Now everything really goes to hell.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
Chapter Eleven
When the fighters of
the other races who had massed to bring what they thought would be freedom and
safety to their kin reached the Hibernation Chambers, they were sweating inside
their armour in the volcanic heat that filled the subterranean halls. They
stood for a while, even the commanders forgetting discipline at the awe
inspiring sight of hundreds of dragons of all sizes, shapes colours and
patterns sleeping on their sand and stone couches as if dead, surrounded by a
pale glow that made them seem like unearthly statues. While the temperature
inside the cavern was not hot enough to actually kill anyone, it made them very
uncomfortable and could cause heatstroke if they had to actually do battle for
too long without water. Those who were in charge sent requests to the surface
for more water to be brought down, and while these commands were being carried
out they ordered their men to begin what they had come here for and spent their
lives training for. They then set about the bloody work of dispatching the
sleeping dragons.
Something that
nobody remembered, not the fighters that were intent on bringing death to the
sleeping dragons nor even the dragons themselves, was that the spell price that
bound the dragons to their deathlike stasis of hibernation for ever second
millennium was itself bound by several caveats and conditions. Those
responsible for casting the spell that healed the destruction of the Great
Eruption had not wanted to leave their friends and loved ones completely
defenceless in a potentially hostile world. The Millennial Hibernation was
bound to break for a limited period of time if a certain number of the sleeping
dragons were suddenly killed within a short space of time, say for a cave in or
another eruption or if some enterprising large predator had come upon what it
say to be an endless supply of free dinners. This was to prevent the price of
the spell that saved the dragons from dying out during the Great Eruption from
in turn causing their extinction at a later date.
The long ago spell
casters had not counted on the cause of death being a large and well-armed
force of their fellow thinking beings. The dragons themselves had not thought
that the other races of the world would ever grow to hate and fear them so much
that they would take advantage of their helplessness during the Millennial
Hibernation to attempt to wipe them out entirely. They had thought that their
city, built as it was inside the crater of a massive volcano that was almost
completely impenetrable to a foe on foot, would protect them. Many had thought
that even the subtle disguising and hiding in plain sight of the entrance to
the Hibernation Chambers was the worst kind of overkill. They had not realised
that even with the changes that had been made to it since it had been built,
they would still be able to be found by an intelligent and determined foe that
was driven by fear and hatred.
Since they had
assumed that the dragons would remain unconscious and be completely helpless
against them, the fighters that the other races had managed against all odds to
get into the Hibernation Chambers to deal with the dragons did not do more than
make a cursory check to ensure that they knew the general layout of the place
and where all the dragons were before they set about their slaughter. They
determined that they would go through room by room, eliminating all of the
dragons in each room before moving on to the next room and then next and then
the next and so on until they had eradicated the dragons as a living race in
their entirety and relegated them to the annals of history as a lesson to any
of the other races as to what would happen if one of them started abusing the
others in any way.
Those who were in
charge issued orders and the warriors of the other races moved to the sides of
the sleeping dragons and positioned their pikes and spears and halberds for
their initial strikes. Any of them who felt any twinge of conscience about
sneaking in like assassins to butcher a sleeping foe firmed their resolve with
the reminder that if they did not do this thing now, then these very same
dragons who had caused so much trouble for their ancestors would awaken again
in a few hundred years to plague their own grandchildren and great
grandchildren. The signal was given, officers shouting a single word to the men
who stood with their pole weapons held in readiness, positioned the closed
eyelids of great draconic eyes; ready to drive through the weak spot at the
back of the socket and into the brain. For a moment the voice of command lingered
in the hot, still air of the first of the Hibernation Chambers, and then the
spears and pikes came down and the room became an abattoir.
The plan had been a
good one from the point of view of those who had come to do the killing. The
first room full of dragons died without making a fuss or even a single sound.
The men rammed their weapons home as deep and as hard as they could with
accuracy that had been built upon a lifetime of training and strength that hand
been honed by hammering on buildings for months on end. After jamming their
weapons as deeply as they could into the eyes of the sleeping dragons, the men
ducked and hugged the base of the sleeping platforms as closely as they could
to avoid the flailing wings, tails, heads and clawed feet of the dragons they
had just killed as the spell holding them in stasis for the Millennial
Hibernation was shattered and they thrashed violently in their death throes.
Draconic blood fountained everywhere, splashing over hides of grey and black
and cream, brown and green and blue as they went into a riot of colours of pain
and shock before reverting back the owner’s normal colours and patterns as
death overtook them and they once again lay still.
For a few minutes
after the violence of the death throes of the first room of dragons had passed
and they once again lay still, the only sound was the slow dripping of blood
from the slaughtered dragons. Then the commanders of the warriors of the other
races shouted orders and their men stood shakily to assess the damage to their
numbers caused by the violent thrashing and flailing of the dying dragons. Many
had not been able to duck out of the way in time and had been smashed to death
themselves or sustained grave injuries. Those who were injured were ordered
back out to the surface for medical treatment, and a squadron was left behind
to arrange the bodies of those who had not survived for transportation back to
the surface. Survivors, though drenched in blood, were re-formed into their
units and they retrieved those of their weapons that had not been smashed to
pieces from the heads of their fallen foes. Those whose weapons had been
destroyed during the dying spasms of the dragons were given replacements and
they went to the next Hibernation Chamber to repeat their slaughter.
The dragon
population was much larger than it had been at the time the spell had been cast
for the saving of the draconic race and the rest of the world form the
destruction of the Great Eruption, and thus the conditions that bound the price
of the spell that were needed to awaken the dragons did not begin to take
effect until the warriors of the other races were over half way through
butchering the occupants of the second of the Hibernation Chambers. Dragons
began awakening all throughout the Hibernation Chambers, confused and sluggish
and wondering why they could smell a horrible stench of blood and death and
hear noises that had no place in the normally silent underground caverns.
It was when the sound
of agonized shrieking from those who had just begun awakening when the weapons
of the warriors pierced their eyes rent the air that the confused drowsiness
was abruptly banished from the rest of the dragon population in a wave of
horror and panic. Some of the more alert adults, those who had experienced
several Millennial Hibernations and were used to having to fighting their way
up from the depths of the deathlike sleep leapt to their feet and went to
investigate the noise and the smell from the Hibernation Chambers that were
closest to the entrance. They stood in the entrance to the second of the outer
chambers and turned whiter than sun bleached bone in horror at what they saw.
The room was filled
with blood and dead and dying dragons. Draconic blood ran in rivers across the
floor towards them and they could see though the archway and short corridor to
the first of the chambers that there was even more blood and horror to be found
in the first of the rooms. Armed and armoured beings of the other races,
already soaked in blood from their initial round of slaughter, were engaged in
tugging their weapons from the eyes sockets of dead dragons and attempting to
finish off those who had not been killed before they began to wake up. The
dragons that had begun to awaken before the death blow had been dealt had moved
as the spears and pikes of the warriors had come down, so they had been blinded
instead of killed instantly. The blinded dragons were in incredible pain, some
screamed as they tried to remove the weapons from their eyes and others,
realising the danger that was upon them, tried to ignore their pain and sudden
disability and fight back against their attackers.
It was complete
pandemonium, and some of the dragons who had not been in the hibernation
chamber that was currently under attack turned a violent scarlet in rage rushed
forward shrieking in fury to attempt to save their friends and their families.
The dragons who had been blinded could not see who or what had attacked them or
what was going on, they slashed out with their taloned forefeet and bit blindly
at anything that did not smell of dragon. Unfortunately for them and those who
tried to assist them, everything in the room either smelled of dragon or dragon
blood. What had been up until now a controlled and organised butchering of
somnolent dragons swiftly became a bloody, chaotic brawl as uninjured dragons
tried to save their friends and confused fighters quickly formed little groups
and closed ranks and began to use what weapons they still had to keep the pain
crazed and angry dragons at bay.
The more cautious
heads amongst the other races that had been involved in the planning for this
endeavour had ordered that marksmen with high powered longbows and crossbows be
included in the assault force. The reasons they had given were that if the
dragons proved too difficult to approach in their death throes for a clean kill
then an arrow that had been dipped in a paralytic toxin or a heavy crossbow
bolt to the chest would speed up the process. The tacticians had also pointed
out that while projectile weapons were manifestly silly when used indoors
against foes the same size as you, the dragons racial claustrophobia lead them
to build on a scale that would make any of their buildings as good as the
outdoors for any marksman to fight in, and that the dragons were so blasted
large when compared to the other races that a marksman worth his salt would
find it extremely difficult to shoot someone of his own side when faced with
several dozen dragons who were confined to the ground and lost their major
advantage of aerial manoeuvrability in a fight.
As the frantic
dragons desperately tried to get their thrashing, fighting friends back behind
them and into the relative safety of the other hibernation chambers the
commanders began shouting orders. The fighters of the other races fell back
into lines across the blood soaked hibernation chamber, pole weapons to the
fore, while archers came running carefully through the carnage of the first
chamber and took up positions behind them. While dragons whose rage red or
terrified pale hides were soaked in the blood of their friends hauled thrashing
dragons backwards by main force, the bowmen knelt in the sticky pools of blood
that were already drying in the heat of the hibernation chamber. They took
their position behind the protective line of warriors who were carrying pole
arms and took careful aim at the moving mass of dragons. At a sharply barked
command, they fired.
Bowstrings hummed
and a line of deadly projectiles streaked unerringly towards their targets. The
arrows and crossbow bolts flew across the carnage that filled the room,
thudding into the uninjured dragons that had stayed to guard the doorway after
the last of the wounded had been forced through it. Shock and pain turned
furiously red hides pale and mottled underneath the splashes of blood that were
drying on them, cries of pain and outrage almost drowning out the order for the
bowmen to reload. The poison that coated the projectiles of the longbow men
began to take effect faster than it normally would, due to the fact that there
were simply so many arrows stuck in each dragon that a dosage several times
more than would be lethal entered their bloodstream within a few seconds of the
arrows leaving the bowstrings.
The dragons cried
their pain and outrage, and as the paralytic poison that the arrows had been
dipped in reached their bloodstream they collapsed to the floor. The injured
dragons that had been forced to retreat to the other hibernation chambers heard
their rescuers hit the floor and demanded to know what had happened. Those who
had been able to see what had happened were not able to speak, shocked into
silence at the cold and organised brutality that had descended upon them while
they slept.
At another command the warriors armed with
pole weapons advanced across the blood sticky floor of the chamber they had
already taken, moving around the bodies of those dragons they had managed to
kill in the first wave of the attack on the room. The bowmen stayed where they
were, those who were armed with crossbows making good use of the time to cock
and reload their crossbows. They rose and moved forward, taking cover behind
sleeping platforms and the corpses of dragons half way down the room to provide
covering fire if the dragons decided to retaliate without warning. Once again
men moved in to take care of those who had been unlucky enough to fall victim
to the death throes of those they had killed or who had been killed by the
dragons that had awoken before the death blows could fall. Some move forward
and began to attempt to clear the corpses of the dragons who had fallen victim
to the paralytic poison on the arrows from the doorway to the next hibernation
chamber.
It was about this
time that reinforcements started arriving, news of the dragons awakening had
reached the surface along with the call for the bowmen, and a squadron of
dwarves arrived along with the relief. They carried massive axes for shearing
through bone and meat so that they could chop a way by main force through the
mammoth corpses that would inevitably block the advance of their forces through
the complex of Hibernation Chambers. No matter how strong any of the other
races were, there was no way that they would be able to move a dead dragon or a
dragon that did not want to be moved.
By this time, deep
within the complex of Hibernation Chambers underneath the volcano that housed
the Dragon City, all the dragons were awake. The spell that bound them to the
sleep of the Millennial Hibernation had reached the critical point of dragons
killed in a short space of time and had released them all from the lethargy and
the spell that took them out of time. There was confusion in the chambers
furthest away from the carnage, as the dragon’s internal sense of time told
them that not enough time had elapsed from when they had entered the Millennial
Hibernation for this to be a normal reawakening.
News of the attack
on the Hibernation Chambers spread quickly from room to room when confused and
grumpy dragons demanded to know what on earth was going on. As the smell of
blood permeated the entire complex and the sounds of battle as the assault on
the third of the Hibernation Chambers began, a creeping horror began to dawn on
the surviving dragons. They were trapped deep underground, entombed in solid
rock and the only way out of the Hibernation Chambers was the same way that
they had come in by to begin the millennial Hibernation. It was the same way that the other races had
used to get in to begin killing the dragons in their sleep without any
explanation as to why they were doing so. The way out was blocked by a
well-armed and bloodthirsty force that knew the dragons weaknesses and took
full advantage of them.
Some of the dragons
lost their heads entirely and began to panic, reverting to their earlist
instincts when faced with the awfulness of the situation. The panicked dragons
screamed their terror and attempting to fly out through the solid stone of the
roof, irrationally throwing themselves against solid basaltic rock in their
desperate desire to escape. There was at least one casualty from a breaking
neck before the healers realised what would happen if the rest of the dragons
lost control of their fear in the contagion of panic at being trapped in an
enclosed space and faced with certain death. They quickly stunned the panicking
dragons with spells that put them back into a sleep similar to the one that all
dragons had been in for the Millennial Hibernation until it broke under the
weight of the deaths caused by the attack of the fighters of the other races.
With those who were
an immediate danger to themselves safely sleeping in defensible corners of the
hibernation chambers, the dragons tried to work out what on earth was going on
and what they could do about it. Those who tried to defend their friends and
family and slow the advance of the oncoming army through the Hibernation
Chambers were quickly slain by the poisonous arrows of the archers, and those
who tried to build a wall of their own bodies as they succumbed to the toxin
could not slow the advance for long. The dwarves were able to cut through
dragon flesh a lot faster than solid rock, and even without the gravel and sand
they dumped on the pools of blood and groe their work left on the floor the
heat of the caverns rendered the floor dry enough to be negotiated again in a
sickeningly short space of time.
Over half of the
members of the Council of the Elders had been lost in the assault on the first
three rooms of the Hibernation Chambers, and those who remained knew that there
was nothing that they could do to evacuate what remained of their people to
safety or to stop the armies from slaughtering them down to the last hatchling.
Any magical intervention to buy them the time to escape would have so steep a
price it was only something that a member of the Council of the Elders would
contemplate doing for their race. They swiftly debated what on earth they could
possibly do as the fear that swirled through the Hibernation Chambers gave way
to futility and despair. Many dragons had tried to reason with the fighters, to
ask them why they were doing this and to try to get them to explain why they
were doing this. Those dragons had died as quickly as all the rest, shot full
of poison-coated arrows at the orders of commanders who really did not care
about the tricks they thought that their foes were trying to pull on them.
There was nothing
that could be done to save the beleaguered dragons. Some attempted to seal the
passageways between the Hibernation Chambers with magic, but all they could
manage was to get the stone that already existed to flow to fill the gap. By
the time the stone had created a layer of rock that was broad enough to cover a
dragon sized doorway it was so thin that the advancing warriors could break
through it with little difficulty. Trying to do anything more, like creating a
solid stone barrier out of nothing, would incur such a great magic price that
it was completely unfeasible in the current situation. There were enough
injured dragons already without another adding themselves to the tally of the
incapacitated by attempting a defence strategy that would only box them in
further.
Deep within the
Hibernation Chamber complex, buried far under the Super Volcano, dragons
panicked as death approached them. Evreth cowered between her parent’s
protective, wings, her hide flickering between the stark white of utter terror
and attempts to camouflage herself and hide so fast she looked like a crazed
strobe light. Path had tried to comfort her young friend, but the reek of blood
and death that permeated the underground caverns and the Cloud Clan dragon’s
inability to force her hide from its own blanching and to resume a more normal
colouration undermined any attempts she made. Path’s parents were in
consultation with some of the other dragons who had also been posted as
Ambassadors, and they appeared to be arguing over something.
After a few minutes
the huddle of Ambassadorial dragons broke up. The sounds of battle and pain were
drawing ever closer to their room, and dragons were beginning to prepare
themselves for what would be a futile attempt to defend themselves. With
nothing else to do but wait for the fighters of the other races to reach them,
Path watched her parents and the other ambassadors as they moved to surround an
abandoned sleeping platform. One of the dragons, a Star Clan male who was in
the prime of his strength, smoothed the basalt sand that filled the sleeping
platform with a sweeping gesture of a wing. As he did so, the sand rippled and
solidified into a massive sheet of black glass. He hissed in discomfort as he
sat, having chosen a more painful and less lingering magic price for the
transformation of the sand.
The ambassador
dragons sat solemnly around the massive mirror, staring at it with fierce
concentration. Since she was watching them, Path was one of the first besides
the ambassadors to see the images begin to form on the sheet of black glass
that filled the stone dragon bed. The dragons were conducting one of the easier
forms of scrying, that of looking into the past and the present as it was
happening. This was more definite and cost less in the way of magic price than
attempting to spy out future events, as the past had already happened and the
present was in the process of happening. Future events had far too many
possibilities and variables for anyone to really consider it worth the cost of
the spell to find out one or two of a billion potential futures.
What the dragons saw
in the black glass mirror caused more horror and despair in a situation where
they already faced inevitable and horrifying deaths. They watched a series of
images rapidly flash across the glass, the story of how they came to be trapped
and slaughtered within the Hibernation Chambers unfolding before the dismayed
gazes of dragons whose hides alternated between the grey of grief and the white
of shock. They had not anticipated anything like this ever coming to pass. They
had not thought that the other races had come to hate and fear them so much
because of the actions of a handful of malcontents.
There was no sound
in this scrying spell, but the Ambassadors and the other dragons that cared for
a look at the mirror of black glass saw quick flashes of rabble rousing
alternating with debates in familiar council chambers. The sounds of injured
dragons crying out in pain and the rhythmic smashing of the fighters of the
other races chipping their way through a hastily sealed doorway formed a
hellish backdrop to the vision of the past and present unfolding in the black
glass mirror.
The building of the
road flew by in a blur of fast time, and when they saw the beginning of the
tunnel through the wall of the super volcano that housed their home Path cried
out in shock. She recognised some of the miners as regulars at some of the inns
and Travellers Hostels she had stayed at as a Special Courier, and the Cloud
Clan dragon finally had an answer as to why the people along her route had been
stockpiling so much wood.
The beleaguered
dragons finally had their answer as to how and why the other races had come to
deal death upon them, and they knew that there was no way out for them. They
could not fight their way out of the Hibernation Chambers without all of the
surviving dragons falling to poisoned arrows or the weapons of those fighters
they could see still outside. They were backed into a corner and simply did not
have enough people left to risk losing any to the magic price of any spell that
could stay the advancing troops or transport the dragons to a safe location far
enough from the Dragon City to be able to escape by wing or foot.
Sounds of renewed
fighting and death floated through the complex of underground chambers with a
fresh wave of blood scented air. Path looked around the room at the terrified
dragons, scared into frantic blanching or frozen stiff with fear and with hides
that automatically blended into their surroundings in a useless attempt to hide
with the camouflage reaction. Evreth huddled between her parents, her hide
still flashing dizzily between a terrified blanch and an attempt to hide. Her
parents were stark white in horror, their wings spread protectively over their
only child. Path’s own parents were back in consultations with the other
Ambassadors and one surviving member of the Council of the Elders. The young
Sand Clan dragon was frozen in place, her limbs felt like they had been filled
with heavy wet sand and she could not bring herself to move in case she
panicked like so many others and tried to fly out through the solid rock above
her.
