39x03
Mena struggled to free herself as the dragon lurched right for Savina.
Mena was frightened on the girl's behalf--but Savina looked more determined than scared. She held her holy symbol out in front of her like a weapon, and narrowed her eyes. “Down,” she commanded. Blue light radiated from the holy symbol toward the dragon.
The dragon stopped beating its wing and tumbled to earth with a shuddering thud. It roared—still loud, but no longer painfully so—and whipped its head down as if to attack Savina. It caught its neck in its torn and smoldering wing, and yowled in pain from the depths of its throat. Twiggy was still caught in the ice, but it didn’t stop her from casting, and the beast became even more tangled in itself. It fell to its side, exposing its belly.
It's vulnerable now, Mena thought
Finally. Nyoko sunk two arrows in its underside and Arden did the same with a dagger. Twiggy let out a burst of fire, searing the wounds. But somehow the dragon righted itself and charged at Kormick, who was just freeing his last foot from the ice.
“Look out!” Mena yelled, but it was too late; the dragon closed its teeth around Kormick’s shoulder, pulled him from the ice, and lifted him from the ground. With his free hand, Kormick slammed a warhammer at the creature’s jaw. And slammed again.
“Don’t stop!” Mena cried out.
“Yes ma’am!” Kormick replied, and pounded again. The dragon dipped its head and let go, dropping Kormick a few feet to the ground. Kormick clambered to his feet and away from its head, wiping icy dirt from his cloak.
Blood streamed from the dragon’s eye and jaw. It lifted itself from the ground again, weak and wobbly but, Mena had no doubt, still dangerous. Twiggy, still caught in the ice, cast
magic missile, but that did little harm, and soon the dragon was too high up for any of them to reach it.
“I’ve got this,” Tavi announced, and he teleported to the top of the cliff and threw his sword. It lodged in the back of the dragon’s neck and exploded into flame.
As the sword re-formed in Tavi’s hand, the dragon plummeted to the ground, burnt, bloody, and at long last, dead.
***
Inside the cave, Mena and Twiggy checked the walls for more writing. There was none. The cave held only a few animal carcasses and staggering amount of what Mena assumed was dragon dung. Savina poked a stick at a pile. “I thought dragons were supposed to have hordes of treasure.”
“They’re supposed to be wise, too,” Kormick called in from outside, “but we just beat one to death with hammers and fire.”
They returned outside, where Tavi had built a fire and was roasting hunks of dragon meat. “How often do you get to eat dragon meat?” he asked Aeton.
“Haven’t yet,” Aeton replied.
“Maybe there’s a reason it’s not a delicacy,” Rose said, waving away the smoke. “It smells terrible.”
“Or maybe,” Tavi smiled, “it’s just that they’re rare and hard to kill. And we get to say we’ve killed one.”
“How Ehktian of you,” said Rose.
“If we weren’t so far off the map, I’d say we should put a big red Ehktian X on this spot,” Tavi said.
“A big red Ekhtian X,” Twiggy mused. “Maybe that’s what the symbol on the map was.” She pulled out the map she’d copied from the Sheh cave wall. “There are a bunch of these symbols around the cave. They’re all a bunch of Xs, really. An X with slanty lines around it, and a little X with a line above it.
Maybe that symbol means ‘danger.’”
“Hm,” Mena said. “It’s a more complicated symbol than the others. But the concept of danger is more complicated than, say, the concept of 'stream' or 'waterfall.'”
“The stream and waterfall both had wavy line symbols,” Savina commented, “and the wavy line reminds me a tiny bit of an Alirrian holy symbol. So maybe the wavy line means water.”
“The Sheh cave also had wavy lines,” Nyoko observed. “And there was no water there.”
“That cave was a shelter,” said Savina. “A place of safety. And the pond had wavy lines, too, but little ones. Shelter and water are both Alirrian. Maybe the wavy lines all denote something Alirrian.”
“Why not a big set of wavy lines for the pond, then?” Nyoko asked.
“Maybe the symbol wasn’t just about the pond,” Arden said. “The pond had fish, too.”
“They were delicious,” Kormick observed.
“They were,” Twiggy continued. “And if you want to make a useful map, you don’t need to tell people where to find a pond. You need to tell them where to find food.
So this X with a wavy line must mean ‘animal.’ The map shows the fish—water animals—and over here, where we found the hoofprints, deer. Earth animals.”
“So the diamond is Kettenite,” Nyoko said. “Fitting.”
“
And the swirl must be Sedellan,” said Mena, stabbing at the roasting dragon meat. “All those Ehktian Xs surrounding a swirl. Danger: there be dragons.”
“So there must be a difference between the big symbols and the small ones,” Twiggy said, taking off her glasses to squint at
her notes.
“Parts of speech,” Kormick said. “The big ones are nouns.
The little ones are adjectives. You basically already said it yourself.” Everyone turned to stare at him. He shrugged. “What, you’re surprised I know basic grammar?”
“Of course not,” Mena said. It made her wonder all the more about what Kormick was always writing in his little notebook.
Maybe he’s secretly a poet, she thought, and chuckled inwardly.
Tavi handed around hunks of charred meat. Rose took a bite, chewed, and gagged. In fact that was more or less everyone’s reaction. Even Aeton lost enthusiasm as he chewed. Arden was the only one who swallowed hers, and Mena suspected that was only to keep Tavi company.
“So what have we learned?” Rose asked. “Dragon tastes terrible after all.”
“Or maybe we just didn’t have the right spices,” Tavi mused.
“Or maybe that we shouldn’t let Tavi prepare the food,” Twiggy smiled. “At least we’ve made some good progress on the language.”
Kormick shook his head. “But what good is a language, without any verbs?”