She did lean perilously close, though, bending over until her nose was less than an inch from the mountain by the time Julius joined her. “What is this stuff? It’s not rock.”
He leaned in as well, squinting in the dim, red moonlight. Even with his superior night vision, though, it still took Julius several seconds to understand what he was looking at. And when he did, he almost wished he hadn’t. “They’re chains,” he whispered, stomach sinking as he tilted his head back, looking up, and up, and up.
The mountain in front of them wasn’t a mountain at all. It was a pile. A colossal, towering, cylindrical pillar of glistening metal chains just like the one Estella had slapped on Chelsie. Each one was scarcely wider than a string, but they were stacked to the sky, all of them tangled together in a giant knot that seemed to have no end or beginning. They were also allmoving, the little links expanding and contracting in unison like the breathing of a sleeping animal. Just watching something so horrendously creepy was enough to make Julius’s skin crawl. Marci, as usual, was unfazed.
“That’s so cooooool,” she said, leaning back so far she nearly fell over in her efforts to see the pile’s top. “I guess we know where Estella got her chains now. So how do you think these work? Do we just pick one out?”
“No way,” Julius said with a shudder. “You saw what happened when one of those things touched Chelsie.”
“I wonder if they’re all different futures?” Marci said, leaning back in to peer at individual links. “You know, all the different chains of events that could possibly happen?”
“How would that even work?” Julius asked. “We’re in another dimension, and didn’t Amelia say that seers couldn’t see out of their own?”
“It has to work somehow,” Marci said. “These are clearly the same chains Estella used, so they obviously function in our world.” She frowned. “Maybe it’s a dragon thing? This is where you’re all from. Maybe part of your future is still here or something?”
That wasn’t a bad theory, but just trying to think through all the implications was already making Julius’s head ache. Before he could reply, though, the black wall in front of them began to vibrate.
“Perceptive lesser creature.”
The words rolled through the ground like shockwaves, making them both jump. “Um,” Marci said, moving closer to him. “Did that mountain just backhand compliment me?”
Julius was lifting his shoulders in a bewildered shrug when the mountain’s surface began to move, the softly pulsing chains curling like tentacles until they’d formed a wide, arched opening.
“Enter.”
Again, the voice shook the ground, but this time Julius was ready for it, listening closely to the words as they rumbled through him. Not surprisingly, given where they were, it sounded like a dragon. Abigone. Under any other circumstances, that would have filled him with a healthy amount of dread. Now, though, after a full day of crisis, an evening of almost dying, and a night spent walking untold miles across an alien desert, Julius was too excited about the possibility of actually finding someone who might have some answers to be more than mildly apprehensive.
“Come on,” he said, pulling out his phone to use as a flashlight, the only usefulness it had left out here. “Let’s finish this.”
“I just hope it doesn’t finishus,” Marci whispered, nervously eyeing the tunnel of chains. “And I thought we weren’t going to touch those?”
“The chains are safe,”the voice assured them.“They sleep until cut. Though I invite you to take your time. We have plenty of that to spare, here.”
It might have been Julius’s imagination, but he’d have sworn the strange voice sounded bitter at the end. But while the idea of walking over mind-control chains—sleeping or not—sounded like a very bad one, he was sick of dragging this out. So, with a deep breath of the strange, empty air, Julius closed his eyes and took a big step forward, planting his foot straight down on the tangled chains that made up the tunnel’s floor.
It was…not pleasant. In fact, Julius was certain the feeling of thousands of tiny threads pulsing through the bottom of his shoe was going to be nightmare fodder for the rest of his life. But other than that cheery detail, nothing actually bad happened.
“Is it safe?” Marci whispered.
“I think so,” he whispered back, placing his other foot on the creepy, breathing floor. “Relatively speaking.”
She stepped in beside him with a grimace, her whole body shivering like she’d just jumped in freezing water. “That’s a feeling you don’t forget,” she said, opening her eyes at last as she locked her arm through his. “Let’s get this over with.”
The two of them set off into the dark, marching side by side down the sloping tunnel of chains. Again, it was impossible to say how long they walked. According to Julius’s exhausted legs, it was miles, but the reality was probably closer to a few hundred feet before the tunnel took a sharp turn upwards, expanding into a large, and surprisingly open, space.
From the outside, the pile of chains had looked like a tall, steep, strangely cylindrical mountain. Looking up from the inside, though, Julius realized it was actually shaped more like a very steep volcano, and he and Marci had just entered the caldera. Coiled chains rose in sheer walls around them on all sides, but here in the center, the ground was relatively flat, creating an enormous, circular space open to the moonlit sky above. It actually reminded Julius of standing in the center of a giant nest, which was fitting, because lying in the middle of it all was the largest dragon he’d ever seen.
It was impossible to tell justhowlarge, because the dragon’s snake-like body was coiled in a circle, looped over and over onto itself like a giant pile of rope. That said, even the small coils were still twice Julius’s height and as big around as a school bus. He couldn’t begin to imagine how huge the dragon would be if it stretched out, but what really made him stare were its scales.
In addition to its enormous size—or more likely because of it—the dragon’s body was covered inhugescales. Each one was easily five feet across and arranged in overlapping rows, like a snake’s. This wasn’t unusual—with the notable exception of feathered serpents like the Heartstrikers, most dragons were scaled—but where normal dragon scales varied in size and coloration, these scales were all bone white and so uniform that they looked like they’d been made in a factory. The only difference between them was the writing.
Every scale on the dragon’s body was covered from top to bottom with neat, tightly packed lines of curling black script. Julius couldn’t read what they said, but he recognized the symbols from some of his mother’s oldest—and therefore most valuable—treasures. But just as he was wondering if they’d stumbled onto some kind of giant monument, the coils began to move, sliding over each other with the sound of clicking stone beads as a square, white-eyed head the size of a tank rose from the dragon’s center to look at them.
“Welcome, son of the Heartstriker,” it said, its deep voice still booming, but at least not ground-shaking anymore.
Julius swallowed. “You know who I am?”
“I know whatever you bring with you,” the dragon said. “which, in your case, is very little.” It opened its mouth, showing its bone-white fangs in what Julius hoped was a smile. “I am Dragon Sees the Beginning, and while I’d like to have more than twenty-four years to work with, I welcome you all the same. It is entertaining to have something to look at again.”
