"I remember why it is that you have come to me," he admitted.
Gabriella exhaled with relief. "You know what I seek? And what is my mission?"
Coalroot shrugged slowly, his eyes still narrowed. She was going to have to ask of course. Creatures such as this never gave willingly. She straightened her back and drew a deep breath.
"I seek the one called Merodach," she stated clearly. "I must find him and confront him. I am given to understand that you know where he is."
Coalroot's lips stretched into a sly smile. "I know where he was yesterday, and I know where he shall be on the morrow; thus, I can offer a satisfactory guess of where he is at this moment. But you must know, Gabriella Xavier, that such knowledge does not come without a price."
Gabriella looked at him. The heat of the cavern baked over her, drying the sweat on her brow even as it appeared. "I have little to offer," she replied. "What do you require of me?"
"Oh, it is not that sort of price," Coalroot grinned, his rocking speeding up again. "The cost of knowledge, Princess, is more knowledge. You cannot leave here learning only that which you wish to know. You must take with you the burden of full clarity. It is the only way."
Gabriella's brow furrowed uncertainly. "You mean," she said, "that you will tell me more than I ask for? That is all?"
Coalroot's cackle filled the hot air, rising like bats into the darkness. On Gabriella's shoulder, Featherbolt ruffled his feathers violently and clicked his beak.
"Yes!" Coalroot wheezed gleefully. "Yes, that is all! But beware, Princess! It is indeed a price that many do not wish to pay! Full clarity can destroy a human as surely as any sword! Many have chosen to lie down and die beneath the weight of knowledge! Heh hee! Their bones are scattered amongst the rocks below, along with the skeletons of those who came in search of my treasure! Indeed, many more have come to see me than have left again!" He laughed shrilly, delighted.
Gabriella stood stoically in the face of the old man's mad glee. She tried to imagine what sort of knowledge could possibly lead to her mortal despair but could think of nothing. When Coalroot's cackles finally subsided, she faced him stolidly.
"Tell me what I wish to know," she declared, "and I will accept the burden of whatever else you give me."
Coalroot still tittered to himself, even as his eyes locked on hers, narrowing. "As you wish, Princess," he agreed. "The man Merodach is not himself on the march as you have supposed. He shall be in the same place tomorrow as he was yesterday. He awaits at the Theatre of the Broken Crown, just beyond the northernmost edge of the Tempest Barrens. There, your man died, and there Merodach has established his fortress."
Gabriella absorbed this with growing confusion. "He awaits…?" she asked faintly, worriedly. "For what?"
The old man giggled through closed lips, leaning forwards in his chair even as he continued rocking. "For something," he allowed, "but not for you."
Gabriella frowned in disbelief. "Then he is not on the march?"
"He is not," Coalroot winked cagily. "But his armies are, and they are many! Oh my yes! Many indeed! They are further than you have guessed, very nearly upon their prey! Heh hee!"
Gabriella's heart grew heavy as lead inside her. She nodded slowly, clenching her jaw. "I will go to him nonetheless. The beast must die. Vengeance will visit him, and his armies will scatter."
Coalroot did not laugh at this. Instead, he ceased rocking in his chair and leant even further forwards, his eyes turning icy as he commanded her gaze. "Will you?" he asked meaningfully. "And shall they?"
Gabriella stared into his cold eyes. A shiver coursed over her despite the heat of the cavern. She began to sense just how steep the price of her information might be. She took a step back from the old man's piercing stare.
"Yes," he breathed. "You begin to see, do you not? Your Darrick understood at the very last, even with his dying breath. Even your mother, she knew the truth as she lay on her chamber floor bleeding out her last, her eyes glazing over, feeling the life force ebb slowly from her body. You have been granted a great gift, Gabriella Xavier. You will know that which others only learn when it is too late to matter. You will know the cords of fate, and see just how small you are in comparison to them…"
Gabriella wished to shrink back, but her feet remained locked to the stone. In the face of that mad glare, she regretted her choice. She wished she could take back her questions. Suddenly, the knowledge she had gained felt small and paltry compared to what might be about to come. Coalroot's eyes seemed to grow larger, expanding to icy pits, deep as the cavern lake she had encountered on her journey. The rumbling earth spoke his words along with him, forming a cataclysmic unison.
"You will go to the man Merodach in his fortress, and you will face him. It is your destiny," the voices rang, filling the cavern, their words falling like weights. "But… you shall fail in your quest. Your father's kingdom is already in ruins. Camelot will be no more. Its name shall be swallowed into oblivion, reduced to myth, dismissed as legend. All those that you love… shall die. They will pass unto Sheol. And soon, Gabriella Xavier, you shall join them."
The echo of Coalroot's words rang through the darkness, no longer wheezing and shrill but clanging like iron, shaking the very cavern walls. He continued to stare at her, to glare straight into her, measuring the collapse of her will and seeming to delight in it. His smile was razor thin, sharp as flint.
Finally, after what seemed like several minutes, the echoes of his proclamation faded away, diminishing into the hidden depths of the Barrens underground. Gabriella stood there in the heat, the ruddy light glinting from her armour.
Slowly, she nodded.
"So be it," she whispered to herself.
Coalroot stared up at the young woman, his smile fading, and did something that he had not done for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
He blinked.
The remainder of the underground journey was mostly uphill.
The heat of the cavern of Chaorenvar gradually fell away as Gabriella and Featherbolt ascended long subterranean slopes roofed with plates of stone and still as crypts. Here, there were no buried rivers or lakes and very few stalactites and stalagmites. The cave stone was as dry as bone, so that puffs of dust arose beneath Gabriella's boots. The air itself seemed dead, as if it had been baked sterile by some unimaginable heat in eons past.
As they progressed, Gabriella began to get a sense of the underground geography of the Barrens. The cavern of Chaorenvar was the deepest point and was probably in the very centre, directly beneath the Cragrack Cliffs. Perhaps, she surmised, the volcano had been responsible for the cliffs. Perhaps, in some remote past, it had erupted so violently, so suddenly, that it had broken the very bones of the earth, splitting the land in two and shifting the masses apart.
Further, what if the eruption had not been a purely natural event? There were legends that the most powerful wizarding armies had employed devastating spells to summon such forces as earthquakes, wind storms, lightning, and floods. Even the great Merlinus himself was rumoured to have had a hand in such things.
In the cave of the petrified army, the witch Helena had referred to a certain "mercenary sorcerer" by whose hand the entire army had been turned to stone. What if the same sorcerer had summoned the wrath of the volcano Chaorenvar and provoked its deadly forces to unnatural strength? Was it possible that the great sorcerer himself, Merlinus Ambrosius, was indeed still alive somewhere? Was the passage of time different for such beings as he? And if so, could it possibly be true that the great sorcerer, whose counsels had benefited the Elder King Arthur himself, had known of Gabriella, and had a hand in her fate? Could Helena’s tale of the werewolf and the midnight rescue in the snowbound lake cottage be true?
Every time she doubted it, she remembered the sigil at her throat. It was still warm.
Darrick had worn the other half, until Merodach had taken it.
Gabriella mused on these things darkly, occupying her mind as she traversed the tunnels' perpe
tual night.
She and Featherbolt slept twice during this segment of the journey. Her food was gone now, and her flask was finally empty. The last few swallows she poured into a hollow on the stone floor for Featherbolt. He drank methodically, dipping and then tossing back his head, letting the water run down his throat. When it was gone, he launched lightly into the air and landed on her shoulder.
"That's all," Gabriella sighed, trying not to feel hopeless. "Let us hope we are near the end of our underground trek."
Hungrily, parched from the arid environment, the two continued on.
Finally, on the third day of their gradual ascent, Gabriella spied a faint glow of light somewhere ahead. She stopped, her eyes going wide, and stared, half-certain that it was a mirage.
"Do you see that, Featherbolt?" she asked. "Is it really there?"
Featherbolt took off from her shoulder and flapped ahead. After a moment, he vanished from the glow of the goblinfire torch. His screech came back to her, echoing. Then she saw him again, a black shape against the slightly less black background. The light was real enough, although so faint that it was barely a cloud of grey.
Gabriella made towards it, increasing her pace despite her weariness. It had been so long since she had seen daylight that the promise of it was almost too sweet to bear. She began to run. The light of the torch bobbed on the jagged walls, casting wild shadows in every direction. Her own breath sounded harsh and ragged to her, echoing back in the confines of the tunnel.
Featherbolt screeched again from some distance ahead, leading her onwards.
Slowly but gloriously, the light grew. What was once only a milky cloud was now a persistent glow, picking out the roughness of the walls and floor in stark contrast. As Gabriella moved into the light, she relished the breadth of its reach. For days, she had been living in a world no larger than her dome of torch light. Here, finally, the tunnel opened up ahead of her, becoming wider, taller, and framed with a deadfall of rocks and boulders. The light came from a point around the next bend. A shaft of dusty brilliance pierced the tunnel from left to right, falling at an angle across a tumble of broken rock. Framed against this, perched on one of the larger boulders, Featherbolt watched and waited for her, switching his head anxiously from side to side.
"We are almost there," Gabriella proclaimed, catching up to Featherbolt. The broken rocks behind him framed a wide rift, apparently opening onto a large cave filled with the white light. Gabriella smiled excitedly as she circumvented the tumble of rock and moved into the beam of light, letting it wash over her.
It was indeed daylight. A huge, ragged opening bloomed ahead some hundred or so paces away. The world beyond the cave entrance was seamlessly, blindingly white. Cold air pushed through the rift, making a low moan amongst the rocks. The floor of the final cave was carpeted with broken rock and gravel, criss-crossed with great scraped areas, as if something extremely large had been repeatedly dragged around the cavern.
And there was a smell.
"Ugh," Gabriella said, wrinkling her nose as she moved into the light of the space. "What is that? It's like the time Professor Toph's potions laboratory got flooded. But worse, somehow…"
It was worse because it wasn't just the smell of scorched chemicals and rot. It was the smell of fresh death. The purple stench of blood was rich in the cold air. Featherbolt flapped ahead, arcing towards the nearer wall on the left. He alit on what at first appeared to be a tangle of uprooted trees. With a sinking dread, Gabriella realised that it was a pile of very large bones, black with rotted gristle. Featherbolt alit on a rib and pecked his beak at it. He fluttered his head, apparently with distaste.
"Featherbolt," Gabriella called worriedly, her eyes wide, "I think we had better leave as quickly—"
There was a large noise behind her, a sort of prolonged rattling scrape. It ended with a sound like air in a gigantic bellows, snuffling slightly as it diminished. The chemical smell grew suddenly sharper.
Gabriella froze in place, eyes wide and heart trip-hammering. Then, as the noise faded back to silence, she turned, careful to make no noise on the gravel-strewn floor.
There was a monstrous shape pressed up against the opposite wall of the cave. It appeared to be a sort of lumpy, brown hill, carpeted with scales. A row of jagged plates were planted into the hill like a fence, diminishing in size as they marched down a sort of bony ridge. Where it neared the cave floor, the bony ridge separated from the shape and became a long, tapering tail lined with three rows of serrated spines.
As Gabriella watched, the lumpy hill expanded slightly, and the snuffling bellows sound came again. There was no mistaking the shape, even though Gabriella had never seen such a thing before in her life. She froze to the spot, petrified with fear.
Slowly, massively, the shape began to uncoil. The tail slid backwards in its bed of gravel, making that crunching scrape again. A pair of lumps near the top became shifting shoulder blades beneath scaly skin. There was a thump as a gigantic, muscular leg hove into view, revealed from behind the slithering tail. Sharp extrusions of bone marked the elbow and heel of the appendage. Hooked claws scratched the cave floor.
Slowly, the dragon began to stand, its snuffling breath filling the cave and reeking of chemical.
Gabriella's paralysis finally broke as the snake-like neck began to heave into view. She dropped her torch and scrambled backwards, terrified to turn away from the monster but desperate to find a hiding place. With a frantic lunge, she threw herself behind the pile of rotting carcasses. Featherbolt was still there, fearlessly perched on a massive ribcage. The stench of death was nearly enough to make Gabriella sick, but she hunkered low and covered her mouth, resisting the lurch of her gorge.
She could still see the dragon through the forest of gristly bones. It stood slowly, languidly, and raised its head in a luxurious stretch. The vertebrae of its neck and back popped like pine knots in a fire, and the plates of its spine snapped visibly upright as their joints aligned. The dragon was large enough that its bulk filled nearly a fifth of the cave. Suddenly, with disconcerting litheness, the great beast turned its great, serpentine neck, sweeping its horned head low over the floor, its nostrils trailing ribbons of smoke. It regarded its home suspiciously, its orange eyes flicking busily, as if it smelled something amiss. It stopped, and Gabriella was sure that it had seen her.
A gurgling noise began to sound, and Gabriella realised with dismay that it was the dragon's stomach. The dragon huffed, turning the gurgle into a flaming belch. Gabriella swallowed past a lump in her throat and willed herself not to move. Above her, Featherbolt preened himself on his ribcage perch.
The dragon coiled, narrowed its eyes, and lunged forwards. Great, leathery wings unfurled from its back and caught the air like sails, lifting the beast from the ground as it pounced. The jaws unhinged, and the head cocked sideways, snapping forwards on its long neck to strike. There was no time for Gabriella to react. She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her head in her hands as the shadow of the monstrous beast fell over her.
The dragon's four feet struck the ground with massive thumps, and the jaws snapped shut like a trap. There was a horrible, wet crunch of breaking bone and tearing flesh, mingled with a seething grunt that was half roar, half growl.
Gabriella uncovered her head. She was still in one piece, still lying amidst the pile of rotting carcasses. She peered through the bones, faint with relief.
The dragon was directly in front of the pile of carcasses, violently dismembering the freshest of the lot. The corpse in its jaws appeared to a chortha, like the ones Gabriella had confronted earlier in her journey. Its blunt head and curved horns lolled as the dragon ripped one of its rear legs off, devouring it whole and crunching noisily on the bones. The dragon was an exceptionally messy eater, snarling great, furious gusts around its food, cooking it with its flaming breath. The air was fetid with the reek of burnt fur.
Suddenly, the dragon lunged backwards and violently whipped its head. The carcass, still clamped i
n the dragon's jaws, ripped grotesquely in two. The front half of the dead beast flew back towards the dragon's nest, trailing ropes of innards. It struck the ground and rolled. The dragon pounced upon it, snarling viciously, as if the pathetic half-corpse had been trying to escape. The dragon's massive claws scraped and dug at the broken floor, spraying rocks in every direction. Its tail rose towards the ceiling and then thumped down, shaking the ground and sending up a great cloud of grit.
Gabriella was terrified. She glanced away from the rampaging dragon, saw the opening of the cave some thirty paces away, and scrambled desperately to her feet. Feeling hopelessly slow and clumsy, she tumbled out of the strew of carcasses, nearly tripped on the loose rock of the cave floor, righted herself, and began to run.
Behind her, the dragon slammed and roared, its breath sending up gouts of blue fire, lighting the cave all around. Rock and gravel kicked back from its scraping claws, pelting Gabriella from behind as she ran on, nearing the light of the cave's entrance. Something heavy flew over her shoulder and landed with a wet thump on the stony floor in front of her. It was the head of the dead chortha. Its blunt muzzle was open and masked with blood. Its eyes boggled in two different directions. The head itself was nearly as big as Gabriella.
Behind her, sounding horribly near, the dragon let out a sustained roar. The heat of its breath blew Gabriella's hair forwards, making it swat wildly around her cheeks.
She hurdled the severed chortha's head, using one of its twisted horns as leverage. As she landed on the other side, she slid on the broken gravel and fell.
A wall of scaly muscle hurtled behind her, taking the chortha head with it. A spray of blood misted over Gabriella. She scrambled forwards, numb with terror, and launched herself towards the cave entrance. Its light fell over her, blinding her, but she ran on, stumbling, sliding, leaping out into the freezing white.
She fell forwards. Her face dashed into a mass of snow, and she found herself rolling head over heels down a steep hill. Brilliant white surrounded her, making no distinction between earth and sky. Finally, she landed on her back, skidded down the remaining slope into a mass of snow-crusted yellow grass, and scraped to a halt.