Chapter 3: Forced Companions

Aeron

I’d never seen a human push their body so far past its limits and still insist they were fine. By the third switchback, the girl, Maeva she’d said, was barely holding her weight upright, but she kept clawing up the rock as if pride alone could keep her from tumbling into the abyss.

The ridge above Wyrmfell was a bastard, even for me. The old paths had long since collapsed, leaving only a ribcage of slick basalt ribs and a brittle skin of gravel. Wind howled through every fissure, needling the exposed flesh on my face and turning even a small slip into a potential death-spiral. I waited at the next ledge, arms folded, watching her try to ascend the ten meters I’d just cleared in three steps.

She dug her fingernails into a crack, boots skating for purchase, and hauled herself up with a hissed expletive. Her lungs, unaccustomed to altitude, worked overtime just to keep her upright. The air was thinner here, sharper, and as her body had no fat reserves to burn, she ran on borrowed will and stubborn spite, nothing more.

By the time she reached me, her face was the color of day-old ashes, and her hair was plastered to her skull with sweat. She slumped against a chunk of pumice and doubled over, wheezing. I didn’t hide my amusement. “I thought humans prized efficiency.” She glared at me, but her words came out chopped by breath. “We also… prize… survival. So if you’re done… judging, I’d like… to keep breathing… thanks.”

The last was delivered with teeth bared, more snarl than smile. I liked that. Still, the climb was pointless. Even in my current form, with most of my weight compressed into something vaguely humanoid, the muscles in my legs could have cleared the rest of the ridge with her slung over one shoulder like a sack of firewood. The only thing stopping me was pride, hers, and a stubborn thread of my own.

I waited, arms crossed, while she caught up with herself. She dabbed sweat from her brow with a sleeve, then, unprompted, tried to push onward. Her first step forward skidded, the rock tearing the laces on her boot. She nearly lost her balance, and would have if I hadn’t caught her by the collar. She twisted out of my grip, quick as a lizard. “Don’t touch me.”

“Would you rather fall?” She glared again, but didn’t answer. She took a shuddering breath, stared at the next impossible incline, and looked, just for a second, like she might cry. I could have said something cruel. It would have been easy, and I would have enjoyed the taste. Instead, I crouched, my back to her, and jerked my head over one shoulder. “Get on.” She stared as if I’d grown a second head. “I’m not a child.”

“No,” I said, “children weigh less.” Then, before she could protest, I reached back, hooked an arm around her knees, and pulled her onto my back. I half-expected her to fight, but she only gave a single, startled yelp. Her hands scrabbled at my shoulders, searching for a hold that didn’t involve digging her nails into my flesh.

The satchel containing the reliquary pressed hard against my spine. She shifted, trying to adjust it, and I caught the movement. “Careful,” I said. “Unless you want to crack the stone.” She mumbled something, gratitude, or maybe just more curses, then went still. Her body radiated a nervous heat, all shiver and sweat, and it took me a moment to realize that she was trying to keep from shaking. She must have expected to be dropped. Instead, I rose, balancing her weight evenly, and started up the face at a pace that would have given a lesser human vertigo.

The next two switchbacks were narrow enough that even I had to edge sideways. The wind increased, a constant banshee keen that froze exposed skin and tried to rip the girl right off my back. Every step was a negotiation with gravity: one misjudged rock, and we’d both be splattered across the lower scree fields. The ridge fell away into nothing on either side, the drop obscured by a rolling fog that blurred the boundary between sky and earth.

Maeva clung to me, breath hot against the back of my neck. Her heartbeat was a rapid, wild thing, a rabbit’s pulse, but I noticed it started to slow as she grew accustomed to the motion. The longer I carried her, the less she gripped my shoulders in terror and the more she seemed to trust the rhythm of my movements.

We reached a resting ledge, a sliver of rock barely a meter wide. I set her down gently, careful not to jostle the satchel, and watched as she leaned against the wall, eyes squeezed shut. “Still alive?” I asked, amused. She opened one eye, then the other. “If I say yes, will you call me weak again?” I shrugged. “If you were weak, you’d be dead.” She laughed, a brittle sound, and then looked away, embarrassed by the show of emotion. I pretended not to notice.

We rested in silence, watching clouds unfurl across the sky below us. From here, the valley looked like a graveyard for lost gods: massive ribs of stone jutting from a sea of white, the only color the scorched red of distant cinder cones. After a while, she spoke, softer than before. “What is it like, living up here, all alone?”

I didn’t answer at first. I’d never been good at small talk, and I had no interest in baring old wounds for her inspection. But she waited, head tipped forward, refusing to meet my eyes, and I realized she was not baiting me. She genuinely wanted to know. “Quieter, without your kind always clamoring at the gates,” I said, finally. “I do not miss it.”

She made a skeptical noise. “You miss something. Otherwise you wouldn’t keep the reliquary.” My jaw tightened. “That is not your concern.” She let it drop, to my surprise. Most humans would have pressed, probing for a secret to exploit. Instead, she rested her head back, closed her eyes, and simply breathed.

We sat like that for a time, not speaking, letting the wind clean the sweat and stink from our bodies. Eventually, she straightened, checked the straps on her satchel, and nodded. “I’m ready.” I doubted that, but didn’t say so. We continued up, this time with her walking, and I kept pace at half my normal speed. She made it another hundred meters before the cold set in, by now the temperature had dropped below freezing, and the sun was little more than a memory.

She stumbled, caught herself, and marched on. The stubbornness was almost admirable, if a bit tragic. At the next outcropping, she stopped, hands pressed to her thighs, breath streaming in white puffs. “How much further?” she asked. “Far enough,” I replied. “If you want to quit, say so now.” She shook her head. “I don’t quit.”

I believed her. Still, I could see the way her fingers trembled, the blue edging her lips. Humans were so fragile. One bad night, and she could lose toes, or worse. The wind would take her in her sleep if I left her to it.

Reluctantly, I stripped off my outer cloak, a heavy, fur-lined thing I’d lifted from a mercenary years ago, and tossed it to her. “Wear it. I will not have you freeze to death before we reach the summit.”

She blinked, genuinely surprised. Then she put it on, and the relief was immediate. She buried her hands in the sleeves, chin vanishing into the collar, and I had to suppress a laugh at the ridiculous sight of her swimming in dragon-sized clothing.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, voice muffled by the fur. “Don’t thank me yet. We still have to cross the spine.” She squared her shoulders and started off, determination back in every step. I followed, this time not quite so annoyed at her weakness. I even felt, though I would never admit it, a flicker of respect.

When we finally reached the plateau, the girl collapsed, not from exhaustion but from relief. She turned to look at me, eyes bright in the failing light. “Why help me?” she asked, not quite believing I’d done it. I had no answer that would satisfy her, or myself. So I shrugged, and looked away, pretending to scan the horizon.

The clouds were thinning, the last of the sun bleeding orange over the far peaks. In the distance, I thought I saw movement, storm clouds maybe, or something worse, threading the valley below. But for now, on the razor edge of Wyrmfell, it was only us and the wind, and the odd, stubborn warmth that neither of us knew how to name.

~~**~~

We traveled the high ridgeline in a brittle hush, the wind having stripped even the crows from the air. Maeva kept her gaze fixed on the path ahead, but I could feel the tension in her, the way she hunched her shoulders against the cold as if it could be outlasted by sheer will.

She was not the first to brave these upper paths with me. But she was the first to do so without the promise of glory, or the scent of blood in her wake. Perhaps that was why I found myself tracking her with a different sort of interest, one less about threat, and more about what she would do, given the chance.

Half a league from the plateau, the path narrowed, folding against a sheer wall of volcanic glass. Frost rimed the rocks, and even my boots left only shallow dents. It was here, where the mountain grew mean, that Maeva stopped, squinting at something just beyond the rim of her cloak.

She stepped off the path, boots scraping. I was about to snap at her, another careless move and she'd be feeding the wolves below, but she had already reached the base of a shattered alcove, hands tracing the edge of an embedded relief.

The first of the shrines.

No mortal had seen these in generations. The stone dragon, though eroded by centuries of freeze and thaw, still showed the curve of horn and jaw, the flared membrane of a wing arching over a cluster of eggs. The scales were chipped, the runes circling the pedestal half-buried in windblown grit. Moss colonized the sunless pockets, turning the ancient gray to a bruised green.

Maeva ran her fingertips along a split in the stone. For a moment, her expression softened, the same look I'd seen on the faces of parents at graveyards, wondering if there was anything left beneath the marker to mourn. She turned to me. “What is this?” Her voice was careful, less like a demand and more like the kind of question that required respect to answer.

I considered ignoring her. Instead, I shrugged. “Old things. For the dead.” She knelt, ignoring the cold, and inspected a jagged bit of rune. “They look like eggs,” she said, half to herself. I set my jaw. “They are nothing now. Let them be.” But she would not. She dusted the moss from a spiral script, mouthing the syllables. “You can read this, can’t you?”

I said nothing, but I felt her eyes on me, weighing and measuring. The wind howled, stripping her words away, but the question hung there, insoluble. She straightened, looking at me instead of the shrine. “Did you know them?” I should have barked at her for prying. Instead, I turned away, clenching my fists until the claws threatened to break through my skin.

“Once,” I said, the word is more exhalation than speech.

The path onward skirted the cliff’s edge, treacherous with frost. I stepped out, deliberately outpacing her, hoping the movement would break the thread of her curiosity. But she caught up quickly, using her small size to slide over places where I had to maneuver awkwardly.

Another shrine came into view, half-collapsed, its guardian dragon melted to a vague suggestion of snout and talon. Maeva paused, this time looking at me instead of the stone. “Who built these?” she asked. “Humans?” I shook my head. “We did.” It slipped out before I could swallow it. “Why?”

I kept walking, picking up the pace. My feet found the holds without thinking, muscle memory from centuries of repetition. “Because even the mighty like to be remembered,” I spat, a bitterness I hadn’t expected rising in my throat. Maeva followed, not pressing, but not silent either. “I think it’s beautiful,” she said, after a time. “Then you are easier to please than most.”

We traveled another hundred meters. Every few paces, the Reliquary at her hip would glow faintly, its pulse synchronized with some buried memory in the mountain itself. Each time, Maeva’s hand hovered near the satchel, not protectively, but almost in greeting.

She stopped at the third shrine, a ruined arch with only the claws and a single fractured scale remaining. She touched the stone, then faced me, her expression unreadable. “What happened to them?” she asked. I braced my hand against the wall, knuckles bone-white. “They were broken,” I said, voice flat. “By others. By us.” Maeva waited, but I said nothing more. She seemed to understand that was all I would give.

We stood together, surrounded by the ghosts of my kin, and the silence was different this time. Not empty, but full of what could not be said. Eventually, I led her away, forcing the memory to fade with each step. The last shrine vanished in the mist behind us, the only marker that we had ever passed this way. I could feel her watching me as we climbed, and for the first time, I wondered if the mountain missed its dead as much as I did.

~~**~~

By nightfall, the mountain had peeled away even the pretense of comfort. The best shelter we found was a shallow alcove cut into the leeward side of an outcrop, just deep enough for two if one didn’t mind sleeping with their knees in their ribs. The wind cut through the opening in steady, freezing breaths. I’d have slept exposed, if only to prove a point, but Maeva shivered visibly, so I relented.

She wasted no time. While I cleared ice from the stony floor, Maeva collected handfuls of scraggy mountain heather and the dry seed-heads of grass that poked from between the rocks. Within minutes she’d built a tidy nest of kindling, shielded from the wind by a semi-circle of basalt shards. She took a flint and steel from her satchel, same as she’d used to break into my vault, I realized with dark amusement, and struck sparks until a curl of smoke began to rise.

I crouched beside her, curious despite myself. Her hands were chapped and raw, but steady as a surgeon’s. Each movement was practiced: spark, breath, then a careful coaxing of flame until the bundle glowed at the heart, blooming to life without drama or wasted effort. It took her less time to start the fire than it would have taken me, even in dragon form.

“You’ve done this before,” I said, unable to keep the surprise from my voice. Maeva didn’t look up. “You learn, if you want to see the morning. Or if you want your brother to see another one.” I watched as she fed the fire with progressively thicker twigs, never wasting a single motion. I’d expected more trembling, more tears, but she was all efficiency, grit layered over a core of something almost reckless.

The fire cast a golden glow against the cave’s ceiling, exaggerating her features into sharp angles and deep shadows. She settled on her haunches, chin on her knees, and dug a packet of dried meat from her pocket. With a flick of the knife, she carved a strip for herself, another for me. She offered the first, waiting to see if I’d take it. When I did, she raised an eyebrow, as if she’d half expected me to bite her hand off with it.

The silence between us was not as comfortable as the silence of the mountain, but it was better than most I’d known with humans. The only sound was the crackle of the fire and the occasional pop as sap exploded in the heat.

We ate. She chewed slowly, savoring each bite, and when she finished, she rummaged for a dented tin cup and filled it from her water skin. She took a long, slow sip before wiping her mouth and sliding the cup across to me.

The woodsmoke dulled the bitterness of the dried rations. I finished my share, then passed the cup back. As I did, our hands brushed, a trivial thing, a quick spark of contact, but it was like being jabbed with a live wire. My muscles tensed, and I pulled away too fast, spilling a drop of water onto her knuckle.

Maeva froze, her eyes locking onto mine. The warmth shot up my arm and sizzled at the base of my spine, an aftershock echoing through every nerve. She looked as startled as I felt. For a moment, neither of us moved. The night, the cold, the hunger, none of it registered. Only the fire, and the pulse in my hand where we’d touched.

She broke the moment first, looking down at the water on her skin. With a quick swipe, she wiped it away, but her cheeks glowed pink in the firelight. I busied myself with the fire, throwing in an extra branch to avoid saying anything stupid.

Maeva wrapped herself tighter in my fur-lined cloak, pulling it around her shoulders until she nearly vanished inside it. She stared into the flames, face flickering between worry and something that looked an awful lot like longing.

I cleared my throat. “You never asked why I chose this route.” She glanced up, wary. “Was there a choice?” I nodded, settling onto a rock opposite her. “The valley road is easier. But it’s watched. Valkar’s whelps have patrols there. This ridge is dangerous, but no one expects a human to survive it. Even less with a dragon in tow.”

Maeva smiled, thin and tired. “So you do care if I make it.” I ignored the dig. “I care about finishing what I started. Your death would complicate matters.” She chewed that over, then looked away. “You can tell yourself that if it helps.”

We sat in the warmth, the conversation dying back into the flicker and snap of burning twigs. After a while, Maeva pulled her knees to her chest, cocooning herself as much as possible. “I don’t want to sleep,” she said, voice soft. “Every time I close my eyes, I dream of the vault. Or the reliquary. Or …other things.” I understood the sentiment better than I cared to admit. “Dreams are nothing,” I said. “It’s what you do when you wake that matters.”

She nodded, then turned the cup in her hands, staring at the reflection of the flames in its battered surface. “Why did you keep it?” she asked. “The reliquary. If it hurts you so much to remember.” I thought about lying, about feeding her some line about treasure and pride, but the taste of that felt wrong. She’d seen the shrines, seen the pain. I could offer her a sliver of truth. “I keep it,” I said, “because forgetting is worse.” She nodded once, as if that made sense to her.

We finished the meal in silence. When the fire had burned down to coals, Maeva scooted to the far side of the alcove, rolled up tight in the cloak, and turned her back to the wind. I leaned against the stone, folding my arms across my chest, and listened to the sound of her breathing. It slowed, deepening, until I thought she’d fallen asleep.

But then she spoke, barely a whisper. “Thank you,” she said. “For carrying me.” I didn’t answer. I watched the moon edge above the far peaks, shedding silver across the ice fields. My hand still tingled where it had brushed hers, and I couldn’t help flexing it, over and over, like a beast working a thorn from its paw.

In the morning, we would face the next climb. I doubted either of us would be ready. But for now, in the lee of the mountain, with the warmth of her words and the embers in my hand, I allowed myself to rest.