Loose gravel cracked underfoot, accentuated by the soft echoing drips of spring rain and stale air.
Dailes' golden eyes pierced through the cavern's shadowed light as he stayed one step ahead, monitoring their surroundings.
Despite her deep breathing, Chyrie continued to tear her gaze from the burnt remains of clothing and scattered bones. She thanked the gods for every empty tunnel as they passed, praying above every star they might not find a shallow grave with half-rotten bodies.
The smell left little to the imagination. Sulfer rent the damp breeze, accompanied by dried blood and wet dirt.
Her stomach turned.
Chyrie could only stare in horror as Dailes examined several pairs of remains in the darkness, sniffing at there cast arms to check for weapons.
"This way."
A small mercy that he only wished to speak in her mind.
She followed him left, into a dead end where the darkness swallowed them whole and her heart shuddered.
Laying across the rubble were glistening bones of white, still clothed in armor despite the worn garments, and reaching for a moss covered sword.
Tears prickled in her eyes as Dailes moved to nudge the sword closer to her.
Instead of grasping the weapon, Chyrie knelt down beside the mummified face of a solider. A man. Her heart crumpled with the dust lining his jacket and blew away like fresh ash.
Her fingers reached out to test the remains, to feel around for identification of sorts, but she only found the metallic plating of his pommel. The emblem was only given to the royal guard.
Whomever lay here, she'd known or seen.
Chyrie felt a tear break loose down her cheek as she shifted even closer, knocking the dried skeleton over.
The dirt pile broke behind them, shaking the walls of the tunnel.
Dailes bit into the silver weapon and dragged it into her lap. "Let's go."
Her limbs froze in place, refusing her.
Dailes shoved himself between her legs and lifted her from the cavern floor.
Chyrie swallowed past the heartbreak, now mixed with guilt as her drakeling carried her through the cavern like a faithful steed. They would need more tools if she was going to complete Anryth's challenge.
After entering a new cavern, she slid off Dailes' back and started brushing through the remains of her people.
She found several items–from picks, to tongs, and an older ax. A sack of leather for her to strip and reform into grips. Gauntlets for her wrists if she needed the extra protection.
Chyrie started carrying them to Dailes' back when a metallic crack snapped through the air.
His tail had come down upon a broken mine track, lined for carts to use and stripped the metal right from the ground. He then lowered himself to wedge under the bar and heat it, his fire curling over the steel framework.
Managing to snap the grating and cart track, Dailes rammed his body into the trail beneath him and ripped the beam from the floor.
She'd stared in awe at his genius, watching him rip raw material from the ground and find a way to carry it back to the forge.
Chyrie felt the ground beneath them shake as the track dislodged a wooden beam supporting the mines ceiling. Her legs locked up again as dirt started raining down from the splitting wood and groaning filled the air.
"Chyrie!"
The walls were caving in around them.
She couldn't continue to freeze, even as her limbs shook with every pained movement.
Her legs weren't walking fast enough.
Before she knew what had happened, the ceiling collapsed around her fast falling frame as Dailes catapulted her across the room.
Tools clattered around her as she hit the ground, knees catching on brittle rock and old gravel.
"Dailes!" she yelled back.
Chyrie scanned the entire mine, unable to see his smokey scales in the blackness. Her mind reeled as she threw herself forward, hurtling for the wall of mud. Broken glass from a shattered lantern cut into her feet as she tugged at a giant chunk of gravel.
"Dailes!!" she screamed, her throat burning. "Dailes, where are you!"
Nothing moved.
No warmth curled through her mind.
Chyrie sobbed quietly as she shoved large mounds of clay out of her way, feeling the sodden moss and stone scraping under her fingernails.
"Dailes! Dailes, please..."
Her breaths broke out in sharp rasps as the panic hit, stripping her of the soul-bound feeling she'd cherished in her chest for such a short time. She couldn't find it, the sensation unbearable.
"Niukka!" Chyrie cried again, stumbling to her knees. She pressed her palms together and begged the empty forge. "Niukka, please... Please save him, save this creature of your creation, crafted by your power..."
Her veins sang to life with the fire of her own magic, edging her into another digging frenzy.
Again and again she fought.
"Dailes!!"
A wing broke out of the rubble.
Then another.
Chyrie's heart flipped between the sight her drakeling and the sickening angle one of his wings had been bent.
"Oh gods," she whispered, rubbing away tears as she climbed over to him. "Oh gods, oh gods, Dailes!"
"Hush," he said, though his tone came sharp. "Please."
Frantically pulling away enough mud for him to breath, Dailes crawled out of the wreckage limping. His movements were more stiff than she'd ever seen them.
"Are you hurt?"
Dailes' whine of anguish broke her heart as he attempted to flex his wing. The thin skin remained intact, but the bone connecting to his shoulder was locked out of place, another close to the center where it folded was left broken.
"You were right," he murmured softly. "This is a bad place."
"It wasn't, once."
He grumbled and crawled toward her scattered mess, nosing the tools together. Once they were gathered, Chyrie placed herself against Dailes' wing to brace the bones. Without her leathers, she couldn't bind them here.
Chyrie forced herself forward, gently brushing the top of Dailes head as they walked.
She didn't even know if they had enough supply, but they'd need to make it work now.
"I'm of no use without wings," he muttered to himself.
"Hush," Chyrie soothed. "You're of plenty use."
Dailes snapped his teeth at her in argument.
"We are the strength we possess," she said, repeating the words her mother buried within her. The hymn sung over her crib was a distant memory. "Now, let me look."
He flared his wing at her and angled it against the floor gently.
Chyrie took a deep breath and grabbed a thin strip of metal that had been rounded with no sharp edges, lining it up with his more crucial wound–the snapped radius.
"You'll fly again," she assured him, pressing the bone in place and binding it down with leather. Her heart knew she might be lying, but with quick attention, she might be able to save him. "This will hurt."
She pointed at the coracoid bone sticking out of the socket.
"It hurts now."
"It's my fault for allowing you down there," Chyrie said softly.
"I would search with or without you."
She frowned. It wasn't worth debating when her gut told her it was true.
Dailes slunk over to the Temple entrance and dropped himself on the floor.
Chyrie approached his stretched frame and sat beside him, leaning into the warmth from his underbelly. She remembered how young he truly was as Dailes laid his head in her lap, his pain echoed by a quiet whimper.
Lifting her fingers, she struggled to summon the sparks of ember and smoke that normally danced along her fingertips.
The light of her healing fire, stolen.
"As long as I'm bound by this wretched oath, I've no healing left within me."
"I'll heal," he rumbled back, emphasized by a puff of smoke.
She was afraid.
Very afraid of the healing process, if it meant he'd never fly again.
Between her hatred for Anryth and her fear for Dailes, Chyrie shuddered under the weight of the tide of nerves threatening to suck her in.
The King of Rymedör had stripped her completely and claimed justice upon her land. He took her parents, her magic, and her people—bade her to die on the hearth of her goddess, for the slim chance that she might end him altogether.
Chyrie couldn't fathom what might beg someone to choose between life or death.
She would trade anything to see her parents again, to undo this hellish nightmare.
Then, for the first time in months, she wondered what Anryth had lost.
Whom.
If his insanity were driven from the empty void left by love.
Chyrie frowned, closing her eyes. She saw a man she'd never known standing with a woman, with children and a family and sighed. A figment of her imagination, possibly.
Someone no better or worse than her.
Or a forgotten reality smeared in blood.
On hands and knees, Chyrie crawled for the warm glow of Temple light cast through the rocks.
If Niukka, herself, protected the souls and swords of her parents, perhaps she'd find more records of the past locked within.
Or even the truth.