The ground shook with a heavy impact, and Achilles reared with a shriek of effort and fear. Gwen nearly dropped the spear, her view blocked by her horse—and then, as he regained his feet, she saw that the dragon had leapt into the air to land on their otherside, cutting off Achilles’s charge. Her horse had reared to a stop just a few feet away.
And there, so large she could see herself distorted in the curved, glittering arc, was the dragon’s eye.
Gwen and Achilles both froze in the same heartbeat. She felt her horse’s body grow rigid beneath her, felt her own body stiffen, the spear only half raised, the weight of it still an agony on the injured tissues of her shoulder—and she could not lower it or drop it.
Isobelle, she thought frantically, reaching for the glimmer of light and hope that had saved her last time.Think about Isobelle.
But the instant the thought crossed her mind, a cold and irrevocable dread swept through Gwen.
Something was wrong.
In the depths of the mine, she had been able to see the dragon’s eye through the slit in her visor, had watched as its pupil searched in vain for her eyes in the darkness of her helmet. She had been able to see the dragon’s eye clearly enough, enough to be paralyzed by the horrid power of the monster. But now, she had no helmet, nothing standing between her and it.
Now, it could seeher.
The huge golden eye fixated on her, seeming to swell until it eclipsed all else, blocking out the moon and the sky and the grasses all around, until all Gwen knew, all Gwenwasor ever would be, was that eye.
Before, her body had gone still, but she had felt her mind thrashing wildly inside like a bird in a cage.
Now, even her soul was frozen. She could feel the dragon’s thoughts, sliding into her like some ancient, unspeakable curse. Its mind was vast and complex and alien, and filled with a cruelty ascold as iron in midwinter and as unyielding. Its eye burned, and its mind froze.
She could feel it examining her, pulling apart her soul as easily as its teeth and claws would pull apart her body. Crushing each flicker of hope or rage as easily as it had crushed her helmet. Devouring everything—everything except her fear.
She tried again to summon a thought of Isobelle—not to save herself, for she knew now that she was beyond saving, that the dragon was right to rip her hope from her. But Gwen just wanted to think of her, one more time.
The dragon gave that low, cruel growl from the mine, the one that had chuckled and gone through Gwen like the echo of everyone who had ever laughed at the idea of a woman in armor—now, it laughed at her for thinking of love.
Then it ripped that away, too.
She felt as though she were dangling from a cliff over an infinite pit, and that to fall into it would consign her to an eternity of madness—that if she fell, she would be abandoning all that was ever good and bright, abandoning even the memory of ever having lived some other life.
The only thing she had left was a distant, wavering memory. Isobelle’s face, her voice.I’ll be there, when the moment comes.
Gwen gasped and wrenched her mind away. She would not let the dragon take that from her too—and somewhere, in the last flickering recesses of her thoughts, she knew that to think of that last hope now, to use it to cling one breath longer to the edge of the cliff, might warn the dragon of whatever Isobelle meant to do.
So Gwen turned her mind away from hope with one last, wrenching effort, let go of the edge of the cliff, and fell.
Interstitial
Imagine a ship.
A single vessel, silver in the moonlight. An undulating sea of grass stretches all around it, in every direction. The little boat is entirely alone, drifting at the mercy of the currents.
Before it is a sea monster, wounded and full of rage and all the more dangerous for both these things. It moves, sinuous, toward the boat, as we watch from above.
That’s going to be the best vantage point for what comes next.
Gwen is our silver ship, clad in armor made of ingenuity and courage. The dragon is our sea monster, centuries old, its history littered with the knights it has killed. And as Gwen abandons the last of herself on that moonlit sea of grass, it’s clear there’s only one way this ends.
... Or is there?
Lady Isobelle of Avington is still at large, after all.
Her torch flares to life, a tiny spark—a single guiding star in this great black sea of night, beckoning Gwen back home, to hope.
Nothing happens. Gwen is no more than a crumbling statue, her mind lost in the darkest of dreams. The great dragon slides toward her, with a low growl calling for her blood.
Isobelle’s torch waves wildly, but still she draws no attention fromeither of them, even as she begins to run toward the girl she loves, a single shooting star, seen from above.
