The cave breathed.
Mei Lin found it on the southern coast of the Highlands where the ridges fold down into black sand and the sea hisses against rock that is still too warm to touch with a bare palm. The mouth of the lair sat in the cliff like an open jaw. She could see the pulse of orange behind it before she could see the floor of it. The wind off the water carried the smell out at her, brimstone and burnt iron and the dry oven-stink of stone that has been cooking for a long time and intends to keep cooking.
A small red shape sat at the threshold.
Baleflame was a whelp the size of a dog, scales the colour of a sunset that had not finished, eyes too old for the body. He had a posture grandmother would have recognised at fifty paces. The posture of a thing that was holding still on purpose, conserving itself. He looked up at her boots and waited until she crouched before he spoke.
"You came."
"Lirastrasza sent word. The Vermillion."
"Then you know."
"I know what she said. Tell me what you'd say."
He turned his head a fraction toward the mouth of the cave. The light inside threw his profile in red and longer red. "My aunts and my mothers and my mothers' mothers built nests on cliffs from Grim Batol to the Burning Steppes. Black, all of them. Not the corruption you have heard of. Black before that. They are gone. Every clutch. Every elder. There is one left in this cave and there will not be another. The clutch she is sitting on is the last one."
"And you want me to walk in there."
"I want the corruption ended. The line should have ended on its own terms. It will not. So it ends today, and it ends clean. I would do it myself if I were grown."
The wind off the sea did not reach inside the mouth. The heat inside pushed back against her face like a hand. Mei Lin pressed her palm against the rock at the cave's lip and asked it nothing in particular. The rock was hot enough that her fur curled.
She tightened the strap on her shield. She loosened the dagger at her hip and let it sit. Baleflame hopped onto her shoulder for a heartbeat, the small claws careful against her coat, then dropped down again.
"I will keep the mouth," he said. "If anything comes out behind you, it does not get past me."
"That is the whole job, then."
"That is the whole job."
She walked in.
The path inside ran along a ledge cut by something with no patience for stairs. Below her on the left was a long drop into a pool that was not water. Lava moved down there the way honey moves on a cold morning, slow and bright, with a skin on it that broke and re-formed as she watched. The heat lifted off it and made the air above the pool shimmer. Stalactites hung from the chamber roof glowing dull red on their undersides where the heat had been climbing into them for a hundred years. The walls were obsidian in some places and old volcanic rope in others. The whole inside of the mountain hummed at a frequency she could feel in the back of her teeth.
Her water spirits did not run. They stood up inside her ribs the way they had stood up in Iso'rath, alert, quiet, present. They knew this place was hostile to them. They came anyway. Grandmother had taught her once that water spirits will follow a shaman into a forge if the shaman asks honestly. She had not understood the lesson then. She understood it as her boots hit the chamber floor.
Obsidia was already looking at her.
The broodmother had been curled around a clutch at the far end of the chamber, three stone-warm eggs nested in the hollow she had carved with her own claws. She unfolded the way old armour unfolds. Wings the colour of wet coal. A snout long enough to set on the floor between her forepaws. Eyes the colour of a coal that has burned down past flame and gone to slow pure red. She rose, and the air in the chamber rose with her.
The first breath was a courtesy. A long sheet of dragonfire across the chamber that gave Mei Lin time to get her shield up. The fire broke against the round of it and split sideways, and the boss of the shield went hot enough that she could feel it through the leather wrap on the inside. She heard a soft skitter at the cave mouth and remembered, with a quiet crack of guilt, that Baleflame was a whelp and the air in here was wrong for him too. She did not look back. He had said he would keep the mouth. She had to trust the mouth was kept.
She planted her totems.
Searing Totem into a crack in the basalt at her right, and the small fire at the top of it lit a moment later, throwing single bolts of flame at the broodmother's flank, steady and stubborn, the way a child throws stones at a barn door. Healing Stream Totem into the basalt at her left, the cool of it astonishing in this room, the small spout pulsing pale blue water back into her shoulders every few breaths. She felt her water spirits lean toward it like travellers reaching for a familiar voice.
She called the lightning.
The first bolt hit Obsidia along the line of the shoulder where the wing met the body, and the room flared white for a heartbeat, and the broodmother flinched a sound out of her chest that Mei Lin was going to think about for a long time. Chain Lightning on the second cast, off the broodmother into a small black thing that had crawled out of the egg-hollow toward her, and the small thing stopped being a small thing.
The clutch was hatching.
Lava began to come up through the floor.
It rose in patches the size of cart wheels, glowing through the basalt before it broke the surface, and then opening like wet flowers. Mei Lin watched a pool form a pace from her left boot and stepped right without thinking, which put her closer to a second one she had not seen, and the heat off it lifted the fur on her ankle in a way that made her swear in grandmother's vocabulary.
She dropped Windwalk Totem.
The air around it changed pressure. She felt the wind under her boots like a hand sliding a tray under a teacup. She skated three paces clean across a pool of lava that should have eaten her ankle to the bone, came down on cold basalt on the other side, and re-set her stance with the shield up. The wind from the totem brushed past her ear and went on its way. She had a breath, maybe two, of clean movement. She used both.
Obsidia turned her great head and the chamber turned with her. The next breath was not a courtesy. It came in a wide sheet aimed at the new ground Mei Lin was standing on, and she got the shield up sideways and felt the fire wash around the rim and across her left forearm where the leather wrap ended. The Healing Stream pulse came an instant later, cool through the burn, the small water spirits inside the totem doing the work without complaint.
A whelp got a tooth in her wrist.
She had not seen it come. It had hatched and crossed the floor at a speed she did not credit a thing that small with, and the bite was a hot pinch across her tendon. She brought the shield round and clipped the whelp off her arm and dropped a Riptide on her own forearm in the same motion, the water clinging the way grandmother had taught her water clings, mending while she kept her grip on the shield. Two more whelps were on the floor now. A third was unfolding out of the shell behind Obsidia's flank.
She planted Earthbind Totem between her boots and the swarm. The ground around it went tacky for the small ones, slowed their gait to a wade. She backed three paces toward the nearest Lava Pool and waited for them to come.
They came.
She dropped Windwalk again, broke their line, skated around the pool while they were still wading at it, and the first three went straight into the lava where she had been standing a breath before. The pool took them with a sound she did not want to remember the shape of. Two more turned and came at her round the other side and a Chain Lightning took them off their feet long enough that the next pool, opening underneath them as they fell, finished the work.
Obsidia watched the clutch die.
It was the only part of the fight Mei Lin was going to wish she could undo. The broodmother's whole posture changed. The head lowered. The wings half-spread, then folded again. She made a sound that was not for the room. It was a sound for the eggs, and Mei Lin was the wrong audience for it, and she had heard it anyway.
She did not stop.
The Lava Spouts came in earnest after that.
They erupted in columns from the chamber floor, three at a time, in a pattern that Mei Lin read the way she read flood-channels in a paddy. She danced the pattern on her toes. The shield up where she could not get clear. The Healing Stream working steady on her bruised shoulder. Lightning into Obsidia's flank between dodges, then into her chest, then into the soft place under her jaw when the broodmother reared. The lightning kept coming. The sky outside the cave could not reach in here, but the storm was in her ribs, and her ribs had brought it.
She drove a Fire Totem into the basalt for the finishing push and called her Fire Elemental up out of the cracked stone.
The elemental came roaring. A column of molten body and blunt fists, taller than her by half, the heat off it making the air around her shoulders ripple. It looked at Obsidia and made the low conversational rumble fire elementals make when they have understood the assignment, and lobbed its first fireball straight at the broodmother's snout. The fireball landed and the chamber bloomed orange. The elemental loped forward on legs of slow lava and threw the next one underhand, the way a butcher throws a hindquarter onto a slab.
Mei Lin cast Lava Burst into the same place the elemental had hit. The molten fury hammered through scale that had been holding for a thousand years. Obsidia swung her tail in a wide arc and Mei Lin dropped Windwalk a third time and was elsewhere when it came around. The shield came back up against the next breath and the leather wrap on her arm finally went through, and she felt the heat reach her skin, and she did not stop.
She called the lightning down a final time. It came hard, a long bolt that put the chamber white from floor to roof, and Obsidia went to one knee.
The elemental dropped its last fireball. Mei Lin pulled the dagger from her hip for the first time all afternoon, the small useful thing it was, and walked across the cooling floor to the broodmother's lowered head.
Obsidia looked at her.
She did not flinch from the look. She put her hand on the broodmother's snout the way you put a hand on a sick animal. The scale was hotter than her palm could bear and she bore it. She drove the dagger up under the jaw where the scales did not seat, the way the body had been built since before her own grandmother's grandmother had been a thought, and the broodmother's red-coal eyes went out.
Obsidia spoke as she went.
"NO! My clutch is the last...! Father... I have failed you!"
The chamber kept its heat. The wings folded with a long slow weight, settling along the basalt the way a tarpaulin settles over a cart. Somewhere in the back of Mei Lin's chest, behind the storm and the water, her oldest spirits sat very still and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say.
She stood there a long time with her hand still on the snout.
She walked out the way she had come.
Baleflame was at the cave mouth. He was alive. He had a singed patch across his haunch where something had gotten too close, and the tip of one wing was crisped, but he was sitting upright on the threshold and his eyes were as clear as they had been. He looked past her into the chamber and was quiet for a long beat.
"It is done."
"It is done."
"Lirastrasza is waiting."
She did not have a joke for him. She did not have one for herself. She nodded and stepped past him into the sea-wind, and the air outside the cave hit the side of her face that the dragonfire had been working on, and she had to stop walking for a moment until her eyes cleared.
The ride to Vermillion Redoubt took the rest of the afternoon. She let the borrowed pony pick the pace. Above her, twice, a red drake crossed the wind in a long easy line, going somewhere it had business going, and Mei Lin thought, the way she had thought standing in the Highlands the first night, that red drakes being on her side was still a thing she had not fully made peace with.
Lirastrasza met her at the gate. She was tall as her people were tall in human shape, red hair tied back, a small steady face. She did not ask for the report. She read it off Mei Lin's shoulders the way Tavish had read the gear at the Shrine bar, and she nodded once.
"Sister."
"It is done. The clutch did not survive."
"The clutch could not survive."
She looked over the railing of the redoubt at a sky that had bruise-purple in it from the sea storm coming up the coast. "That was the last broodmother of a line that was old when my own line was young. I will not pretend I am not glad of it. I will also not pretend it is a small thing."
"No. It is not a small thing."
Lirastrasza put a hand on her shoulder. It was warm in the way a kept hearth is warm. "You will sleep in our nest tonight. We do not make our healers ride a coast like that one in the dark."
Mei Lin did not argue.
She sat on a stone bench at the redoubt's edge until the lanterns came up. The sea had gone dark below the cliff. She had killed a thing whose entire family was already dead, whose father had doomed her line before the egg she came out of had been laid. The work had needed doing. She had done the work. She did not feel proud of it.
She thought of Baleflame at the cave mouth, sitting upright in his singed scales, holding the threshold for her with a body the size of a dog because there had been no one bigger left to send. She thought of grandmother putting the kettle down in Dawn's Blossom when news of the world reached her, and saying nothing, and meaning the silence.
She did not write a ledger line that night. She would write one in the morning, maybe, when the day had cooled the way the chamber floor had cooled. For now she sat with her shield across her knees and her dagger across her shield, and she let her water spirits settle the way water settles in a bowl that has been carried a long way without being spilled.
The wind off the sea reached her finally. Cold, salt, ordinary.
She went inside.
— Mist