fic: Dragonscape - part 7

[lasermignon]

Dragonscape - part 7
master list


"No, let's… let's wait for a bit," he pleaded. Arthur did not ask for what. He followed Merlin's eyes towards the slowly blackening sky and waited without a word until the outlines of the moon became one with the surrounding night.

But even after Ealdor was no longer visible, Arthur seemed reluctant to proceed, as though he had only now remembered something important.

"Percival should stay behind," he said finally, looking uneasily at the large man as though he really had not wanted to make the suggestion but could not see a way around it.

"What for?" Percival asked, a furrow between his brows expressing his dismay at the request.

"So you can find some large rocks and bar the entrance of the tunnel," Arthur explained.

"That's not a good idea, Sire. We are going to need every man," Sir Leon said.

"Besides," Merlin added before Arthur could protest, "How are we going to come back if the exit is blocked?"

"You forget," Arthur said, addressing everyone by slowly shifting his eyes from person to person until he had caught everyone's gaze with his own. "We are not the only ones who can come back this way."

"I don't think the Dorocha are going to come this way," Merlin's words cut the silence, which had suddenly turned heavy in the wake of Arthur's disconcerting prediction.

"Why wouldn’t they?" Arthur asked and his tone carried none of his customary teasing undercurrents. Good, for that meant he was taking him seriously for once.

Merlin took a deep breath and let it out in a sharp huff, eyes trained on Arthur and Arthur only.

"You see, I think the Dragon in Ealdor is not dead after all; it's just sleeping," he said and did not miss the gasps that followed his proclamation. "It was sleeping so deeply that the Dorocha couldn’t hear it anymore, which is why they went mad. But now I think the Great Dragon had awakened it, which is why the Dorocha are more active now. But they won't leave Ealdor. "

Arthur considered his words in silence, but then he shook his head, dismissing them entirely.

"That's just a hunch, Merlin. I cannot risk Camelot's fate on a hunch."

Merlin frowned. Arthur would not accept it for proof that the knowledge had come to him in his sleep, even if what he had seen in his sleep had been more of a memory than a dream. But Merlin knew his intuition was right. Had Balinor not told him over and over to listen to it? He shook his head.

"No, it's not just a hunch. See, it happens sometimes when two Dragons mate: they exchange organic matter between them but whatever gets transplanted from one ecosystem to the other rarely survives, and the Dorocha know that. If their Dragon is truly awake now, they would never abandon it for another."

"How do you know these things?" Arthur asked, looking bewildered.

Merlin was just as perturbed. He was convinced of being right. But his conviction came from somewhere deep in his mind and the reason for it had been unclear even to himself until he put it into words. He shrugged. "I think it must be that genetic memory thing Gaius mentioned. Things are starting to come back. Or it could just be that we are getting closer to Ealdor."

For a short while, Arthur stared at him bemusedly, and Merlin was beginning to fear that this would be the minute when Arthur reached the limits of his tolerance.

Earlier, when they had made love, Merlin had been apprehensive that Arthur would flinch away when he was confronted with Merlin's physical differences, slight as they were. That he would regard him with unease or even disgust; that he would no longer want him if he knew. But Arthur had been full of acceptance and touched Merlin with the utmost reverence. And the little extra mobility had served them well within their close confines.

"You don't believe me," Merlin huffed, for Arthur had still not said anything.

Arthur then shook himself, as though only now awakening from a dream. "No, I do," he insisted, but he did not look Merlin in the eye.

"I believe you," Gwen suddenly spoke up. Her declaration was followed by similar affirmations from the others, and from each one the words sounded more convincing than what he heard from Arthur's own mouth.

Arthur looked embarrassed, as though he had been outdone by people who had fewer stakes in the matter - and in a way, he was. "It's not that I don't believe you," Arthur blurted. "It's just…"

"What?" Merlin asked, perturbed by Arthur's unexpected hesitance, and not a little hurt by it, although he tried his best not to show that.

Arthur cleared his throat and straightened his back in a way Merlin had seen him do when he had been facing up to his own father. "If what you're saying is true, then we are in an even greater danger than we expected. Likely the Dorocha took the Dragonlord because they needed him to control their Dragon - to wake it up perhaps? But if that's true, then they are not going to just let us storm their lair and retrieve him. And what if the Dragonlord is no longer alive? Then they are going to want the next best replacement," he said with uncommon defiance, and he did not need to say who that replacement was going to be.

And Merlin suddenly saw his reluctance to accept his words as the truth for what they were deep down: a fear for Merlin's own safety and a deep-set doubt in his own ability to protect him from the fate he might come to at the Dorocha's hand.

Merlin felt himself react to it unconsciously, his mouth curving upwards in reassurance and his gaze likely reflecting exactly what he was feeling on the inside: a sudden and unending affection for the man standing before him.

"They won't hurt me," he said. "And if they try, I can protect myself."

"Merlin, you could not protect yourself from a one-legged unicorn!" Arthur huffed, sounding both desperate and fond at the same time.

And to prove him wrong, Merlin lifted the spent glowtorch in his hand and touched a finger to the crystal. At once, it sparkled into life and lit up so brightly that it painted behind flickering spots on the back of Merlin's eyelids. Then its strength waned down to the familiar pale glow.

The mouth of the cave was still as small as Merlin remembered it being. He was the first to crawl through, followed by his mother and Gwen, then Elyan and Gwaine, which was a good thing for they needed the manpower to pull Percival through the opening when his shoulders got stuck. Arthur came in last. He installed himself as the rear guard, appointing Merlin and Hunith into the lead, but it was obvious that he set it up this way because he wanted as many people as possible between Merlin as himself. Arthur had not spoken to him directly ever his little demonstration earlier, and Gwen was beginning to look upset, the furrow between her brows deepening and her lips bitten, by the sudden tear in their friendship. Merlin, too, would have worried that Arthur was angry with him, perhaps for flaunting his magical nature in such a public way, but the expression Arthur wore betrayed to Merlin that Arthur's silence had more to do with embarrassment over his own behaviour. For now, Merlin let him be.

He expected the way back through the tunnel to start out with a steep climb, but the first few steps he took felt nothing out of the ordinary and the passageway continued in a straight line with just a little incline, just like the first time, when he had entered it from the other end. A little further on, the tilt became more pronounced but at the same time, gravity fell away.

"Be careful of your heads. Don't use too much force!" Merlin called back but the surprised, painful grunts and yells signalled that his warnings either came too late or went unheeded.

Arthur and Leon, as knights, knew how to deal with the sudden loss of gravity, but their yelled instructions and suggestions only confused the others more. Not to mention that Merlin heard just as many grunts of pain from them as from everyone else, for they might have been used to anticipating the unpredictable gravity inside the Crystal Cave but were not used to navigating a narrow passageway while not being able to stand on firm ground. In the end, everyone worked out a way to do it for themselves, just as Merlin and Hunith had done.

Their arrival on the other end was similar to Merlin's first time. Though he was now careful to brace himself against the sudden forward slide of his body at the first sign of gravity beginning to reassert itself, and shouted to the others behind him to stop and be careful, it was all in vain; for it only took only one person to fail, and Percival was that one person. Once in motion, his bulk was unstoppable and drove everyone in front of him down the last leg of the tunnel. They landed in an ungraceful heap in the middle of Balinor's windowed chamber, with Merlin on the bottom of the pile.

That was how Gwen, Hunith and Arthur, the only three who had not been swept away, found them and came to investigate whether any of them suffered a serious injury. Thankfully, that was not the case. Merlin felt the weight pressing him into the ground lessen as those above him extricated themselves from the pile and rose, leaving him the last one lying there. When he opened his eyes, he saw Arthur standing above him with his mouth pulled into a mocking grin and amusement in his eyes.

Unthinking, Merlin reached out to him, but before he could retract his hand, Arthur gripped his wrist and tugged him off the ground. Once upright, though, instead of letting go, Merlin grabbed onto Arthur's forearm until Arthur reluctantly looked him in the eye. What Merlin saw there, set him at ease. There was no anger or disgust in Arthur's gaze, just guilt and perhaps a little sheepishness for making a big issue out of a small thing and making everyone worry. They exchanged no words, but Merlin gave Arthur's arm a squeeze meant to reassure, and a little teasing smirk, and at that, Arthur's mood brightened considerably.

Outside the window, a new day dawned on the blue gas giant. Its rings sparkled in cold indifference as the Great Dragon was pulled among their ranks by the dark cord of the tunnel stretched out between them.

They found the outer chambers of the Shrine deserted, and although there was no furniture there which could have been broken or displaced, they clearly bore the signs of past fighting, for the walls smeared with blood. A dead body lay across the exit from the outmost chamber, with its legs and lower body on the inside while the torso pointed outside. His eyes were open and his features twisted into a pained, terrified expression. His arms had gone limp by then, but they had clearly been clutched around the dark pit in his white shirt, as though he had been hoping to hold his broken ribcage together and stave off death that way. He had not succeeded. The blood from the wound which had killed him had long dried into a rusty mess.

Merlin knew those features but it took Hunith to say his name for Merlin to reconcile that horrible face with the image that lived in his memories of the head-volunteer of the Dragonlord's shrine, Julius Borden.

"Poor fellow," Percival murmured. "His death was not quick." He was right. The wound was deep, but no vital organ must have been injured and he eventually died of blood loss. Perhaps he was still hoping for someone to come by and save him until the moment that he realised that this was going to be the end and he still tried to hold his chest together while fear consumed every other emotion and wrote its stark mark over his face.

When someone died in Ealdor, they threw the body in with the compost and held a feast in his or her name. There was not much ceremony over the funeral as only those who were used to the smell could stand to spend much time around compost; the obituary and every other tradition that people held important when someone died took place by the feasting tables, usually in a drunken state. Merlin did not doubt that by the time this was over, there would be need for many such services and Julian Borden would be only one of the dead remembered, if indeed there would be anyone remaining to remember. For now, they would just leave him where he was.

They stepped over the corpse one by one, and followed Hunith who led them through the dark corridors towards Ealdor.

Soon the glowtorches became superfluous. Daylight flooded the passages, carried down from the domes by well-placed mirrors. They were very old. Some of them were just large crystal sheets on whose backs molten metal had been poured; they were not clear enough to see one's image, but that was not their purpose. Arthur and others from Camelot exclaimed on the strangeness of lighting up the corridors this way, but soon they forgot about that and found another thing to be bewildered about when they learnt that in Ealdor there were no houses built over the surface and people lived underground, in chambers fully surrounded by rock.

When they got there, however, they found no living people in Ealdor; instead they found more dead ones. Some of the bodies strewn around were horrifically mutilated. Gwaine thought he saw teeth marks, and suggested the wounds could have been caused by wild animal attacks. But they knew they had not been, for Ealdor lacked predators, and everyone still remembered Merlin's description about the Dorocha.

"What now?" Gwen asked, the furrow between her brows indicating her distress. Despite the situation, she remained as practical as ever.

"Where are all the people?" Lancelot asked. "Everyone could not have been killed."

"There aren’t enough bodies," Merlin agreed, restricting himself to only noticing the facts. Had he allowed himself to dwell on the reality that these were people among whom he had lived his entire life, whom he had seen grow up or grow old, and who now were lying dead by his feet, he would not have been able to keep his last meal down. He knew he probably looked as though he was going to throw up any moment, for his mother and Arthur both tried to comfort him, and he could see Gwen restraining herself from giving into the same impulse. But he shied away from everyone's touch; if he had let himself, he would surely have fallen apart, and there was no time for that.

"They could be hiding?" Leon suggested.

"But where would they go?" Arthur asked. "These chambers are easy to defend because they can be barricaded. This should be the safest place in Ealdor. There is even natural light!"

In that moment, the ground shifted under their feet. Merlin grabbed onto Arthur's arm to keep his balance. The walls trembled, and new cracks appeared along the older ones which Merlin just noticed now. There was a loud rumbling, as though great expanses of rock were shifting and rubbing off against each other. The shaking grew stronger for a few heartbeats, until Merlin thought his bones would be ground to dust, but then it stopped as suddenly as it had started, and only falling dust indicated that anything had happened.

"Perhaps everyone went up to the domes," Merlin suggested, because he could not imagine that anyone would want to stay down here. He could now see the evidence that this had not been a solitary occurrence, but must have been going on for a while: the larger pieces of rubble, which he had thought to be a result of the fighting, gained a new, frightening meaning when observed together with the deep fissures that ran along the walls everywhere. The domes were the only other place with natural light.

They conducted a quick search in three teams. Sir Leon found some children hiding in a shed inside the dome which usually got most of the sunlight; his team was attacked with glowtorches and farming tools and it was fortunate that Merlin's mother was with them and could talk sense into the frightened boys and girls, or else it could have ended bloodily.

To their surprise, they found the Lady Morgause there as well. She sat alone in a corner and remained entirely unresponsive when Arthur and Gwen attempted to talk to her.

She was not the only adult among the children. There were a few others, but they were either old women or rendered incapable of standing due to some grievous injury. The Dorocha had come back after Hunith left and while their main force was stopped by the men blocking their way through Ealdor's main corridor, splinter groups sneaked into the village through side passages and dragged away the women, children and the older men who couldn't fight well. By the time the fighters realised what happened, they could not do anything to stop it.

Morgause and her sister had come to Ealdor before this happened, but at the time of the attack, they had been hiding in the unused corridors. A few of the women had spoken to Morgana and told her that it was not safe out there, but she had insisted that Morgause did not like being surrounded by people and they would rather remain secluded. Then a few days earlier, the poor lass had been found alone just outside the occupied area, screaming her head off. They had managed to calm her down, but she had not talked to anyone since and from all that blood smeared on her robes when she herself had only been lightly wounded, they had concluded that her sister must have been taken by the Dorocha.

Arthur did not take the news well. He told them he was going to take a walk around the dome and use the time alone to think. Merlin thought it looked more like brooding what he was doing, though people less generous than Merlin, like Gwaine, called it sulking. While Arthur was away, Hunith took his place in asking questions, wanting to know what happened in her absence, and where the other people of Ealdor were.

They were told that those who survived the Dorocha and were able-bodied, under Kanen's lead, decided to march into enemy territory and free their captured brethren - and the Dragonlord as well, if it could be done.

"Well," Hunith said with a dejected sigh. "It's just our luck that Kanen has survived. He's been forever a troublemaker, and a charismatic one at that. He must have persuaded everyone to this foolish plan of his."

"Will at least ought to have had more sense than to follow him," Merlin said. He could not help but be upset with his childhood friend.

The old women cackled at hearing Merlin's words. "Are we talking about the same Will?" one of them, Enna, asked. She used to watch over the children of Merlin's age while their parents worked, so she knew them well. "Because he was the loudest of Kanen's supporters."

"When have you ever known Will to have a pinch of sense?" Hunith said, though she sounded more resigned than anything else. "Besides, ever since you left and he realised you had been telling the truth about having been sent for by the Dragonlord, he's been trying to prove himself."

"What for?" Merlin asked. Although if he was honest with himself, he should have expected it. His mother only gave him a wry grimace, probably guessing that Merlin had already figured out the answer on his own.

The Dorocha were not the only ill to befall Ealdor recently. The children talked about times when the ground itself moved under their feet, and the adults confirmed their words, adding that it was no longer safe to go underground, into the corridors and living quarters. In the first big quake, four people died when the ceiling fell and buried them under its weight, others suffered broken bones; old man Simmons died from being trampled by his panicked ponies. And it had not happened just once but it was happening more and more often, with more severe causalities. After the last quake, the floor under one of the domes split open, and heat rose from the gap, so scorching, the very air might cook a man as he stood if he stayed there for even a short length of time. It all would have seemed too fantastic to believe, had Merlin not experienced some of it just a little while before.

There was another earthquake only a little later, and this one was much stronger than the previous one had been. It began with a resounding groan which came from somewhere deep below, like a great wounded beast bellowing out its pain. With it came a feeling of utter wrongness. In the silence which followed, Enna began to yell at him to get down, but Merlin was not quick enough to act, and before he knew, he had been bowled over by the violent vibrations which shook the dome's foundations right after. Arthur came running back, somehow managing to stay on his feet, only to get knocked off them by the next wave. The poultry locked into a kennel nearby made a mighty fuss and the smallest children began to cry but all of that noise was drowned out by the thundering rumble of rock grinding against rock, the earth shifting and complaining under their feet.

"When did this start?" Arthur asked after the quake had passed and the noise had died down enough to hear one's words.

"The first one was just a few days ago," one of the older children told him. She had taken quite a shine to Arthur and seemed to want to stay near him at all times, and Merlin could not say that he blamed her. But Arthur noticed nothing of the attention he was getting. He nodded, as though this was what he had been expecting to hear, his brow clouding with worry, but when he realised that he had gathered quite numerous an audience, he refused to tell Merlin what he was thinking. But whatever it was, Merlin had no doubts that it must be bad.

The village people decided to restore their mood after the great fright with food. The children collected the dead and wounded livestock and the old women cooked a stew out of them, and though Arthur was anxious to continue on their quest, he, too, acknowledged the necessity to eat and rest. Besides, they still had to decide how they would proceed.

Arthur regarded the stew with suspicion, which Merlin thought was funny after he had seen him devour roasted rat with gusto. But after the first bite, his brow cleared, and he began to eat with obvious appreciation.

"It tastes like chicken," he told the others from Camelot, who all looked to be waiting for Arthur to pronounce the food for edible.

"I should hope so," Enna injected, but her normally biting sarcasm softened to a tease as she beheld Arthur. "What else does chicken taste like where you come from?" It was typical, Merlin thought with a surge of fondness. They had not known him even for a day, but Arthur had already won over their hearts.

Arthur looked taken aback but, being Uther's son, he made a quick recovery. "It's just a saying we have," he explained with uncharacteristic sheepishness. "There are no chickens in Camelot."

As they ate, Merlin told Arthur what he heard about the missing people of Ealdor, and Arthur decided their best plan was to follow them. It was not a promising plan, but it was the only one they had.

Thus, it seemed they would follow Kanen and his band of fools into the Dorocha's lair. Unfortunately, no one could tell Arthur where that place was and how they could get there. Kanen's group, they said, had followed the screams of the captured, and the corridors had been filled with those screams then. Now, in the aftermath of the last quake, the corridors were only filled with deathly silence.

Still, when Merlin listened more closely to that silence, he found that it was not silent at all, although it seemed that he was the only one who could hear the constant, low hum that came from very far. It was a pulsing song, an ephemeral call, and it felt very familiar to him. And of course it would, for this was how a Dragonlord felt the living link manifest between himself and his Dragon.

"I know where they are," Merlin said, but his voice was so low that Gwaine inadvertently drowned it out when he started talking at the same moment, lamenting their lack of scent hounds. But Arthur, who stood nearest to him, heard him well enough.

"Are you certain?" Arthur asked, but it was not Merlin's competence he questioned. "What if Ealdor does not have a Dragon? What if it's something else - a trap?"

Merlin did not think it could be anything else, but there was a way to make sure of it. He took his long-extinguished glowtorch in hand, and just like the first time outside the tunnel, it flickered to life from his touch. The crystal was slower to respond, and its light was less bright now, but Merlin also was not trying to show off as he had been that first time.

"Without a Dragon I shouldn't be able to do this, right?" he said. All his life he had been taught that Ealdor's Dragon was dead; now it became more and more obvious that that was not the case.

"All right," Arthur decided. "Lead us, then."

Arthur reckoned they would be heading into a battle, and Merlin did not want his mother in the middle of that. Hunith was easy to talk into staying. She thought the children needed more adult supervision than the infirm and the elderly could provide, and the wounded needed better care than a few teenagers were capable of while also having to keep an eye on the younger children. But when he tried to employ the same reasoning with Gwen, she characteristically refused to be dissuaded from coming.

"I still want to find Morgana," she told Merlin doggedly. "Besides, you forget; I still have this." She meant the sword Elyan had given her. Although one of his more recent works, it was the lightest one. The blade was long and thin, with a slight curve in it, and it looked more like a toy or an ornament than a real weapon.

"You could give it to me," Merlin wheedled.

"You don't need a sword. You have your Dragonlord powers," she told him matter-of-factly, and Merlin wished he possessed her surety as well. The only such power he could be certain of was the ability to light a glowtorch and he could not see how that would be of real use if it came to a fight. Although the Dorocha were rumoured to shy away from light - something Merlin was less inclined to believe after he had seen what they had done to Ealdor - a single glowtorch would have no hope to defeat an entire army of them.

They took their leave from Hunith and the remaining people of Ealdor. She wished them luck, her eyes brimming with anxiety, and then she made Arthur promise that he would take care of her son. Arthur of course made that promise in all earnestness, but Gwaine leered at Merlin in a way that left no doubts about how he thought Arthur would fulfil that promise, and Merlin felt himself redden in acute embarrassment. He ought to have known that their activities during last night would not have escaped everyone's notice, even if most of their companions were too decent to bring it up.

During their stay, daylight in the dome had began to weaken, though it would remain strong enough that they would not need glowtorches until they reached the abandoned lower corridors where no mirrors were installed to carry down light. At Hunith's insistence, they took half the available glowtorches from Ealdor - two for each person: one to use on their way there and one as backup, despite Merlin's insistence that he could easily recharge the ones that went dark.

Merlin had never before thought of Ealdor as small, but after the castle of Camelot with the town and the fields extending as far as one could see outside it, not to mention the almost inconceivable dimensions of the Crystal Cave, Ealdor looked like a very small place indeed. It seemed to him that it took barely any time to leave behind the familiar corridors of his childhood and set foot into the dark, unknown parts of Ealdor which the tales told by his mother had populated with horrifying monsters that devoured lost children. There were no such monsters around now, of if they were, they did not show themselves. Merlin did not think it was the sight of their group of armed warriors or the glowtorches they were carrying which had kept them away, but rather that they were kept busy with the battle - or massacre - which was taking place elsewhere that very moment.

If the walk out of Ealdor felt short, the walk through the darkness seemed to take forever. It was probably just his imagination, but he could tell he was not the only one who felt impatient and on edge, for the entire journey was spent in tense silence. At first Gwaine tried to alleviate it but no one laughed at his jokes, and soon he stopped making the effort.

Merlin did not mind the silence for the call in his head went very faint sometimes, and he needed to concentrate on it strongly to hear it. He did not even see where he was walking; he only knew they were going ever deeper into the moon's depths from the floor's slight downwards angle. He found he had closed his eyes when he tripped over something and went down painfully on one knee. Arthur pulled him upright wordlessly and then kept a hand on Merlin's elbow to prevent similar accidents happening.

They knew they were getting close to their destination when the bodies started appearing. Merlin almost stepped on the first one; Arthur barely stopped him, pulling him back at the last second. The body had belonged to a narrow-faced, long-nosed man with hair so impossible that Merlin and Will had forever made fun of him, saying that he must be wearing a hairpiece made of a pony's coarse tail.

"It's Matthew," Merlin said. His mother had told him Matthew's wife had been among the first ones to be killed by the Dorocha, and according to the ones left behind in Ealdor, he had been eager to avenge her.

Arthur tugged on Merlin's elbow again and he stepped over Matthew's stiff-limbed, glassy-eyed corpse. He did not linger by any of the other dead bodies he stumbled into on his way; he only looked long enough to make sure none of them belonged to Will.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The last corridor did not lead into a chamber; it did not lead anywhere. It just ceased being a corridor. The smooth regularity of the walls slowly melted back into roughly hewn rock. The floor tilted downwards at an even greater angle, becoming both smoother and bumpier, as though the rock they were walking on had once been liquid poured down the slope and solidified in thick, twisted, rope-like trickles. The walking became harder, because one wrong step could result in a twisted ankle or a stubbed toe.

The cavern around them widened until the light of their glowtorches proved too weak to illuminate its edges. They walked in ever-growing darkness for a while until faint, reddish light began to spread gradually through the darkness. The distant noise of battle reached their ears and became ever louder as they continued onward. By the time they were close enough to see it as well as hear the battle, the light grew bright enough to make out their surroundings, and they saw that they had arrived in a large cavern. It was so large, its measurements could only be compared to the size of the crystal cave within the Great Dragon's core. But the crystal cave was bright and filled with water; this one's depths were filled with molten rock, and the light emitted by the churning magma was only bright enough to backlight a constantly shifting mass of shadowy figures in the distance.

As they continued onward, the ground on both sides of the slope fell away sharply, forming trenches, which were filled with cooling lava. The resulting land bridge was only wide enough for ten men to stand in a line. Down the other end of the sloping bridge was a wider landmass, connected to the wall of the cavern on one side, but the other side was completely surrounded by a lake of bubbling, liquid basalt, which went on as long as the eye could see.

"I've never seen anything like this," Percival muttered.

"The smithies in Camelot are similar to this place," Elyan explained. "But much smaller, of course."

They watched in awe as the molten lava churned and bubbled within its basin of solid rock. And as they did, they saw that the sides of the basin were glowing red-hot, and slowly melting away into the scorching pool, their mass increasing the lava's volume and slowly raising the liquid's level. The diminishing plateau in the middle of the slowly widening bowl was overflowing with a host of supple-limbed, vaguely human-shaped creatures whom the heat forced outwards and ever higher up the bridge. Halfway up, they met the disorganised band of Ealdorians in frantic, messy melee.

The Dorocha moved with slow but unstoppable deliberation. The Ealdorians had weapons. They were not weapons made for killing, like the swords with which Elyan had outfitted the Camelot group, but their scythes and flails still proved effective enough as they cut a bloody path through the Dorocha whose only defence against them were their sheer numbers and mindless fanaticism. Those seemed to work all too well on their own, and the men's lack of strategic thinking would be their undoing as they were too desperate to reach their captured loved ones. They pressed forward, paying no heed to the fact that the Dorocha were slowly surrounding them. Soon, in the dense crush of bodies, they would be unable to move enough to swing a blade and would be defeated with their weapons still in their hands.

But some of the Dorocha were not pushing up the slope, towards the battle. They stayed behind, near the lava, and Merlin could only vaguely make out a difference between them and a small group of differently dressed people enclosed in their midst. Merlin realised that those were the captured people of Ealdor.

The Dorocha surrounded their prisoners. They were not numerous, but they only needed to guard their charges from three sides. At their back was the slowly disappearing bank beyond which waited the scorching flow. Merlin watched as a woman, forced too close to the heat by the press of white bodies, flailed her arms in a frenzied attempt to escape. All she achieved with it was that she got pushed even closer to the lava and then pushed into it. She had been too far away for Merlin to even recognise her face, and the noise of the fighting was too loud for her screams to reach them, but Merlin saw her fall and get roasted alive as the lava touched her body, and he felt sick.

The people from Ealdor saw it happen as well.

"They are sacrificing our women and children to the Dragon!" someone yelled, and even through the noise of the battle, Merlin heard Kanen repeat the baseless accusation and use it to inflame his people's lust for war. Fanatic zeal born out of desperation could inspire even less experienced men to become invincible in a fight. But the kind of recklessness which went with it hand in hand also made men take unnecessary risks; it robbed them of a clear head and made them no better than cornered animals. Even Merlin knew better than to believe that attacking blindly and without strategy could prove an effective tactic against such a large enemy force.

As he had feared, after the first frenzied surge, the attack fell apart entirely, submerging into chaos as every man attempted to stand against the enemy on their own.

Arthur's eyes had been focussed only on the battle before him; he had not noticed the goings on in the back, but when he heard the cries, he narrowed his eyes and looked intently until he found the small group of captives, just in time to witness an old man fall into the churning lava in much the same way as the woman before him.

"What are we going to do?" Gwen asked. "We need to help them." Whether she meant the men of Ealdor battling the press of creatures lower down the saddle, or the penned-in captives, bore no importance; their path ran in the same direction.

Arthur nodded curtly. "Let's go, then," he said.

He ordered them to form a wedge putting himself at its point and Merlin behind his back, protected from all sides. Merlin could see that it made sense to protect the Dragonlord in their midst but he knew Arthur had other reasons for thinking up this setup and that made Merlin less happy to accept it. But he did not want to be the cause of more time wasted, so he stayed silent and did what he was told to do. For now.

They ran down the slope, loosely keeping their positions so they would be able to reform quickly, once they were stopped. By then the fighting Ealdorians were fully surrounded by the Dorocha, and as they got closer, for the first time, Merlin was able to take a good look at them and afterwards he wished he had not done.

They truly looked like the dead. They wore no clothes. Merlin shuddered in revulsion as he took in their dirty, white skin stretching wetly over their skeletal forms and their too-many jointed limbs, which resembled nothing as much as overcooked noodles. From close up, they were even less human-shaped. Even those who were, were slightly differently proportioned, or had extra limbs, long, flexible tentacles growing from different parts of their bodies which they used to grab and yank and restrain.

Arthur's tactic failed, as the Dorocha noticed their coming long before they reached them and had plenty of time to bar their way. More and more of them gathered to block the bridge from Arthur's advance, splitting off from the group that kept the men from Ealdor crushed into an impotent mass of bodies and began to drive them down to the plateau like cattle, probably to the back where the other captives were kept.

At Arthur's command, the knights' carefully ordered wedge expanded to render it more difficult to surround them. Arthur told everyone to use their weapons to push their opponents off the bridge as soon as they got the upper hand, but leave the dead there to block the way. Their line was not strong enough to span the entire width of the saddle, so Arthur's plan was to create a gate out of dead bodies which would be easier to defend. But Merlin knew however long they lasted, they would never win that way.

"Seems we got ourselves into a bit of a pickle," Gwaine said, giving voice to Merlin's fears, but he sounded more exhilarated than intimidated. Most likely he was just very good at hiding one with the other. "Ought to have got out while we still had the chance," he murmured. "Oh, well."

And taking that as his own cue, he lunged forward with his yet unblooded sword at the nearest Dorocha. The blade skewered the creature in the belly. Then Gwaine yanked the sword back, pulling with it a mess of wet entrails, which spilled onto the ground, splattering the toes of their boots. Bile rose in Merlin's throat, and he heard the muffled sounds of Gwaine swearing, his voice thick as though he were busy swallowing back what wanted to come up his gullet. But his victim did not seem to react in any way to having just been disembowelled, just dropped down to their feet like a puppet with its strings cut.

And then, as though a horn had been blown, all the Dorocha swung into action at the same time and butchery began.

Merlin was not allowed near the enemy at all. His glowtorch did not frighten the Dorocha, so he stopped waving it around aimlessly and hit a few skulls with it until Arthur's skull got in the way more than once and he demanded that Merlin stop and do something useful instead, like wield his powers. He still remembered a few of Nimueh's mnemonics so he tried those, but nothing happened - not that he had expected them to work. Then he attempted to feel for the faint link which had led him here, and though it was there, latched onto the back of his mind, he could not get through it to establish a true connection. But that was nothing new. He was used to feeling frustrated and powerless from his failed attempts at getting through to the Great Dragon.

Arthur fought beautifully, as though he had been born to wield that sword. His sword arm was painted red to the elbow with blood and the pile of dead bodies in front of him grew larger with every heartbeat. Sir Leon wielded his prong with methodical efficiency, though he used it more as a staff, to hit, than to stab as one does with a spear. The other men held their ground well enough, if fighting did not seem to come to them as naturally as it came to Arthur, and even Gwen was of use, though Elyan insisted she stay behind his back and only engage the ones that got past him. They worked remarkably well as a team. Merlin was the only one among them who seemed to be of no use.

It was his frustration which made him angry enough to start tugging on that faint connection with the Dragon. Perhaps he was trying to tear it out, make it disappear if it would not help him, just sit there at the back of his mind, forever mocking his impotence. But that was the wrong thing to do - or perhaps it was the exact right thing to do, for his action finally elicited a reaction. It was not the reaction he would have chosen to elicit but it was better than doing nothing.

A shudder ran along the bridge. Merlin felt it in his soles; the others probably felt it as well, for Arthur shouted for everyone to brace themselves and the order came not a moment too early. As soon as the first wave had passed, another one started up in its wake, but this one was not a mere shudder. The ground shook under their boots, forcing them to their knees - Arthur as well, though he had not stopped hacking with his sword at the last of the enemy that still had its legs under it. At Arthur's sword thrust, it flew, wounded, down the left side. The thin crust of solid rock, under which the magma was still liquid, broke under its weight and they heard its strange, wailing scream, and a sizzle of fat as its flesh was charred off its bones. Percival almost followed it down, but Elyan and Lancelot grabbed his cloak and belt, and pulled him back with great effort.

The Dorocha looked as though they were not even aware of what was going on. The inhuman faces showed neither fear nor surprise when a violent quake flung one of them off its feet and right into the churning abyss. Arthur, though, was not yet satisfied and as soon as the first bout of shaking was over, he urged everyone to their feet.

"Grab the one standing next to you and let's form a chain," he told them. "We are going to run down and join the other group. When one of these things gets in your way," he said, meaning the Dorocha, "knock it over the side. Don't leave any of them behind our backs."

The people of Ealdor were closer to the lower end of the bridge by now. Anyone falling off it from this height would probably break a couple of bones but live, if not for the lava at its bottom. They huddled together, crouching, and this, unintentionally, proved a more effective tactic against the Dorocha than anything else they had tried before. Like this, the Dorocha could not herd them further downwards, not even by crowding them in more, and when they tried, it only resulted in more of the creatures falling over the edge.

Arthur did reach them before the last great surge of tremors started. By that time, a few of them had noticed that reinforcements had come, but Merlin saw the confusion in their eyes when they failed to recognise them. Merlin did not blame them for it; in Ealdor, everyone was known to everyone else from birth to death.

Merlin saw Will the same time he was seen by Will, even though Merlin was still mostly hidden behind Arthur's back. He called out Merlin's name, making everyone else aware of his presence, and this was enough to turn the scowls into smiles and surprised greetings. And then the first sentence out of Arthur's mouth was enough to turn them back to scowls.

"Do you know where Balinor is?" Arthur demanded.

He had an eye for recognising leadership; he found Kanen among the men right away and directed the inquiry at him. Privately, Merlin thought he would have had better luck choosing anyone else. Kanen was a man whose stubbornness could rival that of a rock wall, and he instinctively disliked people who questioned his authority, as Arthur's direct questioning had done, as he rarely had the chance to wield any.

"We don't care about Balinor," Kanen spat in disgust while he took Arthur's measure. "He had chosen to ally himself with the enemy, together with the Witch."

"Witch?" Arthur asked, but Merlin did not hear the answer because Will then grabbed his arm and demanded his attention.

"What in the blazes are you doing here, Merlin?" Will asked. "And who is that?"

"It's Arthur," Merlin said then shook his head. "I'll tell you later." There was no time for long introductions. The tremors were winding down and the Dorocha slowly finding their feet one by one, and Arthur was butting heads with Kanen.

"We don't need to fight them," Kanen told Arthur; he had always possessed a flexible voice and was now playing it to its full effect to express his own superiority. "They don't attack us, and they are leading us right where we want to go: to our people. Once we're reunited with them, we'll attack to get back here and flee."

"And where do you propose to flee?" Arthur asked, his tone hard with disgust over Kanen's near-sightedness. "No place is safe in Ealdor, and not just because of the quakes. Those are just a symptom of Ealdor being slowly pulled apart. Indeed, soon there might not be an Ealdor."

"And what do you know about it?" Kanen spat. They had both stood and by then they had the attention of every man crouched down around Kanen. The Dorocha were once again crowding around them, but they could do nothing else for no one else had risen, they were so focussed on the clash of wills playing out before their eyes: Kanen, a loud-mouthed troublemaker rather than a true leader, but still one of their own, facing up against the heroic, macabre figure of Arthur, with his shining golden brow, decked out in his knight's armour and bathed in the blood of his slain enemies. A stranger whom no one had ever seen before but whose bearing was nonetheless commanding, who seemed capable, and, above everything else, whose arguments rang true.

"What I know," Arthur said, and this time his words were directed at everyone, "is that Ealdor is falling toward a planet as we speak and the pull of that planet's gravity is so great that it's already melting rock." He nodded at the lake of red-hot lava. "See that? That's all that'll remain of your home if you don't act to stop it, and the only way to stop it is to find the Dragonlord who can command the Dragon."

"And why should I believe you?" Kanen asked, but his voice was so faint that it was barely heard underneath the by now constant, low groaning that came from the rock around them. He knew he had already lost, but perhaps it only dawned on him now that if he continued on his course, he may save the people from the Dorocha but they would all die nonetheless.

When he next spoke, Arthur looked into everyone's eyes, his voice ringing clear and commanding. "So I ask again, do any of you know where the Dragonlord is?"

"There." A man stood and pointed a finger at the side of the cavern that was farthest away from the lava pool. In the protection of a jutting rock, shaded from the reddish glow of the bubbling minerals and shrouded in darkness, was a naturally formed recess. It was only small compared to the measurements of the cavern, but it was small and dark enough to fade into the surrounding rock.

No wonder Merlin had not seen anything worth his attention there, though now, when he looked closer, he saw the ghostly gathering of white bodies drawn together tight into a protective circle around a rounded bulk. The inside of the circle was free of them but far from empty: two small figures stood there, nearly dwarfed by the huge object, which Merlin at first thought to be just another rock, but as he watched, a stray ray of light caught its surface and reflected back from it multiplied. It was a crystal.

One of the little figures had started walking towards the border of the circle. She was trapped by an impenetrable barrier of Dorocha, Merlin thought; they would not let her free. But the mass of bodies parted in front of her, granting her free passage. She was coming in their direction, and at her approach, the Dorocha shuffled aside, opening a free aisle enclosed within two hedges of living flesh, which slowly extended itself to the bottom of the slope and then further up, until it reached the group of humans trapped there.

As she stepped out of the shadows, Merlin was finally able to see her better: she was garbed in a simple dress of tan leather over pale linen, and wore her dark hair down, two thin plaits keeping her long tresses from falling into her face.

"What is she doing here?" Arthur sounded bewildered, and Merlin would never have recognised in this woman the haughty, elegant Lady Morgana with her beautiful, lavish dresses and elaborate styles, had he not been clued in by Arthur's reaction.

Merlin had no answer to Arthur's question but he did not doubt that Kanen must have meant her when he had talked about a Witch. They watched her walk with unhurried steps through the corridor lined with the Dorocha, up the slope and straight to Arthur. As she was getting closer, Merlin lost sight of her in the throng of heads, and then he saw that the men of Ealdor had straightened from their crouch, wanting to see what was happening, but the Dorocha were just standing around unmoving; they did not attempt to herd them down to the others.

And then the crowd before them parted and Morgana's white-clad figure emerged from the gap like an apparition. Her pale skin gleamed in the orange light and her features radiated an otherworldly calm.

"Morgana," Arthur called to her; his voice radiated urgency. He probably wanted to ask her what was happening, but she turned to Merlin and ignored Arthur entirely.

"Merlin," she greeted him. "Balinor told me much about you. Come, there is not much time left." Morgana extended a hand, as though she expected Merlin to clasp it. "Come," she said again when Merlin hesitated and wiggled her fingers in a manner of playfulness which seemed utterly alien from her very nature.

"Something's happened to her," Arthur murmured. "She's not herself." His words would not have been audible at all, had he not been standing so close behind Merlin - and when had Merlin stepped in front of him? But then Morgana - and there was nothing of the lady in her now - was holding onto his hand and tugging, the protective circle of the Dorocha parting before her, and Merlin felt himself take a step forward as though in a dream.

Morgana passed between the first two Dorocha, standing there like two living pillars, and pulled Merlin after her. Merlin's eyes sought Arthur, who just stood there, too stunned to move, but when their gazes met, he grabbed onto Merlin's other hand. He did not pull him back. Instead, he began to push after Merlin, so close as though he could make the Dorocha believe they were the same person. The Dorocha did not care; they did nothing to stop him, and Merlin pushed his fingers between Arthur's and linked them together tight.

They had only taken a couple of steps forward when the ground began to shake and grind on itself again. It went on for a long time, rendering their steps unsteady, but the narrowness of the corridor formed of the Dorocha's bodies kept them from falling. As they got closer to the shadowed corner, Merlin noticed that the lump of crystal in its middle was a slightly asymmetrical ovoid, rather than a ball, with its rounder half resting on the ground and the peak pointing upwards. It resembled nothing as much as a freshly laid chicken egg - if there had ever been a chicken which could produce an egg of this size.

Merlin should not have been surprised when he saw Balinor standing in the egg's shadow, yet he was. Not by the Dragonlord's presence, but his appearance. Merlin had expected him to look bedraggled, bearing the marks of his mistreatment by the Dorocha, yet he looked completely unscathed, and not only that but he looked carefree, excited, as though the suffering of the captured people of Ealdor had not touched him at all. He greeted Merlin with a smile on his face, and looked honestly happy to see him. He grabbed him, impatient, out of Morgana's hold, and dragged him forward.

Morgana did not look as though she minded; in fact she seemed to have forgotten about Merlin entirely. She stepped closer to the crystal and flattened her palm against its smooth surface, then her eyes closed and her smile suffused with rapture.

"What's happening to her?" Arthur cried, and his grip became like the iron around Merlin's fingers.

"She's no Dragonlord, but the Dragon likes her presence. It responds to her." Balinor spoke approvingly. He looked to be speaking to himself, though, rather than answering Arthur's question.

Arthur regarded the crystal with little surprise, accepting the revelation of its nature as something not entirely unexpected. He stood by Morgana's side, fitting his hand next to her smaller, paler one. After a heartbeat, he looked at Merlin and shrugged, pulling back.

Merlin was going to try the same but Balinor suddenly became invigorated. He gripped Merlin hard on the shoulder.

"No time to play around," he said. "I am very glad that you've finally arrived, though you were not in a great hurry. I sent out the summons weeks ago!"

"Summons?" Merlin asked. "You mean my mother? You sent her to Camelot?"

Balinor looked at him as though Merlin had had spoken in a language entirely unknown to him.

"Of course not. I asked Kilgarrah to fetch you."

"Who's Kilgarrah?" Merlin asked. The Dragonlord, even now, was his usual confusing self.

Balinor then swore - Merlin had not thought he was even familiar with the concept.

"The stubborn old thing!" Balinor pushed his fingers into his hair; it was greasy and matted, and looked as though he had not washed it since Merlin had last seen him, which was probably the case. "Stubborn, old, mad thing," he repeated, more thoughtful than unhappy now, his anger already dissipated. "Of course, I can't blame it for going mad. It's been on its own for too long. Dragons aren't meant to live in a solitary existence."

His musings were interrupted by another bout of quaking. In its wake, the already softened ceiling above the ever widening lava pool split open, fresh lava pouring down through the crack and filling the natural basin to its capacity. Screams sounded, audible even over the ear-shattering rumble, as molten rock spilled over the rim and splattered over the people and Dorocha who had not been quick enough or not been able to run away from it, as the way was still blocked by the hoard of slimy, white-skinned creatures. Many of them did not stand up again. Thankfully, the flow halted as the lava solidified a little further away from the heat's core, and formed a dam which kept the rest of the scorching liquid within its confines.

"Why aren’t they letting them go?" Arthur exclaimed, his tone rife with frustration. "Why did they take those people?"

"They are trying to protect them," Balinor answered as though the answer were obvious.

"Protect them?" Arthur asked. "But they are killing them."

"One or two dying makes no difference for them," Balinor explained with an almost cheerful callousness and an utter lack of empathy. "They don't see humans as people; they see them as cattle. Why do you think they took women, children and older men? To preserve a breeding stock. But they left the most troublesome ones behind. Those, of course, won't survive."

"My mother-!" Merlin cried. They had left Hunith behind; Merlin had believed her to be safer, and now it turned out that she was facing certain death. Arthur took his hand again and squeezed.

The walls shook again and the force this time was enough to start tipping over the crystal. Only Morgana's slim body pressed against its underside stopped it from rolling out of the natural indentation in which it had been resting.

"Balinor!" Arthur yelled, for Merlin was still choked with grief over the thought of his mother dying. "What can we do to stop this? There must be a way!"

"Stop it?" Balinor laughed at him with utter delight. He, too, had to yell to be heard over the growing mayhem. "We're not going to stop it! We're doing just the opposite: helping it get ready!"

"Ready for what?" Arthur yelled back.

"Ready to be born, of course!"

Those words were followed by sudden, portentous silence, as the ground's shaking and groaning ceased right then.

"You mean to say that this is not the Dragon of Ealdor but a Dragon egg?" Arthur's voice intruded into the quiet. It was too loud, obnoxious and utterly irreverent, and just the thing Merlin needed to hear to counter the paralysing anguish. It turned into a numb sort of acceptance, and Merlin took comfort from Arthur standing by his side and not trying to placate him with empty words.

"Don't be ridiculous," Balinor retorted gleefully. "Dragons aren't hatched from eggs like chickens. Their existence is predestined. You could say they are born out of destiny." Merlin thought that sounded ridiculous; Arthur must have agreed for he murmured something under his nose from which Merlin only heard the words 'destiny' and 'chicken'. It made him laugh, and then he felt horrible that even with the acid knowledge of his mother's fate eating into his guts, he could still laugh.

"Are you ready, Merlin?" Balinor asked. Merlin swallowed and nodded. He stepped forward, letting go of Arthur's hand.

"I don't know what to do," he said. "Can't you do it?"

"I tried." Balinor frowned. "But Dragons tend to imprint on one Dragonlord, and I made the mistake, if you can call it that, to introduce the two of you early on. Now this little one doesn't want to have anything to do with me."

"You mean, same as the Great Dragon didn't want to have anything to do with me?" Merlin asked. Anger was easier to bear than the crippling desolation, so Merlin welcomed it and let it fill the empty black spaces left behind in his soul by the latter; held onto it.

"Kilgarrah was going to warm up towards you eventually." Balinor waved a hand, dismissing the criticism implied within Merlin's question, and it could not be more obvious that he believed none of what he had said.

Merlin gave him a hard look, and tried to decide whether he should believe him anything at all, but in this situation, his choices were rather limited.

"All right." He shook his head. "Tell me what I have to do."

"You need to make contact, call it on its name, and wake it to life."

"And how do I do that?"

"He needs to touch it with his feelers," Morgana informed Arthur before Balinor could speak. There was a glint in her eyes and her tone was teasing, even though they were probably only heartbeats from a horrible death in an explosion of molten rock.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Go on and touch it!" Arthur urged, taking Merlin's hand and pressing it against the egg.

"Oh." Merlin waggled his fingers; the crystal felt inexplicably cold to the touch. "These are not my feelers," he said. "The feeler is my-" Merlin coughed and left the sentence unfinished. He felt warmth on his cheeks which had nothing to do with the heat of their surroundings. A moment later Arthur, probably hit with sudden remembrance, started blushing as well.

"Ah," he nodded.

"I see you've already made the acquaintance of Merlin's feeler, Arthur." Morgana cackled merrily behind their backs. Arthur rolled his eyes.

"Shall I turn around?" Morgana asked Merlin. When she got no answer, she continued to watch Merlin even more intently until Arthur grabbed her arm and tugged her back from the egg none-too gently, so that Merlin could have some privacy.

And then Merlin did what his mother had, under threat of punishment, warned him never, ever to do again.

part 8