“Oh, Shaella, I loved you,” he rasped, as the last drop of his life blood ran down his chest. I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die! Were the only thoughts he could manage to think, as death’s maw finally closed over him.
Pael had almost lost his grip on the complex strands of magic he was weaving when Shaella had arrived. The dragon had startled him too. In the back of his mind, he remembered that he had started this even before the dragon had been collared. If Shaella had somehow failed him, the dragon could’ve returned and ruined everything. He had placed total faith in Shaella’s abilities, and she had come through.
Listening to her howl, cry, and carry on over something as trivial as love, made him wonder if he were a fool for having faith in her. He was giving her what every father alive wanted to give his little girl, what every little girl wanted from her father: a kingdom of her own to rule. Power, and the means to hold it all, was hers. Didn’t every little girl dream of being a princess or a queen? Now here she was, on her hands and knees, cursing his name, threatening him, and babbling on and on, right in the middle of the most important moment of his life. She was so much like her mother, he swore. So impossibly hard to please, so ungrateful for the sacrifices he made. Years of manipulating, and planning; schemes upon schemes he had hatched and played out for her. He had misdirected the eyes of Kings and Queens, and tricked the nobility of entire nations, to get Shaella into this position. Here he was, on the cusp of dark glory, as much for her as for himself, and she was crying over a dead boy. Pael cursed himself a fool for even trying to please a woman. He– He–
He suddenly felt that something was very wrong. The binding was holding perfectly, but Shokin was slipping away from him. How could this be? The demon wasn’t trying to break free either. It couldn’t. It was being drawn back into the Seal. Something had gone terribly wrong, but what? Pael searched the depths of his knowledge frantically for a solution.
For the briefest instant, there had been nothing but Gerard. No sight, no sound, no emotion. Just death. But the surge of magic from Gerard’s ring, as it made to carry out his last command, caught hold of him just in time.
Like a mother’s fingers, squeezing her child’s skin between her thumbs to force out a splinter or thorn, his pectoral muscles clenched against the dagger blade. It didn’t leave his body, but its tip slipped back out of his heart. The powerful magic of the ring couldn’t fill his empty body back up with blood, but it could heal the mortal wound, and it did.
The ring’s power held him there, on the brink of death, long enough for his heart to start beating again. Gerard’s soul was clinging to his body with all the strength of his love for Shaella. The surge of magical energy gave him the strength to hook his thumb in the dagger’s hilt, and pull it out of his body. The momentum of his falling arm caused him to roll onto his stomach. He couldn’t think. Every move he made was on instinct, or guided by some other force. The magic couldn’t hold him in life much longer, and his body needed liquid to make more blood. These realities came to him as afterthoughts, fragmented truths, telling him how dire his situation was.
Riding the tiny bit of strength the ring’s magical rush had afforded him, he pulled himself across the empty space he was suspended over to the landing of the stairway that spiraled down into the depths. He found that his hands slipped down through the invisible plain that had supported him.
The first step felt real enough when he touched it. The cold, dark thing that he had felt earlier, was pulling at his will again. It wanted desperately to keep him from going down. Gerard’s will wasn’t his own though, it was a thing of instinct, so the demon’s desperation was wasted. The magic of the ring was guiding Gerard. First one step, then another, he used his hands to pull himself down. Then, his upper body went over, and he went sliding. His blood-soaked front acted like a lubricant, and it was several steps later before he came to a rough, jumbled halt against the curving wall of the pit.
The sound of the wizard’s musical chanting had disappeared, and the cold black thing seemed to have found a way to crawl completely inside of him. It was screaming horribly in protest, and the sound echoed through Gerard’s head. With the last bit of magical strength left in him, he managed to pull one arm out of the shoulder strap of his pack. He wiggled himself a step or two down from it, so that it was at the level of his head. He then jabbed a finger-size hole in the top of the dragon’s egg, and put his mouth to it as if it were his mother’s breast.