“M’lady!” Rose Red stepped forward again. The tunnel returned, crushing her. If her body were not so sturdy, the rocks would have pulverized her bones to dust. She screamed in terror.
Then it was gone, and she stood at the far end of the gallery. Daylily was nowhere in sight.
Rose Red gasped and drew a long breath, exulting in the ability to breathe. But the next moment she coughed and sputtered. A terrible smell lingered in the air. Like the smell of a match just gone out, but multiplied a thousand times. It wasn’t the smell of dragon smoke. More like the lingering smoke from a dead dragon’s carcass. Rose Red gagged.
The gallery stretched behind her, the impersonal stares of the old kings and queens still following her progress. But before her, rather than the wall and following passage she knew she was supposed to find here, a great cliff stretched for miles upward into the darkness. Tufts of struggling vegetation grew from ledges, evil-looking plants, parasites sucking life from the very rocks to which they clung. If those were flowers growing from those stalks, they were not flowers that would bloom with new life. The jagged petals looked more like razors, the centers like evil faces. Little witches, Rose Red thought.
In the cliff, there was a door like the one that was supposed to be in the wall at the far end of the gallery. Except where the real door had been delicately carved with starflowers, this one was carved with replicas of the witch flowers on the rocks. Rose Red put her hand to the knob.
“Don’t touch that.”
The voice sounded like ashes with just the faintest hint of life still glowing in their depths. Rose Red turned. Someone materialized from the darkness on her right. A woman, or at least, what had once been a woman. She was tall and thin and walked as though she had been beautiful at one time and had yet to acknowledge that she was beautiful no longer. Her skin was burned black and gray all over, and the ends of her hair smoldered like dying matchsticks.
Rose Red knew what she was the moment she saw her. She could see in an instant that this woman was a dragon.
The woman approached. The evil smell came from her blackened skin. She stepped between Rose Red and the door, her head bowed so that Rose Red could not see her face. “Don’t touch that,” she repeated. “You don’t know where it might lead.”
“I have a fairly good idea,” Rose Red said, though she retreated a few steps into the gallery. “Ain’t many places Death’s Path can lead, now, is there?”
“Only one end ultimately,” said the woman. Her rasping voice sounded as though it pained her throat. “But you are yet living. Go back while you may.”
“Another said as much, but he let me by eventually.” Rose Red tried to put more courage in her voice than she felt.
The woman took a menacing step forward. Her eyes, like two lumps of coal, smoldered with remnant heat, hideous to behold. Her nose wrinkled as she sniffed, and her lips curled back in a sizzling snarl. Rose Red clutched her lantern tight.
“I smell him on you,” the woman said.
Rose Red made no reply. The woman took another step toward her, her face wagging slowly back and forth. She was blind, Rose Red realized. But she sniffed again, and her snarl grew.
“I smell him,” she growled. “The father of my sons.”
“Oh,” Rose Red whispered. “I know who you are now.”
“Do you?” said the woman, drawing herself up to her full height. She stood at least seven feet tall. Her burned hair crumbled and fell from her scalp with every movement she made, yet somehow was always replaced with more burned hair. “Who am I, then?”
Rose Red did not like to say the name out loud.
“I am the firstborn,” said the woman. “Most powerful, most glorious, most beautiful of all my Father’s children. A dragon such as the worlds have never seen before or since. I was a glory!”
She was so hideous and so repulsive, her words fell more awfully from her lips. Rose Red adjusted her grip on the lantern and raised it so that its silver light fell on that ravaged face. But the woman could not see the glow of Asha. All hope had long since fled her blind eyes, leaving her in this dark place on Death’s Path.
“I rivaled the Father himself in might and flame,” said she. “I could not be bound. I could not be stopped by any who moved in the Near World or the Far. Again and again, their finest warriors sought to kill me. Yet though I was slain twice over, Death himself could not bind me. I returned stronger than before. At last I sought even to vanquish the Spheres in their dance in the sky. I could have swallowed Hymlumé herself!” She snarled again, looking far more like a dragon than a woman.
When she spoke once more, her voice was a pathetic whisper. “Thus my Father took my wings from me. In jealousy, he bound me to earth. A dragon trapped forever in the body of a woman.”
Her blind eyes fixed on Rose Red. The girl felt as if her soul were exposed.