Penny grimaced, sticking a ball of mashed-up plants into her mouth. Their bitter juices coated her tongue, but she swallowed the herbs without complaint, only making a slight face afterward.
So far, her vision had improved dramatically, and she'd repaired most of the rest of the damage. In addition, she'd managed to bring down most of the remaining dragons; at most, only one or two were left.
Still, the risk was doubled for these last dragons. Penny considered herself extremely lucky that the blast hadn't roused the nest matriarch, but a pitched battle against a large dragon close to the nest could be the final straw that woke her, and Penny knew that she could not defeat a nest matriarch and multiple other dragons in her current condition. The only solution was to attract the attention of one of the remaining dragons and lure it far from the nest. In an ideal world, Penny would wait several more weeks to restore herself, but she no longer had the time. The danger was too great.
A shriek rang out over the ethereal mountain peaks, and Penny froze. That had been a dragon, not hunting or quarreling with another, but dying, and dying in anger. Penny risked a small amount of magic to float up beside the trunk of a dying pine tree, using its cover to look toward the nest. Her heart sank.
It looked as if there was only one large dragon left, and that was dying, stabbed through with a glimmering snow-white claw. Only one claw.
Penny had held onto hope that the nest matriarch might be young and small, compared to other matriarchs of other nests, but those hopes were now dashed. This dragon could not produce a shard the size of the Crista Magna throne room, but it could rival the nest matriarchs of some of the more famous dragon nests of the world.
The matriarch raised her head and a wild roar sounded, half animal, half speech. Penny felt a chill down her spine; a sharded nest matriarch should not be able to make any sound that could be words. Neither should a nest matriarch be able to kill the dragons of her nest, unless... unless she was not sharded.
Penny froze as the massive head turned toward her, and the nest matriarchs giant mouth cracked open slightly, sounds echoing in her head.
"Human."
Penny didn't reply, feeling insanity lurking at the edges of the word. She couldn't afford to listen or dwell on the matriarch's words, whether or not they were impossible.
"Huuuuumannnn. Biting, slashing, brutal, huuuumannn. I smell you, human. Come here and pay us your debt!" Penny dropped to the ground and crouched, her hands pressed tightly over her ears. There was no doubt now; shard-madness shrieked in the matriarch's words and battered at Penny's defenses, trying to drown her sanity.
"I owe you nothing." Penny whispered, trying to fight it back.
"You owe us blood. Blood for blood until your kind shards over. We hunger, human. Pay your debt."
Penny's breath came in ragged gasps as the words ricocheted around her mind. Blood for blood... blood for blood. Blood for– Penny bit down on her hand, and the sharp sting of pain cleared her mind slightly.
This can't go on. She had to kill the matriarch, and she had to do it quickly. If she went shard-mad, could someone save Avalon from her? And if they could, how much would it cost Avalon's people?
Penny stood, with a deep, shuddering breath. She bundled up a wad of herbs and tucked it into her cheek, hoping the bitterness would help her keep her focus.
"Right." She took a moment, then replied. "You are not yourself. You already know this. You are not yourself, and you are in great pain. I will do what I can to help you."
"Help me by dying."
A vast and impossible swath of forest vanished in front of Penny's eyes, evaporated under the force of the matriarch's breath. Penny launched herself to the side and then toward the center of the nest. Her legs ached already, not up to their full strength, and she barely had the magic to make a single strike.
One chance. If she failed here, she would be so close to the matriarch's heart shard there would be no safety for her mind. If the matriarch dodged her strike... Well, then, I'll have to make sure. Blood for– No, no blood for blood. Not now, not today. Today would be a day for mercy.
Penny circled around to the back of the nest and leaped for the matriarch's neck, an impossibly massive white pillar. The matriarch was the size of a small mountain peak, and failing to make a complete cut meant unimaginable consequences.
"Entertaining, human. Dance for us more."
The matriarch's tail slammed into Penny's ribs with astounding force and she flew sideways past the nest matriarch's chest. With no magic to absorb the shock, she bounced and skidded before slamming into the edge of the dragon's nest, looking up with a groan.
"Do you not intend to dance? Then die." Urgently Penny chewed the leaves stored in her cheek, tasting their bitter sting, hoping it was enough to block out the shard-madness, hoping the matriarch couldn't reach her too soon.
"Hm? Human, what is this?" Shuddering under the force of the words in her brain, Penny looked up to see the edges of the nest matriarch flaking off and turning to dust. A ring of airborne ash clouded the air around the massive, scaly neck, marking the place where Penny had sliced it in two as she was flung past. "Aahhhh, a venomous bite. As expected of humans. Serpents, all of them." Slowly the matriarch collapsed as her legs blew away as ash; her voice changed to a thin, weak, clear one, one that did not carry the insanity of a sharded dragon. "Human, I beg you, grant the mercy that was not granted us, and the mercy we could not grant."
Penny stood shakily and knelt, her face stony but her heart sore from the dragon's request. "I ask that you be at peace, in the place where your soul may land. May your suffering be ended and your heart eased. O Hand of the Great God, I beg of you, peace for her soul." The Plea for the Dead finished, Penny knelt for a moment in silence before approaching the matriarch's heart shard, all that was left within the nest.
The shard was massive, about the size of a small farmhouse, with gently pulsing rainbow light running down its facets. Strangely, it was not clear, as most heart shards were; a curtain of opalescent light seemed to block off its depths from prying eyes. Penny rested for a moment, then used what magic she had left to lift the shard and carry it down the slope, past the wreckage of a ruined mountain, to her camp. As she walked she skirted the edge of a massive crater, where the exploding shard had eaten a huge curve into the mountain slope, and made her way past the dust of thousands of evergreens, evaporated in the breath of white dragons. There was no sound but the wind, and no smell but the smell of ash. Penny comforted herself with the thought that, soon enough, these evergreens would creep back up the slope, and the birds would return and pikas would nest in the rocks.
Finally, she lowered the matriarch's dragon shard to the ground and took a deep breath. She knew that she should be taking this time to rest and to prepare for her journey back to Crista Magna, but the strangeness of the shard lured her. It was very dangerous to attempt to clear the curtain of color inside it, but she had to know.
As Penny placed her hands on the shard, the dragon's last request echoed in her mind. Grant the mercy that was not granted them, the mercy they could no longer grant. What happened to you?
As Penny watched, the light cleared away and revealed the depths of the dragon shard. Bile filled Penny's mouth; she doubled over and retched, gray fog clinging to the edges of her vision, shock numbing her limbs.
Within the matriarch's dragon shard, a baby dragon was frozen in the face of death, its mouth open as if it was still crying. Its body was in tatters, and yet it had been alive very recently. Something, someone, had to have carefully kept it alive to have caused that much damage without immediate death.
Torture. Someone tortured their baby. No wonder the dragon's nest had sharded over. Every last dragon's heart had broken beyond repair at this scene, and it was small wonder. No one could have borne this. Sharding must have swept over the nest like a catastrophic, crystalline wave of grief.
But sealing the body in the matriarch's heart shard had saved Avalon and Kaster. Penny had no doubt of that. A precious and loved child, kept safe from prying eyes in the shard, must have interrupted the matriarch's shard madness. This was why she could still speak. This was why she had killed other sharded dragons. A scrap of sanity had been preserved by holding this precious baby in her heart, long after its life had faded.
And the final request... had it been the matriarch's request, or this child's? Penny didn't know anymore, but the request had been made with no madness in it. After so much pain, was it possible that this baby dragon's heart had stayed intact?
Penny tore her eyes from the depths of the shard and began to think, rage boiling up in her. There were some insane fools who would deliberately cause young dragons to shard in order to harvest them. If they had done this, Penny would come for them. Justice would be served.
Slowly Penny picked up the remaining shards to bring back to Crista Magna. They buzzed in her hands, as if the anger of the dragons had survived through the shards. The closer they came to the matriarch's shard, the louder their rage. Colored spots began to float in front of Penny's eyes, and her head pounded. Something is wrong. Something is happening. This shouldn't happen.
One more step, and the colored spots sharpened into blurred dragons, projected as if imagined into her mind's eye. Another, and they began to clarify, and a red splotch began to resolve near them.
A red splotch, lined in glinting gold. A uniform. The uniform of the Crista Magna High Guard. The ones directly under the Queen.
Heart shards fell out of Penny's numbed hands, and the image faded from her vision. Blood for blood, the matriarch had said. Blood for blood, Penny's for her father's, and the damage of a sharded white nest an appropriate price to pay? The Queen must have gone mad.
Penny's eyes cleared slowly and she collected her thoughts. Avalon was not protected while she was Champion, not if these were the lengths the Queen would go to. But how could she abandon Avalon's people? If she fought the Queen, Avalon would be destroyed, so what else was left for her to do?
There is only one option, Penny realized, trembling slightly. She had considered it once or twice, but it meant going against the Queen, and she had never had the strength to do it for herself. This time, though... this time she could do it, because this time it was for Avalon and not for herself.
Penny collected the dragon shards and started the long road back to Crista Magna, carefully considering her next actions. The safety of Avalon depended on perfect acting, precise timing, and above all, on the rage of the Queen.