Mat barreled toward the gap and, in his effort to rush through, rammed his shoulder into the bookcase and sent the lantern flying out into the corridor before it landed with a satisfying shatter of breaking glass. A tiny fire sprung up in its place and danced in Mat's eyes. With the mind to stomp it out, Mat closed the distance but stepped over it as the fire leapt to a throng of headless ballerinas on the bottom shelf. Not one budged in a survivalist panic.

Pain threading behind his eyes, Mat took one last look at the glow growing on the ceiling before he rushed back out through the door and into the rolling fog.