Sleep that night was hard to find, and when Sly woke he found he’d been unconscious only three hours, and he wasn’t rested. When he rubbed his head with water he found the sticky clumped residue of caked blood in his hair. He finally thought to ask for an opinion and Gus diagnosed a concussion caused by the strike to his head. Sly couldn’t remember the injury, he barely remembered hitting the pool.

  Sly had slept on a natural ledge beside the stream. When he started walking again, he found the ledge persisted as a path by the water. His thoughts were slow and the pressure in his head made his ears sing, but he knew to prefer the dry ledge to the streambed that soaked his boots. The ledge sometimes departed from the waterside, but even when the sounds of water faded, he reasoned the stream would eventually return.

  After walking for some time, Sly grasped he hadn’t heard the water for a while. Gus advised him to go back, but his head hurt, and he felt it better to continue into the darkness.

  A tunnel was a tunnel, after all, and didn’t all tunnels lead somewhere?

  He felt that was an important philosophical point and continued on, but the stream didn’t come back.

  After a time, Sly began seeing hazy images flickered ahead of him. When he closed his eyes they persisted on the left side of his vision, and he was frightened he’d somehow suffered a stroke.

  Gus said not to worry, that these were images from the new sonar system they’d discussed a few hours before. Thoughts hidden beneath a dull throb, Sly recalled no such conversation but found the visual sonar system intuitive to use. The near inaudible slap of each step sent a ripple that illuminated his feet and the path he walked on. Naturally he discovered the limits of the grainy system the hard way, when he walked too fast and struck his head on invisible, needle-thin stalactites. From then on, he slowed and kept his head down.

  Slow trudging felt better, as his head ached less often, and he was very thirsty. It was so very nice to see, and the grainy images muted his fear of dark, tight and twisty places into a throb he could mostly ignore. Rationally he knew he should be worried, even terrified. Instead, he found it an effort to care.

  By now even Sly was aware that he wasn’t well. He’d thrown up a couple of times and knew better than to make sudden moves. Leaving the water had been a bad idea, because now he was thirsty and had nothing to drink or clean himself with.

  When he heard the water again – a sound like rushing streams falling to crash on rocks – he was relieved and staggered faster. The distance between his head and the ceiling began to grow, and he became joyful when he could no longer see the ceiling in any of his sonar images. He’d entered a high-roofed cavern.

  To his mild regret, while there was some water here it was only a wide, shallow pool, not the waterfall he expected, and the smell in the air was very bad, like rotten eggs. Even so he knelt to cup water in his hands, time after time. He was so thirsty that he ignored the sound of rushing and crashing in the air around him.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Then the dragons came down to drink, and Sly froze.

  Most of the early arrivals weren’t huge and the serpentine shapes remained a distance away as they drank. Between his fugue and the grainy images Sly couldn’t pick out clear characteristics, but after a while he started to recognize features, as he might spot a baby’s hands and feet in an ultrasound. Serrated teeth within long gaping jaws needed no imagination to pick out, and their long, snaking bodies bore talons hooked beneath and jagged wings tucked above. He noticed the dragons came to the pool in waves, the smallest first, hard-to-see flitting serpents scooping water from the surface like kingfishers. Then goose- or swan-sized became the average. The largest creatures progressed with a hop and glide, while the smallest hovered like hummingbirds.

  Stood stock still, they all ignored him. At least at first.

  The mass of dragons near the cavern roof became an angry black cloud on Sly’s sonar, heading directly for the pool of water where he crouched. The thunderous sound of white water he’d heard earlier was the collective thunder from thousands of pounding wings. The stench of rotting eggs got even worse, so gut clenchingly bad it threatened to put its foul fingers down his throat and make him puke. Sly progressively grew more nervous and drew the Sig, but he wasn’t sufficiently confused to think could take on hundreds of flying reptiles on his own. Not with only two clips. Gun in hand, he stumbled to the cover of a three-foot-high stalagmite and crouched, head throbbing with the air pressure of thrashing wings.

  Finally, the larger gliding dragons approached, six or eight feet long, the size of tigers at the zoo. He hadn’t rationalized how the larger specimens could fly before the alpha arrived, a true titan the size and heft of a Komodo or Nile crocodile, ten feet long from the end of its blunt, shark-like snout to the tip of its lashing tail. It mostly walked but dust flew up from its wings, and when the alpha belched, a stream of hot, gaseous fire erupted from its mouth.

  Only when the billow of blue-gold flame lit up the insides of the cavern did Sly see the dragons in all their glory. Until then, he had used coarse sonar and perhaps a touch of image intensification to see the silhouettes of the creatures around him. He’d become used to seeing the world in greyscale, forgetting that light brought pain.

  The light from the alpha’s flames triggered three simultaneous and overlapping emotions. The most visceral response was that of awe, an immediate and immense reverence for the creatures around him. How magnificent! What he had somehow imagined as grey-green reptilian monsters were shown, instead, as iridescent masterpieces of evolution.

  Each animal, he realized in a split second of lucidity, had but a moment to attract a mate between a billow of flame and the void of a lightless cavern, and they made the most of it. Each scale reflected, no, refracted a different gorgeous hue, from red and orange to shades of green and blue, and they glowed as if still wet from sprayed-on metallic paint. He was enthralled by their wings, which were not awful and horned, nor thin skin stretched over bone like those of a bat, but bejewelled structures as transparent as church stained-glass or the gossamer vanes of fairy-folk. The same translucent blades buzzed on the tiniest dragons aloft, imperceptible except as pulsing light motes above their backs.

  If his first emotion was awe, the second was pain, and the third, fear.

  A second after the light erupted, pain struck Sly’s dark-adapted eyes like a physical thing, so great that he cried out. And an instant later his throat clenched closed, from the terror of having made any sound at all.

  The plume of blue-gold fire subsided, and the hall returned to darkness. For the longest stretch of time, an eon in Sly’s mind that was barely a second on Gus’s clock, nothing in the place breathed.

  Then all hell broke loose – a furnace of fire, wailing and gnashing of teeth.