Shadows of the Cursed Dragon (Excerpt)

Chapter 1: Heartbeats in the Cage

Claire

Dusk unspooled over the clearing in bruised purples and blue-black shades, the last rays gasping through shredded leaves. Claire pressed her knees into the damp humus, the warmth in her hands a falsehood against the night's chill. Under her palms, the wolf shifter panted shallowly, a patchwork of blood and mud knitting its flanks. Its fur, matted and grey, trembled as she swept a soothing palm over its side. Each wet, rattling breath a struggled attempt; the situation as clear as the mist escaping wet lips into chilled, spring, forest air.

“Easy,” she whispered, voice a filament in the silence. “You’re safe now. It’s almost over.” She touched her brow to its bristled ruff, closing her eyes and sought to comfort.

She could feel the wound before she saw it, a tear just above the ribs, gaping and rimmed with crusted crimson, sticky with shifter blood. Her touch set off a faint pulse of blue, as though her skin filtered the moon. The magic hummed, eager and reckless, but she gripped it with semi-harnessed discipline and coaxed the ragged tissue together. It was a trickle, not a flood, but enough.

The shifter’s amber eyes flickered open, bright and wild, iris ringed by a darkness more human than animal. It whined. The sound shook something loose in her chest. “I know,” she crooned, “but you’ll see another full moon. I promise.” the intention behind her words was honest enough, even if what she said wasn’t.

Her fingers hovered, trembling. If she concentrated, she could smell the iron under the blood, the warning in the air, the prelude to violence. The forest never stayed silent for long. The soughing of branches, deliberate, too heavy for a deer's delicate tread, certainly it wasn’t the wind. Claire glanced back and braced briefly, but she did not flinch. Then a slow raise of her head, turning to stare ahead into the settling gloom, her chestnut curls tangled across her face, collecting beads of sweat on the brow beneath.

From the treeline, dark shapes unfurled cloaked and hooded like wraiths. A tell tale sign of them, the Brotherhood. Not rumors this time. Not bogeymen. Three, maybe four, blades on their hips, some with the reek of spell-damp on their boots. The first man’s face was a shadow aside one of his eyes, they looked almost flat, cold, sparse of humanity. He spoke plainly, his voice hoarse but his tone carried purpose. It was one word that left his mouth: “Healer.”

Another flanked her left, moving with a soft form of inevitability. She clung to her magic, a reflex. Its current tingled up her arms, but even as her heart quickened she did not run. The wolf shifter whined again, it shifted as if trying to stand.

Claire backed away as the cloaks invaded, hands raised in a plea or a threat. “He needs care. There’s no point in… ” The third man stepped in, chain wrapped gloves catching the faint light. “Not here for the beast.” He gestured, and the others closed ranks around her.

She tried to move back, but the clearing was a dead end, roots gnarled, stones slick and treacherous. The wolf shifter made a broken noise, it tried to bite but missed by inches. The first man seized her arm, his touch was rough, cold, almost mechanical, fingers bone-hard and remorseless. A spark leapt from her skin to his, a sharp blue that scorched the air and left an aftertaste of ozone. The Brotherhood man cursed and staggered backwards. “Restraint,” he spat, “now.” Changing the retreat into a retrieval, two more grabbed her, pinning her with a practiced efficiency of creatures far too comfortable with their power..

Panic yawned open inside her, raw and hot, she let it fuel the surge. Her hands glowed, fingers spread in an involuntary burst, and the blue light shot outward, dazzling and wild. One captor reeled, momentarily blinded; another hissed as the magic licked his cheek, leaving a trail of blackened skin. But the glow faded quickly, her strength shunted by the presence of iron.

They forced her wrists together. Someone produced iron rings from a pouch before roughly applying them. The metal bit, and Claire screamed before she could stop herself, the pain was not physical, but worse, a cold devouring of her will. The magic guttered, shrank to a stinging numbness down to her bones. She tried to fight, but her limbs would not answer. They yanked her up, boots scuffing in the loam. The wolf shifter struggled to rise, but one of the Brotherhood men kicked it aside. It moved to retaliate, but a glance to its saviour saw it hesitate before it fled, tail low, blood trailing like a thread of regret across the moss.

Someone wrapped a strip of scratchy cloth around her head, yanked it tight over her eyes. Sudden darkness appeared, stealing her sight along with it. Only sound was left to her: the animal hush, the scrape of bodies through brush, the mutter of men who wore her fate like a badge. Her lungs burned. The taste of blood, hers?, coated the back of her tongue. She flexed her wrists against her restraints and found only agony and a settling state of woe.

They moved her through the woods, the pace relentless but efficient, like a military march. Branches snapped against her shins. When she tripped, they hauled her upright by the arms, never slowing. The last thing she remembered of the forest was the faint, fading whimper of the shifter somewhere in the darkness, unwilling to leave her but unwilling to risk its injured body. Then the way the earth seemed to close itself over her, a yawning sense of claustrophobia as she sensed they’d entered the catacombs and vanished from the world above.

Blindness was less frightening than the world people built to keep her from it. Claire clung to the smallest freedoms: the breath she could not help but draw, the shuffle of her own boots against uneven stone. Brotherhood hands gripped her biceps, bruising with the practiced ease of men who preferred their work unremembered. Someone behind her hummed an ugly, tuneless melody, the sound winding through the corridors with her misery.

She counted her steps, lost count, and began again. The air grew cold, then colder; it puckered her skin, filled her lungs with rot. The smell of old water, rusted metal, and something worse, fear or maybe memory, grew larger in her senses. The world shifted downward. Down, down. The ground sloped under her, loose, dry mud and stone crunching against heavy heels. A single misstep sent her sprawling face-first into rough hands that left gravel in her mouth and laughter in their throats.

Time meant nothing.

At last, the pace slowed. The hands released her. She swayed, blinking in the ink-darkness of the blindfold. Voices drifted through the thick hush: clipped, accented, hard to place. “Room secure.” “Prepare the vessel.” “Strip her of wards.” She catalogued the language, not sure if any of it was meant for her.

A torch hissed to life and she felt the heat before she saw anything, just a sliver of warmth against her cheek, a promise of coming light. Someone grabbed her by the jaw, twisted her face up; she could feel his nauseating warm breath upon her face, “Ready?”

Before she could answer, they ripped the blindfold away. The light felt like a solid blow to her eyes, fierce and sudden, shoving pain through her skull. She winced, tears smearing her vision. A hand clapped the back of her head, the voice blunt and as hoarse as the others, “Look.”

She did.

The room, if it was a room, devoured itself, vaulted stone worked so high the ceiling was lost in blackness, runes carved into every surface, glowing with something too slow to be flame. The shadows shivered; torchlight ricocheted off facets of moisture and old bone. The walls were thick with the echoes of centuries.

The Brotherhood men arranged themselves in a wide semicircle behind her. She was left in the open, knees aching from the earlier stumble. Before her yawned an abyss, a pit lined with old stone, its bottom obscured by fog.

“Forward,” came the command. Not a request. She moved, the iron biting into her wrists. At the edge of the pit, Claire halted. Her breath clouded, suspended in air that burned as it froze. Torches ringed the drop-off. Below, the shadows shuddered, moved.

No. Not shadows. Her eyes adjusted, picking shapes out of the blackness.

Something enormous slumped in the bottom of the chamber, something at first impossible to comprehend. It looked like a mountain that had been twisted, then abandoned. Its bulk heaved in shallow, pained intervals. Its hide, or carapace, or skin, shone with the depth of night, but not true black: the scales flickered at the edges with glints of bronze, gold, the memory of fire.

Wings lay broken, swept wide like a desecrated altar cloth. Chains, thick as fence posts, inscribed with dead languages, strapped the thing to the floor. Where the chains touched, the flesh blistered, emitting plumes of foul-smelling steam. Every wound hissed in the cold, and the stink of ancient blood soured the air.

Claire could not look away.

She had grown up on tales. The Dragon Kings, the Wyrm Healers, the wars that broke the world. But in every tale, dragons belonged to another time, another country. The last one, her great-grandmother used to say, had died a hundred years before she was born.

This one was not dead. It was alive, but dying, slowly.

A tremor passed through the beast. Its eye, just one, visible between the folds of chain and matted gore, cracked open. It was the color of tree sap but fierce and raw like fire. The eye fixed on her lazily, as though time mattered little, and she felt rather than heard a sound: low, guttural, the echo of a bell that had never been rung.

Someone at her back shoved her forward again. “Close enough?” one man asked. Another laughed. “Closer,” said a third, and she was pushed so near to the pit that if she lost her balance she would tumble in, just another offering for the fire.

A man in a robe, a different color, perhaps, or perhaps it only seemed so by the way he held himself, stepped beside her. His face was thin, pocked, mouth always on the edge of a smile. “You are a healer,” he said, a voice more serpentine than the others, no trace of question. “You will keep it alive, as long as it’s needed.”

Her tongue, dry as old paper, surprised her. “Why?”

The man’s smile withered. “Because its blood is life, and we have earned our share. Do what you are told and you may yet live to see daylight.” He gestured to a table set up at the rim of the pit. Instruments glinted in the torchlight: blades, vials, needles as long as knitting pins. “You will be part of something holy.”

She shook, but not from the cold.

The dragon’s eye did not leave her. She wondered if it recognized something in her, a kinship perhaps, in being trussed and made a tool for another’s use. Its breath fogged, labored, carrying a scent of burned metal and something older. The Brotherhood men waited, arms folded. One of them idly picked at a strip of dried meat, the other spat on the floor and watched it freeze.

Claire forced her body to move. She knelt at the edge of the pit, chained hands hovering above the floor, and closed her eyes. The air vibrated with old magic; it was hard not to breathe it in. When she opened her eyes again, the dragon was staring straight through her. This time, it blinked, slow as the closing of a vault. She swore she heard her own heartbeat double.

A memory, half-dream, half-nightmare, surfaced: stories of old, when healers and dragons spoke together in the darkness, trading secrets, binding wounds. If she was not mad already, she soon would be. She dipped her head to the beast, nothing more than a thread of hope, and waited for the men to decide what happened next.

They made her wait. The Brotherhood always did, letting the uncertainty grind away at the edges until the captive lost the will to bite. Claire stared at the dragon’s battered face, counting the pulse beats between each tortured breath.

Finally, shoes squeaked on the wet stone. The man in the special robe reappeared, flanked by two more, one carrying a blade, one cradling a silver basin. The leader's robe, worked with a strange gold thread, shimmered sickly in the chamber’s light. The man knelt with deliberate slowness, so they were nearly eye-level. He did not smile.

“Healer,” he said, the word a pin driven under the nail, “I have seen what you are capable of. Impressive, in context. But I require more.” She said nothing.

He gestured with a gloved hand to the dragon’s ruin, the blood drying black around the chains. “You will keep it alive. Nothing more. Its suffering is no concern of yours. We need it breathing for the ritual and not a moment beyond.” The gold-embroidered hand opened, palm up, all mercy. “Do you understand your function, Claire?”

Her name in his mouth. A desecration. Her rage burned, brief and useless, then died. She did not look at him. “You want its blood,” her voice quivered. “We want its blood,” he agreed, a venomous glee barely biting the edges of his voice at her deduction, “and its wisdom, its memory, its immortality. The things your kind squandered in ignorance. The world does not need wild magic, only progress.” His words tumbled out rehearsed, as if the doctrine itself could force obedience.

A guard moved closer, holding up the silver basin. Blood already filled it, dark and thick like a syrup. The other flicked the curved blade, showing her the color at the edge. “You will assist us,” the leader said, “or suffer the consequences reserved for traitors.”

Claire spat on the stone, watched it freeze. The man did not react. “Begin.” Two more guards stepped forward, hands never straying from their weapons.

She approached the pit, the dragon. At this range, the heat radiating from its battered body prickled her skin. She knelt, iron chafing at her wrists, and reached for the nearest wound, a cut, deep but not fatal, running across the dragon’s forelimb. Her hands hovered. The instinct to heal warred with the certainty that she aided monsters.

“Do it,” the robed man prompted, impatient.

She pressed her palm to the wound. Blue light spilled out, urgent and alive, a river surging through the dried blood. The dragon’s whole body shuddered. In her head, she heard not a roar but a resonance, a sound that vibrated the inside of her teeth, like metal struck in a deep cave.

The pain was immense. The magic fought her, like a wild dog snapping at her will. She forced it down the channels of her arms, into her hands, into the dragon. Blue flames raced along the wound’s edge, knitting flesh, searing nerves. The beast did not cry out, only held her gaze.

The guards watched. The leader leaned in. “Good. Again.”

Another wound, this one near the base of the neck. The scales here were black, each one as broad as a saucer and edged with gold. Her hands splayed, the blue fire more intense now, the air around her filled with the stench of ozone and old wounds.

As she healed, something shifted, inside the dragon, inside her. The blue light snaked into the scales, then through them. In an instant, she was somewhere else.

~~ ** ~~

Smoke and flame. A palace of bone and black iron. She saw herself, no, not herself, but someone who looked like her, clothed in robes the color of dried blood, standing before this dragon, unchained. A hand reached out, not in command, but in longing.

Two silhouettes embraced, as if the world might fall apart without it. A kiss, desperate and old. A scream, rent from the gut, then snuffed by smoke.

The vision flickered. Now the dragon wore a crown. Now its flesh melted and reformed, wings coiling and uncoiling, the chain eating deeper, always deeper. The woman, her ancestor, herself, her shadow, fell through fire, never looking away.

~~ ** ~~

The vision ended. Claire gasped, sweat cold on her brow. She tasted ashes. The world snapped back. The dragon’s massive eye was open. Gold, but alive, and the slit pupil focused on her as if it recognized something under her skin. She knelt there, hands still pulsing with blue, the cold air streaming her hair back. Recognition passed between them, something familiar; it wasn’t forgiveness, but something like a vow.

“Enough,” the leader snapped. “Step away. The cut is closed.”

Claire drew her hands back, knuckles bone white and trembling. The dragon did not move, but its eye lingered on her, sharp as memory. The guards circled, ready for a slip, but she was empty now, her body hollowed out by the magic. The man in the gold-stitched robe stepped up to her, inches from her face. “You will obey. There are worse things than pain.”

She said nothing. The dragon did not blink.

The Brotherhood turned their attention to the table, arranging implements, preparing for what came next. Claire shuffled to the side, her limbs like sandbags. She let her head loll against the wall, eyes fixed on the dragon, and let her mind drift to the vision.

The feeling of the dragon’s scales, the warmth of its gaze, lingered longer than the threat of pain. She was not sure whose side she was on anymore, but the chain that bound her seemed less real than the one she felt in her marrow, the one that linked her to this creature, this legend, this dying thing that would not die.

The guards closed in. The dragon’s eye narrowed, its gaze almost haunted.

Let them come, Claire thought, and shut her eyes, already burning with the blue she would never stop giving.