“Nope,” Echo replied.
She let the magic pour from her hands. There was a little pain, concentrated at the base of her skull, but there was also a strange sensation of relief. Like she had been carrying around a heavy weight that she was finally able to put down. The feeling didn’t last long. The barrier tried to fight back, pushing against Echo’s flames, driven by the only purpose it had: to keep Caius inside the circle and everyone else outside.
Echo threw everything she had into the flame, and when the well of magic ran dry, she dug deeper and found more. Her vision began to black out at the edges. She was vaguely aware of someone shouting her name, telling her to stop, but she could feel it—she was close. So, so close.
Pain blossomed into knife-sharp agony in her skull. But she couldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop. She poured every ounce of power in her body into the barrier. Her legs gave out and she crashed to her knees, only distantly feeling the impact. It was nothing compared with the burning in her head and hands.
Echo summoned a last, desperate lurch of power before collapsing completely. Her forehead rested against the stone floor, blessedly cool against her feverish skin. If it weren’t for the white-hot pain lancing through her, she would have thought she was dead. She couldn’t even open her eyes.
“It worked.” Dorian’s voice floated to Echo through the haze of pain and fatigue that gripped her. Lying there, recovering, she listened as Dorian and Jasper worked to release Caius from his manacles. Echo allowed herself the barest of smiles when she finally heard the chains clatter to the floor.
Caius was free. And together, they were going home.
“I’ve got him,” Dorian said. “Jasper, will you—”
A roar, sudden and viciously loud, consumed the remainder of Dorian’s sentence. It reverberated through the floor, vibrating loose rocks against Echo’s forehead. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, ignoring the aches in her muscles. They all fell silent and still, waiting.
“What the hell was that?” Jasper whispered.
Echo didn’t supply him with an answer. She knew. They all knew, even if no one wanted to believe it.
“That’s not possible,” Dorian said under his breath.
But as the sound of leathery wings drifted up from below, Echo knew his disbelief was futile. The carvings on the walls of the lava room and around the doorframe they had passed through into this room had not been mere decorations; they were warnings to whoever was foolish enough to proceed beyond them.
Echo rose, her legs as shaky as a newborn foal’s, and thought, Here there be dragons.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The ground rumbled beneath Echo’s feet. The pit surrounding the island, previously dark with unrelieved shadows, began to emit an orange glow like the embers of a fire that stubbornly refuses to die. Another roar sounded from deep beneath the surface, so ferocious that the ground shook with it.
Dorian gently lowered the still-unconscious Caius to the ground. “It appears we have awoken the beast,” he said.
“That room with the lava wasn’t what the rune meant by fire,” Echo said. Of course it hadn’t been; that would have been far too easy. “This is pyromaniac cat-bird.”
“It’s Super Mario,” Jasper whispered as he leaned over the edge, craning his neck for a better look. “I told you. That’s Bowser, and Caius is Princess Peach.”
“Who’s Mario?” Echo asked, just as quietly.
“We’re all Mario.”
Echo reached for the reserves of magic within her, but she felt empty, like a car out of gas. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “So, what you’re saying is, I have to slay a dragon to save the princess?”
“Prince,” Dorian interjected.
“Whatever.” A tongue of flame flickered to life in Echo’s palm. Her exhaustion seemed to double with the conjuring, but she pushed it aside. She could rest when she was dead.
Dorian moved to stand beside Echo. His hand came up and pulled her behind him. A small, rebellious part of Echo wanted to protest, but a much larger and much saner part had little desire to be the first thing encountered by whatever was living deep within the bowels of the temple.
Even the beast below—which Echo was not entirely prepared to accept as a living, breathing dragon—held back its roar, as if giving its audience time to adjust to the impossibility of its existence.
The ground began to tremble again, this time with even more intensity. Echo imagined the great beast rising from its slumber, uncoiling a long, scaly body with slow, languorous movements. Gusts of wind rose from the pit, and the dragon—a real, live dragon—emerged from the shadowy depths. Echo’s brain fought to process what she was seeing. Wings spread wide as the creature stretched, claws brushing the walls of its cave, its scales the pale color of moonlight on a clear night, its tail lashing this way and that. She had always wanted to see a dragon—as any child whose head was full of stories would—but these were not ideal circumstances.
Flashes of memory zipped through her mind. Caius tracing constellations of stars in the night sky, telling her the stories behind them, which gods and other figures from his culture’s folklore they were meant to represent. Dorian regaling a bedridden Jasper with old Drakharin fairy tales, full of dragons guarding troves of priceless treasures and the intrepid young warriors who tamed such wild beasts. All those stories were as good as legend, taking place so far back in history that if there was any truth to them, it had been so thoroughly gilded over by time. The one thing all the tales had in common was that dragons had walked the earth once, but none had been seen for thousands and thousands of years. They were, Caius had explained, considered part of Drakharin history. None, he had insisted, were said to have survived the rise of human dominance.
“Caius told me your people believed dragons were extinct,” Echo said, feeling oddly betrayed.
“We thought they were,” Dorian said. His voice was full of marvel, like that of a little boy who has just learned that Santa is real.
“Does that look extinct to you?” Echo gestured, rather unnecessarily, to the dragon holding itself aloft with indolent flaps of its wings, sniffing the air with a long snout, nostrils flaring. A milky white film—cataracts, perhaps—covered its eyes, though it didn’t appear to hinder the beast much. It could probably smell them.
Dorian shook his head in awestruck wonder. “It’s incredible.”
“Not the word I would have chosen for a thing that’s about to kill us and then probably pick its teeth with our bones, but okay, sure, let’s run with that.” The dragon rolled its neck, a gesture that would have been comical considering just how long its neck was, but it was difficult to find anything attached to the creature the slightest bit humorous.