Dragonslayer, Inc.
Chapter XXVIII- Fire and Ice

I swatted the back of my neck, thinking an insect had landed there. I was wrong. It was sunburn.

You don’t think about getting sunburnt when the conditions are more alpine than beach-like, but it’s a threat. As a Dragonslayer, I was never free from threats, even before this crazy quest. I had to decide which threats were worth worrying about. The bigger threats were resolved, while the smaller threats were allowed to exist until there came a time when they could be taken care of.

I did not consider sunburn to be a big threat, and so I ignored mine, and it got worse. We were on a mountain ridge leading up to Curam, and there was not a cloud in the sky nor shade to replace. We were out in the open sun, and while it wasn’t hot, it was punishing.

When the pain got to be outrageous, I asked, “Does anyone have a scarf?”

If I couldn’t heal the pain- and I couldn’t, given our lack of medical supplies- I could at least stop it from getting worse.

“You can have my old shirt,” said Machen, tossing me a dirty, blood-stained piece of cloth.

We were wearing new outfits now. In addition to food and supplies, that wandering tribe had given me clothes. I asked for and received three shirts and three sets of pants. They weren’t fashion statements, but they were practical and well-made, and we were overjoyed to be rid of the obliterated rags we had been wearing.

The remnants of Machen’s shirt covered my neck. My skin was protected. I heaved a sigh of relief. “That’s better,” I said.

“I used to get sunburnt as a kid,” said Machen. “Before the summer, Mom used to buy two eighteen-inch-tall bottles of lotion, and by the end of the summer, they were empty.”

“Somehow that’s not surprising at all.” It was nice to have a new topic of conversation, even one as silly as this. “I got burnt once when I was young, and my mother scolded me for it. Mind you, I rarely ever went outside for longer than ten minutes. This was an exception. I had to wait for my sister. She had been outside the entire day, but her skin wasn’t even slightly red. I wasn’t surprised. She went out in the sun constantly, but she never got burnt. What was her secret? What was she doing that I wasn’t? Nothing. It’s genetic. I got the raw end of the deal.”

“If we’ve gotten to the point where we’re complaining about sunburn susceptibility, we’re not on the raw end of any deal,” said Steph.

She was right. The path had been quiet for the last several days. Nothing save Curam was approaching us. If an earlier stretch of the trip had been so uneventful, we would have been bored, but as weary travelers laboring down the final stretch, we were relieved. We would have preferred for nothing interesting to happen until the dragon battle.

When sunset fell, I returned the shirt to Machen, and he stuffed it in his pocket as we made camp on top of a plateau. This leg of our trip had few pleasures, but when one of those pleasures is a relentless display of breathtaking views, it is impossible to be upset. Tonight the canyons below sparkled as they were drenched in moonlight, and the mountains beyond stood in their dark dresses, gazing into the horizon in majestic solitude.

The skies were clear save for several low-hanging clouds enshrouding the horizon. Meteors raced in all directions. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a city, but meteor showers are special to me. They’re so magical, so ephemerally stunning.

When I was twelve, I heard on the news that there would be a meteor shower, so I begged my mom to drive Acady and me out to see it, and when that plan failed, I woke up at one in the morning, turned on the TV, put it on mute, and turned to the National Weather and Forecasting Channel. True to their word, they were broadcasting the meteor shower live. Afraid as I was of being caught by Mom, I watched for two straight hours before turning off the TV and going back to sleep.

When I was fifteen, I got to see a meteor shower in person. Mom drove Acady and me out of the city and the light pollution to an open field near Claci Basin. I was blown away. My love for meteor showers was cemented. The vast majority of those meteors were racing north, so I stared in that direction, and my mind wandered to what life was like in Miyok and Curam. I wanted to know.

The vast majority of these meteors were racing south, so I stared in that direction, and my mind wandered to what life was like in Natura. I wanted to know.

Sitting down, I stretched my legs and bent my head. The air was getting cold. I was on a ledge, inches from a hundred-foot drop. Machen joined me. “This remind you of anything?” he asked.

“A lot of things.”

“It reminds me of the entrance to Segrabi Cavern. I remember lying there and hearing the bitter winds crash against the rocks. That was a dark night, but I didn’t want it to end. I knew no matter how long I rested, I would still be tired, and though I didn’t want to admit it, I dreaded Segrabi. It was a barrier. Once we went in, that was it. There was no going back.”

“The two of us had a nice chat that morning.”

“What are you going on about?”

“Ironwall and I.”

“That makes more sense.”

“Machen, have you ever regretted becoming a Slayer?”

“Not until this journey. I had freedom, independence, power, status. It was amazing.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I experienced it for myself.”

“I remember that,” he scoffed. “I thought you were gonna end up OD’d in the bathtub of a five-star hotel room.”

“I’m happy to have proved you wrong.”

“There are a lot of things I was wrong about. Realizing that was painful. It would have been less painful to live with my delusions.”

“Then how about this: you wake up tomorrow next to a magic lamp. You rub it, and Esila, the Solanian goddess of fortune, emerges, as purple and voluptuous as she was in the myths, and offers you the opportunity to erase this journey from your life. Do you take her offer?”

“…No.”

“No?”

“No.” He crossed his legs. “I don’t want the life I had. I want this life. I don’t know why, or if I’ll ever replace out. This is a painful existence- I’d call it tortuous- but I don’t want it to go away. I might die soon, but right now I feel alive. For the first time, I feel connected with the world. I feel like I’ve been awakened, like my eyes are clear now. If I were given that offer, I’d say no, feel good about it, and then go back to trying to figure out this crazy world.”

The meteor shower stopped.

Stormclouds approached from the west and east. Rapidly moving, they blitzed the bright night sky, covering it in morose darkness. The moon became invisible, and our visibility was reduced to basically nothing.

“Realistically speaking,” I said, “what do you think the odds are of us making it home?”

“All of us or…”

“All of us.”

“Low. Higher than before, but still really low.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No. Does it bother you?”

“Yes, it does. Some nights it doesn’t, but most…”

A snowflake fell on my shoulder. Another tumbled onto my open palm. Younger me wouldn’t have been worried, but I was no longer so naïve. I knew what was coming. Five more snowflakes hit my face. Needing no further prompting, I sprang up and blindly ran back toward camp, trying to replace it and Steph. A blizzard was coming. I did not want the three of us to be separated, and neither did Machen, who stuck close to me.

Our efforts were in vain. Within minutes, snow was falling by the bucketload. This did not reduce the already negligible visibility, but its accompanying winds drowned out any attempts we made to call to her and any attempts she made to call to us. We were cut off, forced to bumble around like blind moles as snow piled around our feet.

This came to a head when we accidentally, unknowingly stumbled close to a ledge. A gale kicked up, and it didn’t relent. Chaotic, ambitious, and grandiose, it was more like Arge than your average wind. It was as though his spirit had taken control of the blast of air and used it to punish us from beyond the grave. We held out at first, but when it blew a genuine boulder at us, we were forced to roll out of the way, and while we were rolling, the winds blew even stronger, and we rolled off the plateau.

We landed on the same ledge.

Machen landed on his feet and suffered only minor injuries.

I landed on my side and was in chronic pain for much of the next week.

We were out of the way of the wind, but the snow did not spare our ledge. When too much accumulated, Machen would brush it off the side. I couldn’t help. I could hardly move.

When we first fell, Machen wanted to climb up as soon as possible, but when he asked for my input, I only groaned, and he knew something wasn’t right. Turning around, he saw me lying there, broken, and he scrapped his original plan. For days, he took care of me morning, noon, and night. I’ll never forget that.

Most of our supplies were at camp, but Machen had one leaf-bag of buds and one leaf-bottle of Litriol water with him, and I had the same. In a case of preparation paying dividends, we had carried these supplies in case we got separated from camp.

The blizzard lasted for an entire day and into the next morning. When sunrise hit, the winds lessened to a purr. The snow continued trickling down for a few more hours before coming to a stop. By noon, the sky was clear. My face was cast in sunlight.

“How do you feel?” Machen asked.

“Better than this morning.” I tried to turn on my side but ended up flat on my face. “Not that much better though. My body’s wrecked. Can I have a little help here?”

“Sure.” He was smiling, and he helped me onto my side, but he was spent. He wanted me to get better for his sake as much as mine.

There were dark circles around his eyes, and they would only get darker over the next few days. His eyelids drooped, and his face looked like a wax figure that had been out in the sun too long. He was starving, having only eaten a quarter of what he had given me, and he had only consumed a teaspoon of Litriol water. The life had gone from his face, and his skin was rough and rubbery. By the time this tribulation was over, I was, injuries and all, the healthier one.

Clearing our ledge one last time, he stood on its lip and rubbed his hands together, saying, “Steph will replace us now.”

“If she were gonna replace us, it would have happened already. A little snow doesn’t stop her.”

“Should I go looking for her? You’d be left behind. Are you okay with that?”

“Give me another chug of Litriol.”

“There’s only half a bottle left. You’ve been sucking it down.”

“I didn’t realize that. …We should save the rest. You might need some.”

“No. I’ll be fine. It’s for you. If you want to drink the rest of it now, go ahead.” He handed me the bottle, and I drank more than I intended. Only a sliver of liquid was left. I promised myself I would save it for Machen, but my resolve proved weak. He left the bottle next to me while he was gone, and I reached over and sucked down every last drop.

There was none left for Machen. There was none left for me. Ten minutes later, I desperately tried to drink from that bottle again, but there was nothing to drink. “No problem,” I said. “He’ll come back with Steph, and she’ll have Litriol.”

That didn’t happen.

When Machen returned, he was alone. He had only been gone for two hours, but his physical condition had deteriorated. His arms limply swung from his shoulders. “Mission failed,” he said. “I got up to the plateau. Our campsite was abandoned.”

“She was gone?”

“I don’t know where she went. I searched every nook and cranny anywhere near our camp. She might have been blown onto another ledge. She might be in worse shape than you. She might be dead. She could be dead. She’s probably dead.” He began to hyperventilate. “Oh no. This can’t be happening. Oh no. We need her. What are we gonna do without her? Are we supposed to fight Icithan alone, just you and me? How’s that gonna work? Is that possible? It was a long shot with the three of us, but if just you and me, we’re toast. We might as well throw in the towel now.” He shook his head. “What am I saying? You can hear me, and you’re probably terrified. This is a crisis, and I’m responding horribly. I’m supposed to instill confidence, not undermine it. I’m a terrible leader. I don’t want to be a leader, but I have to be a leader. You can’t be a leader, not right now. You’re hurt. You could die. I have to lead. I have to…” He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. “I have to stop panicking out loud. Coran?”

“Yeah?”

“We’re getting out of this. I’m gonna survive, you’re gonna survive, and we’re gonna beat that dragon. We’re gonna make it regret the day it chose to destroy Andes. This is our fight, and we’re going to win, no matter what it takes.” His eyes were burning with defiant fire. “Grab my hand.”

“I can’t really…”

“Don’t be afraid. Just grab my hand. I’ll lift you up, and I’ll hold you still.”

“What are the chances we slay Icithan?”

“Very high. They’re not one hundred percent, but they’re very high. No matter what comes our way, no matter if the world is torn in two tomorrow, we’re not relenting. This is it. This is the end. This is what we’ve been waiting for all this time. Life has thrown its entire arsenal at us, and guess what? We’re still here. What’s it got left? Nothing.” His confidence somehow did not seem put-on.

I took his hand.

The next day was hard, and the day after that was hard, and the day after that was harder. By the time I was well enough to travel, we were out of food. There was nothing between us and starvation except the sustenance in our stomachs. When Machen had dropped a bud onto a ridge twenty feet below, his response was to clamber down, pick up the bud, eat it, and climb back up. We would have resorted to eating bugs, but we couldn’t replace any, not even any tiny flies. It felt like we were approaching the edge of the world.

With Litriol in my blood, I climbed up to the plateau for the first time since the blizzard. My legs hadn’t recovered, so I made my arms work harder. It was rough going, but the pain was nothing I hadn’t felt before. I gritted my teeth, pretended I was somewhere else, and grabbed those holds.

When I reached the top, I spread my arms, shouted, and took off running. My legs cried out for relief, and they gave way. I tumbled onto the snow-covered ground, but I didn’t care. I was here. I was free. After spending those days incapacitated, I had made it back to the plateau. Ducking my head up, I tossed a handful of snow into the air and watched as it flittered to the ground as diamond dust.

“Now that’s the Coran I know. Care to lend me a hand?”

His voice was distant. He had not finished climbing. Standing, I ran to the side of the plateau. He was ten feet from the top, his body twisted in an awkward position he wouldn’t be able to hold for much longer.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“I’d like rope, but that’s impossible.”

“I could drop down and help you climb.”

“No. In your condition, you should exert yourself as little as possible.”

“Then what should I do? You want help. How do you want me to help you?” He didn’t have an answer. “I’m gonna get you up on this plateau.”

“I’ll trust your judgment,” he said. “Just know it was hard to get you better.”

“Sorry for being a burden.”

“Don’t be.”

I nodded and began to climb down, but before my foot could reach the first hold, his right hand slipped, and he was suddenly holding on for dear life by two fingers on his left. Climbing down was tougher than climbing up, as I had to rely more on my broken legs, but I hadn’t the time to go slow. As if possessed by the spirit of a raging baboon, I raced to Machen, reaching him a second before those last two fingers slipped.

Forced to support itself and another human being, my body was pushed past its limits. Another bone broke, but I couldn’t hear the crack over the sound of my heartbeat. I jammed Machen’s fingers into the holds. Though he screamed like he was being tortured, I knew I was saving his life. Pain is far superior to death, a truth I recommitted myself to during the blizzard.

We weren’t in the clear yet. Summoning up what little strength he had left and showing a truly titanic level of resolve, he climbed up to within three feet of the plateau top in fifteen seconds. “How do you like that?” he shouted, triumphant.

Cheering him on, I climbed beside him, hands close enough to stop his fall if his hands slipped again. He made minimal progress from there on out, but with persistence, he managed to get to within one foot of the top before his energy entirely left him. Thrice he tried to grab the top of the plateau, but he couldn’t do it. He didn’t have in him.

Thankfully, he had me.

Finishing my climb, I hung down from the edge of the plateau, grabbed him by the shoulders, and with a carnal scream dragged him across the finish line. Victory was ours. It wasn’t the kind of victory accompanied by blaring horns and cheering fans and gold trophies and crisp champagne, but there was no add-on that could have made it more satisfying. We should have failed, but we succeeded. We cheated fate. It was if the door of death had been open and a swirling vortex had been sucking us in, but we said, “No thanks,” shut the door, and went on our way.

“It’s so white,” Machen said, feasting his eyes on the plateau. His chin, mouth, and nose were under the snow. Only his eyes were sticking out. He wasn’t disappointed by the abundance of white, but he wasn’t intrigued either. His voice was empty. In his current state, he couldn’t be happy or sad or hopeful or fearful or suppressed or repressed or defiant or divisive or decisive. He couldn’t be anything. He could only observe, and observe he did.

I observed too. Flipping onto my back, I stared up at the sky. It was a night sky, and the stars were bright, but not as bright as the aurora. I had never seen an aurora before. Natura is located near the south end of the continent, but it isn’t anywhere near the South Pole. I never thought I’d see an aurora. I never thought I’d see the sky lit with celestial fire. Unable to properly contemplate the mystical beauty I was witnessing, I stopped thinking and just felt. I opened myself up and let sensations and emotions run wild through my body.

On the surface, I suppose it is strange that I would be more fascinated with an aurora than the four-hundred-and-fifty-foot dragon we were chasing, but you have to understand: dragons were a part of my life since I was little. I was used to dragons, so though they had not lost my awe and respect, they were no longer strange or exceptional. You would think a four-hundred-foot dragon would be a different matter. After all, it had been many generations since a dragon of comparable size had been seen. There are history books written in my great-great-grandfather’s time speaking of giant dragons as if they were ancient artifacts. But this wasn’t the case with me.

I was never the kid with the big imagination, but what creativity I had was put toward picturing the grandest of dragon battles. At first, I was battling fifty-foot dragons, but then I heard about one-hundred-foot dragons, so I battled those, and years later, when I heard about four-hundred-foot dragons, my dragons quadrupled in size. More years passed. I got older and more ambitious, and the dragons I was fighting continued to grow. Soon they were six hundred feet long, then eight hundred feet long, then a thousand feet long.

Icithan was impressive, but it wasn’t any more impressive than what my imagination had conjured up through the years.

On the other hand, auroras had never been a part of my life, and the only times they had been part of my fantasies was immediately after they came up as a topic in school or in a conversation with Acady. Save for those rare times, they seemed faraway at best and impossible at worst. It’s like they were out of my reach. To have an aurora right above my head, shining like a wall of otherworldly light as I breathed hard and tried to recover was nothing less than divine.

Gradually, I came to my senses. “What happened to our supplies?” I asked. “Did you check?”

“No. I assumed Steph took them.”

“Let’s replace out, shall we?” Under the lights of the night, I struggled through the snow, groping for remnants of our camp. It was a struggle full of subtle hope and crushing disappointment. I would feel what I thought was a frozen bag of food only to learn it was ice or rocks. One time, I thought I had stumbled upon the motherlode- our stock of meat and corn. I salivated. It was exactly what was needed. But it wasn’t to be. My discovery turned out to be nothing more than a dead shrub and a pile of gravelly dirt.

At the end of it all, I managed to replace and uncover our campsite. It was desolate. There was nothing left except Ironwall’s box of matches and a pile of wet twigs. We had planned to start a fire, but we never got around to it, a wrong I fully intended to right. I called Machen over, and as he trudged dourly across the plateau, I did my best to dry the twigs. Snow-soaked twigs are as useless for starting a fire as a dragon bone. By the time he reached me, I was confident enough to strike a match and hold it to the branches.

Nothing happened at first, but I kept it there, and slowly a tiny blue flame began to flicker. “At least we’ll stay warm,” I said.

“Will we? That’s not enough heat to warm a mouse.” The fire went out.

“I’m gonna make this work.” Fumbling, I snatched a match from the box, starting a fire that lasted long enough to be blown out by a sudden gust of wind.

“Let me try.” I handed him the box, and he struck three matches at once. Covering them with his hands, he held them to the twigs and waited patiently for fire to catch. The resulting flame was an actual flame, not the rinky-dink rip-off I had made, and it was warm. Dingy and smoky, it was far from vibrant, but it was alive, its blue, red, and orange arms swooping and curling with the wind. We held our hands close to it, and we got to forget about our lives. We had arrived from the cold into a pleasant hearth that would shelter and protect us.

We wanted it to shelter and protect us forever, but after three hours, our misfortune returned to us. Pangs of hunger and thirst coursed through our bodies. We were in horrible need of nourishment, and no amount of warmth or light could change that. Our wounds would heal, and our stress would fade, but without those supplies, we would die.

There were several hours of daylight left, and we knew they weren’t to be wasted. We could hold out for days, but we knew we would only get weaker. Leaving the fire burning, we went to replace Steph and our supplies. The plan was to search until dark. We were sorry excuses for human beings, but we felt better than when I lifted Machen onto the plateau. We didn’t feel good or whole, but we weren’t on the brink of death. We trudged slowly. Neither of us could move quickly, and neither of us wanted to. To make up for not covering a lot of ground, we worked efficiently, avoiding the places Steph would never go and prioritizing the places she was more likely to have gone. There were times when we couldn’t judge her intentions, but by and large, we knew what we were doing. We knew Steph.

One hour before dark, we came upon a patch of dirt that had turned to mud. Imprinted in it was a footprint. It was fresh. “She’s not dead,” I said to Machen.

“She can’t be too far. We need to keep going.”

“Agreed.”

We didn’t tell a lot of jokes or use a lot of light language during our sojourn. We didn’t talk a lot period. Talking was a waste of energy, and we couldn’t afford to waste energy.

Hobbled and quiet, we swept through the snowy mountains. This was the case before we discovered her footprint, and it was the case afterward. We were excited about our discovery, but it didn’t show in our body language, and we didn’t talk much about it. We had a job to do, and we were going to do it. The terrain got steeper. If hadn’t been sure Steph was nearby, we would have turned back and gone another way, but we were. We came to a cliff, and we shuddered before starting to climb. Save for death and the thought of losing Steph, there was nothing scarier than a cliff that afternoon. Encouraging ourselves to make the climb wasn’t easy. We eventually did it by picturing Steph’s face at the top of the cliff, all eager and confident, ready to charge up Curam and kill Icithan.

It was a climb that felt much longer than it actually was. A measly seven-foot climb would have seemed a challenge. The thirty-foot climb that stood in our way was an intimidating, feral, relentless beast. We stuck close to one another. When I couldn’t quite reach a hold, Machen gave me a little shove from behind, and I returned the favor seconds later by pulling his arm up to the hold.

Ten feet from the top, there was a small ledge that was large enough for both of us to stand on, so we stopped there and took a short break from climbing. We were almost there. Looking down was nauseating. A fall would have been lethal. When the winds kicked up, we held onto one another and leaned on the cliffside. Our feet didn’t move an inch. We survived. When the gusts stopped blowing, we started to move but then stopped, as we decided we didn’t want to resume climbing, not yet. Safety was our foremost priority, and we didn’t want to take the risk that the winds would return and blow us to our deaths. We waited for a full minute. The air stayed calm. We started climbing.

As we got closer to the top, I got a lump in my throat and butterflies in my stomach. It was becoming certain that we would finish our climb, so my mind moved from the climb itself to what we would see once it was over. The worst case scenario was replaceing Steph dead- recently killed- lying in a pool of her own blood, decaying into nothingness. This was an unlikely scenario, but it was far from impossible, and it terrified me. I had considered the possibility of Steph dying before, but I was woefully unprepared for that possibility to become reality. I was unprepared both emotionally and practically.

In hindsight, could we have slayed Icithan without her help? I don’t know. There’s no way to be sure. All I know is that it would have been a lot harder without her.

There were two other possible outcomes I feared. Number one: we would replace Steph alive but without our supplies. Great as it would be to replace her, three Slayers without supplies is no less dire of a situation than two Slayers without supplies. There were no reliable sources of food or water from our current position to Curam. Our only option would have been to trek back to Miyok, hope against hope that we got there, and replenish ourselves for a new assault on the mountain. Number two: we would replace Steph alive and with supplies but seriously injured. This is by far the least cataclysmic of these three scenarios, but it would have nonetheless made matters complicated. We would have had to either spend more days resting, increasing the probability of Icithan flying away before we could fight it, or carry her on our backs despite being injured ourselves, which would have slowed us down even further in the long run.

These three scenarios dissolved into each other as we reached the top of the cliff. Steph was nowhere to be found. A fourth negative scenario came to mind: that this entire trip was a waste of time, and she was nowhere to be found. We sat brooding on the clifftop before a jolt of lightning hit my heart and these four scenarios evaporated and Steph scrambled into view from the opposite cliffside and she was carrying our supplies and the wear and regret on her face evaporated when she saw us and she cheered and clapped her hands and said, “How about that?”