Death After Death

Simon waited there for almost an hour for the dragon to return, but almost the entire time it was gone, he could hear the carnage. He saw the dragon swoop high enough that he could spot it a couple of times, but mostly everything happened behind the bulk of the mountain. He could hear the things that he couldn’t see. He heard the screams and the battle cries, along with the whoosh of flames echoing off the valley walls. Eventually, he could even smell the scents of wood smoke and burning flesh from where he stood waiting.

What he didn’t see, though, was the valley going up in flames. Simon couldn’t quite see the village from here because of the angle, but he could see points past it, and if it had gone up in a curtain of fire like it had a few lives back, then all he would see was a wall of smoke.

Simon accepted that as evidence that the dragon had not simply slaughtered every human it could find, which raised further questions. Did it spare them because I saved its life, or did it spare them because it was the right thing to do? He wondered.

Living within a day’s ride to a dragon’s lair didn’t seem to be the smartest thing in the world. Still, it was even less clear what relationship they might have had to each other than it was why the Unspoken were in the dragon-slaying business.

On some level, that made sense to Simon, of course. If they were killing witches and warlocks, why not kill mythological creatures while they were at it. Still, that didn’t quite feel right to him, and by the time Icefang had returned, he decided that it probably had at least as much to do with money as anything else.

After all, according to some of the books he’d read, they certainly weren’t above condemning rich men as mages in order to seize their wealth now and then, and Simon wasn’t aware of any man in the world who was as rich as a dragon. Even Queen Elthena probably had less than a quarter of what he’d seen in the cave lying around in her royal treasury.

Still, when the giant bronze dragon returned, trailing smoke and streaked with blood, all of those thoughts vanished. Simon prepared to cast a greater protection from fire spell, just in case. It was impossible not to. His primitive fight-or-flight mechanism all but overwhelmed him, and it took lifetimes of self-control to stand there while the beast bore down on him like an avalanche.

Still, it didn’t incinerate or crush him. It just flew inches over his head before snapping its wings shut and letting its momentum carry it just inside its lair as Simon had pictured earlier. For a moment, he imagined the thing sliced almost in half as it garotted itself on a well-placed scroll, but then he shook free of that gory image and walked toward the giant cave.

“You spoke true, human,” the dragon rumbled as he approached the cave. “They came not just to kill me but to slaughter me and skin my corpse. I have seen the implements of butchery and the flammable solutions they meant to use in tanning, but they are no more. You alone may keep your life.”

Even at this distance, Simon could smell the scents of death and carnage on the beast. It had almost certainly just feasted on the bodies of dozens of men and nearly as many horses and oxen. He was grateful that he wouldn’t have to come back down the mountain that way to see the massacre as he left.

“Thank you, Icefang,” Simon said, trying not to stare at the giant crystalline teeth that were undoubtedly the reason for its name as it spoke. “Now, if we could talk about what you meant when you said that I smelled like her?”

“That can wait,” the dragon answered, brushing his question aside. “Tell me again how this man meant to kill me with paper.”

Icefang was incredulous, but it was obviously a bit more willing to take it seriously now that it had seen so many men bent on carving it up. So, Simon took his time and went through the whole thing again. He simplified things a bit and explained the way the runes would turn the paper’s edge into an infinitely sharp sword blade, not unlike the wide logging saws that the men had brought to cut into the dragon’s flesh.

Though the dragon found this ridiculous, Simon eventually tore a page from his doppelgänger’s journal and used a similar spell to slice through a fist-sized stone near the entrance, cleaving it in half.

“Troubling,” the dragon answered, “Human magic can do something even this impossible, then?”

The phrase human magic implied the existence of other kinds of magic, but Simon ignored that for the moment and said, “I’ve seen your corpse before, in another life, I suppose you could say.”

“This does not surprise me,” the dragon answered sagely. “I have no doubt that I have killed you in other lives as well. Such things are well known to dragons of any age.”

“How is that exactly?” Simon asked.

“It is likely more than your tiny mortal mind can understand, but I will try,” Icefang answered. “When you look outside my lair, you see a world of greenery and life, but if that was my only hunting ground, there would be nothing larger than a rabbit within a hundred miles in any direction. Can you guess why that might be?”

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“Because you can fly far afield?” Simon answered after a moment’s thought. He knew it was wrong, even as he said it, but he’d never given it any thought before now.

He knew that whales grew huge from infinite plankton in the ocean and that ultra-large herbivores on land did much the same thing with foliage, but he had no idea how dragons kept themselves fed. He tried to do the math on what it would take to keep a beast of this size healthy and well-fed, but he honestly had no idea. The best he could come up with was a small herd of cows or a large herd of goats or sheep every day or two.

“What if I tried to tell you that there are an infinite number of valleys beyond that entrance,” the dragon explained like it was talking to a child, “and that most of them looked almost identical, save for the placements of certain outcroppings and the number of houses in the village below?”

“An infinite worlds theory,” Simon said, nodding, as he figured out what the dragon was saying. “But wouldn’t each of those worlds have its own dragon, and wouldn’t each of those dragons flit from world to world as well?”

“In most of those worlds, there would be another version of you. I am sure. There would be many of my assassins, as well, but if you searched every world, you would find only one Icefang or Embermaw,” the dragon answered with a note of pride. “Dragons are singular beings of magical power, and beyond the limitations of lesser species like humans.”

“If that was true, then, well, the implications are staggering,” Simon answered.

“If?” the dragon rumbled with laughter. “If you are brave enough, I will show you, and we will see if your mind shatters under the weight of the true shape of the world.”

Simon was stunned at the offer, but there was no way he could refuse it, even if he didn’t know exactly what it entailed. The two discussed it for a moment, and then, with the help of a long piece of rope tied around the base of Icefang’s neck, Simon mounted the terrifying creature and sat astride its neck on the thing’s clavicle.

Then, with a few steps and a brief attempt to shake him free, the dragon pronounced him secure and strode toward the lair’s exit. “It has been a long, long time since I have allowed a human to mount me,” it proclaimed as it unfurled its wings. You should feel honored.”

Simon started to answer, but no sooner did he start to speak than the dragon launched itself skyward.

It was a violent motion that was the closest he’d felt to a roller coaster in a long time, and he squeezed the rope even tighter. It would be a hell of a thing to solve the level and then die from a fall, he told himself, but that didn’t phase him. If the dragon had some unique magic and was willing to offer him some insight, he would be a fool to turn that down. It was definitely worth at least one death.

Still, as they spiraled slowly up into the sky, he didn’t even get close to falling. Even though he feared the worst, Icefang seemed to be taking it easy on him.

“Look there, at that river,” the dragon boomed over the wind, as the dragon soared through the sky and briefly used its long sinuous neck to point before banking. “That will be the first marker.”

Simon did as bid, not bothering to try to answer as he looked down on the world from at least a thousand feet in the air. The river in question was wide and shallow and seemed to be fed by dozens of minor streams as it slowly wound its way out of the valley to the plains on the far side of the mountains.

Part of Simon’s mind whispered excitedly about the updates he could make to his maps now that he knew exactly where he was, but the rest of him focused on the river, making the details. So, as soon as it started to twist and morph, he was paying attention.

First, the large rocks that were scattered along its length by various floods started to move back and forth. Sometimes they were further downriver, and sometimes they were pushed back. Then the oxbows themselves started to shift as the river seemed to break its restless banks, looking for other courses down the mountain. Some parts of the view never seemed to change, but others, like the boulders, eventually became a blur as they changed constantly.

That was when he noticed the rest of the landscape was growing equally restless. The forests moved closer and further away from the river, and the mountains even started to slowly lose their shapes, rising and falling, apparently at random, to become different mountains in other places.

As Simon watched all this, he could feel the familiar feeling of magic thrumming around him, but he couldn’t say what word he would use to attempt to replicate this effect. Still, it was fascinating.

“We are hundreds of worlds away from the one we were in a moment ago,” the dragon bellowed. “If we fly far enough, we might find another dragon or even the edge of the world itself, but no matter how far we flew, it would never be me.”

Simon thought that answer was a little solipsistic. He’d seen Icefang dead before. Indeed, the dragon had already acknowledged that Simon could see dead versions of him. Was that implying that the dragon thought itself immortal and that there would always be a version of him, or was it simply declaring that any copies of it that Simon found could not be the real thing.

Simon had literally no idea. Trying to answer complex philosophical questions when you were soaring through the air on the back of a dragon over a writhing landscape was pretty much impossible. Instead of trying, he simply watched, listened, and held on tightly.

It occurred to him very briefly as he watched a volcano that hadn’t existed a moment ago erupt that if he were to die here, outside his level and his world, he might well die for good. He might well be beyond the reach of the Goddess’s reality knot. That should have been a positive realization, but he recoiled from it.

Although the ride seemed to take forever, that was mostly just Simon feeling overwhelmed by the images he was being assaulted by. In less than twenty minutes it was over. Slowly but surely, as they wheeled around and started back toward the dragon’s lair, the world started to settle down, twisting into familiar shapes, until only the river twitched and jumped from moment to moment.

When they at least returned, Simon’s backpack lying by the entrance, along with the rock that he’d sliced in half, were both a testament to the fact that, indeed, they had returned to where they’d started and not a different version of the same place. At least, he hoped it did; he tried not to think about it too deeply. Instead, he dismounted, removed the rope from around Icefang’s neck, and tried in vain to make his legs stop shaking.