A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 2119: Guardians of the Land - Part 6
The dragon no longer seemed inclined towards a fight. Oliver wasn’t even sure now why they had fought in the first place. They seemed far more like comrades than enemies. This was a creature of the Stormfront. Though it ought to have ruled its skies, rather than been buried under its land.
"That blue flame," Oliver said. "I have to be rid of it. The Chief of the Gnomes told me so. If I get rid of it, will it be of a help to you?"
Oliver got the sense that the dragon did not like that blue flame, from how it had reacted when it had struck the blue flame with flames of its own. He had a feeling that it was something to do with its confinement. A creature like that mighty dragon would not have stayed underground willingly. It had the strength to force its way through the narrow corridor if it had wished to. And yet it had stayed.
A Guardian it had been described as. But Guardian of what? If it was of the blue flame, then why? The Chief of the Gnomes had seemed to say that the blue flame was the very thing holding the forest back from what it had used to be.
Oliver scratched his head. He did not understand, but a reply from the dragon did not seem to be forthcoming either. It simply stopped, and looked at him, waiting expectantly.
Oliver heaved a sigh. The wounds to his body began to ache so much more. There was a dull thought in his head that he should have died already. Who was he that was foolish enough to challenge a dragon? He had not even come close to besting it.
’Still, it was fun, wasn’t it?’ A part of him thought. His body oozed with excitement. A rueful smile arose on his lips, and he favoured the dragon with it. A cheeky look was what it was, when directed at a being as ancient as it. He wanted to play, just as much as he wanted to solve the problem before them.
The dragon raised a clawed leg in response, ever so slowly. It seemed a warning to Oliver. "Fine, fine... I won’t bother you just yet," he said. The dragon’s look was ever so slightly contemptuous, and equal measures impatient, as it put that foot back on the ground again.
"You expect something of me. What would you have me do?" Oliver asked.
The creature simply stared at him. Or more accurately, slightly above him. Oliver got the sense that it was simply staring at his crown. He tried to take the hint.
"You’re saying I should carry out the duties of a King?"
The dragon wriggled its head in response. It was almost a nod, but a far more natural looking movement that a nod would have been from a creature such as it.
"Did you meet with the First King as well then?"
The dragon dragged the claws of its front leg across the stone, leaving deep gauges, and gave a growl. Oliver took that to be disagreement.
"...Then what duties is a King expected to perform if the First King did not carry them out? It is we that have corrupted this land since his arrival – it is we that should undo what we have done."
The dragon roared in response, the harshest disagreement. And then it spit another pillar of flames towards the walls. It spun around, bathing the whole cavern in it, forcing Oliver to duck out of the way in alarm.
"Sorry! Sorry! I didn’t mean to offend you..." Oliver said. But as he looked around, he could see that the dragon’s intentions were different. A trench full of fire along all corners of the room was lit. Like the torches, it must have been drenched with oil and stocked with wood by someone who had arrived before Oliver.
With that much light in the room, what Oliver had assumed to be a cavern looked very different. Less natural, more man made. He spied the evidence of what once had been pillars, now collapsed against the walls. Even in the centre of the room, the rubble that he saw and had even almost tripped in on in the midst of combat now bore evidence of something larger.
On the walls, he saw strange runes of a similar sort to those that had decorated the corridor on the way down. And then, on another, he saw the spiral rune like what the dragon had forged onto his crown .
Oliver squinted. There was that which Stormfront histories did not understand. Skullic had been unable to tell Oliver anything about the blue flame that he had captured when dealing with bandits on Skullic’s behalf. No one he had asked since had been able to tell him much more either. Hod had come closest, in suggesting that they were the remnants of a civilization before the modern Stormfront began. Others simply dismissed it as the worth of mages.
Work of mages – to Oliver that would assume that those mages were humans that had arrived with the First King. But what he saw written seemed older than just a few hundred years. The very existence of the dragon pointed to that. The creature was not from the time of the First King. He had not been there a mere handful of centuries. Everything in Oliver’s body screamed that at him.
"There’s something I’m missing here..." Oliver murmured to himself, as he slowly crossed the cavern that he now knew to be a chamber, and stood before that spiral rune, sprawled across the wall.
It danced, and twirled as he looked at it. A trick of the eyes, Oliver was sure. The dragon rushed next to him, and raised a leg. Quickly enough that Oliver ducked in alarm.
CRACKKKKK!
A vicious wind slammed Oliver across the face, carrying rubble and dust along with it. The wall had imploded inwards. The sound of the explosion, and the brief glimpse that Oliver caught made him aware of that fact. He knew not how, he simply knew the fact that it had happened. Yet the wind that continued to blow, through that gap in the wall, that was something that he could not explain.
The dragon saw him shielded from the worst of it, holding its position until the wind began to die down to a strong breeze, and still, even then, it did not abate entirely. The hole in the wall that it had left, as large as the spiral rune had once been, revealed a deep darkness that warned of an entryway to somewhere even deeper.
