The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Twenty-One

            "How can he be so close so quickly?"  Lina heard her sister's words and pressed her eyes tightly closed for a moment.  It seemed quite likely that they would never reach Za'Reek, but she pushed the thought from her mind and forced her eyes to open so that she could continue scanning.  Was there a place where they might disappear and take refuge from the dragon that was now closing in on them?  Was that mountain what it appeared to be?  "He's closed nearly half the distance."  Quara shouted the information out and then buried her face against her sister's back, working hard at keeping her breathing steady.

            Ausfela changed course rapidly, moving to the right she folded her wings tightly against her body as she went into a dive.  She plummeted towards the earth.  Lina gripped the saddle until her fingers ached, and realized that Quara's body was entirely relaxed.  There was no way that she was still conscious.

She must have fainted when Ausfela began to dive.  Her arms were pinned between her sister's body and the saddle, keeping her from flopping backwards in the wind.  The harness would keep her sister on the dragon, even if she wasn't conscious, but Lina was still fairly certain that a person could be injured by striking a dragon if they weren't in control of their movements.  She couldn't give the worry much energy though, because a bone rattling sound overtook Ausfela as the dragon behind them let out a great roar, and every other thought that wasn't entirely devoted to finding a way to escape the crimson dragon who was closing in on them, was driven from her mind.

            Lifting her eyes, she gazed ahead again, trying to find the mountain that she thought she'd seen a few moments earlier.  Now that they were hurtling down through the sky, the peculiar mountain was far easier to spot.

            The peak rose up, above the monotony of the evergreen mountains that surrounded it.  Its sides shimmered, grey flecked with flashes of silver.  An enormous glacier, surrounded much of the side that they could see as they approached from the west, but it was what was inside the crater that Lina found she simply could not tear her eyes away from.  Down inside the volcano's crater was a great lake, with three islands, one of which seemed to be fairly large in size, although it was still rather difficult to judge size while traveling at a high speed from such a great distance.

            "I'm going to drop you into the water, just near the island, if we get that far."  Ausfela's voice sounded much older than it had that morning, and Lina sensed an almost indescribable exhaustion that she innately knew had almost nothing to do with the great distance that they had flown in the previous quarter of an hour and everything to do with the millennia that she had spent working to undermine the greatest evil their world had ever known.  "Take your sister and do whatever you need to do to hide.  I will do whatever I can to buy you as much time as I possibly can.  I am not certain that I will be of much help though.  The dragon behind us is larger and faster than I am and has likely been fighting other dragons in the Emperor's service for longer than I have been alive."

            "You can beat him." Lina thought the words back at Ausfela, knowing that if she said them aloud they would sound hollow and fall flat and that she would likely burst into tears the moment that they left her mouth. In her mind she hoped that the dragon wouldn't be able to hear the tears that she was trying to keep from falling.

            "I will try."  Despite the words, Ausfela sounded entirely devoid of hope.  "But you can't worry about me. The task that I have waited millennia to fulfill is now at hand and while it is not going quite the way that I had hoped it might, it is still my duty to do all that I can to push on and ensure your safety.  So I need you to listen.  By Quara's silence am I right to guess that she has fainted?"

            "I think so."

            "Let's hope that it is that and not that she can't breathe. We can't stop now. I can't imagine that the stress of this has helped.  Anyways, here is my plan for you.  I will try to drop you into the shallows, for I don't think that I will be able to land and I don't want to drop you onto the hard forest floor.  But from here it looks as though there's an underwater shelf on that island that goes out quite a ways into the water, where the lava bubbled up to form the island itself, and so I will get you as close as I can and hope that with the soft landing and the time that I can buy you, you might escape.  Then you will need to find a way to hide.  If you can, stay near the water, for he may well burn the forest down here as well, looking for you."