The cave bent sharply again, then began to widen slightly toward the entrance. Pale gray daylight appeared ahead in thin strips between the stones. Not much. Just enough to tell me I was close.
Too close to hope.
I risked one glance back.
Bad idea.
The tunnel behind me glowed in pulses from intermittent firelight deeper within. Dust spun thickly through the air. Shadows moved there too, not the dragon itself but parts of it, the enormous sweep of a wingtip slamming against the chamber's edge, the hooked silhouette of its head lowering toward the passage mouth, golden eye burning in the dark. It did not need to fit into the tunnel. Its reach was already changing the place around me into a weapon.
"Keep moving," Finn said, sharper now.
The ground dropped unexpectedly under my next step. I stumbled, hit one hand against the wall, almost smashed my face into stone, and barely recovered. Pain flashed through my ankle from the earlier twist. I felt warm blood sliding again beneath the torn fabric at my side.
The entrance.
Just ahead.
The wedge of light widened.
I lunged toward it with everything I had left.
The final stretch of tunnel felt longer than the rest of the cave combined. My legs had gone heavy. Every breath came like I was dragging air through broken glass. The daylight beyond the opening looked impossibly bright after the tunnel's gloom.
And behind me, the dragon inhaled.
I heard it.
Not with my ears only. With my spine. My ribs. The stone beneath my feet.
The whole cave seemed to draw inward around that breath.
"Out!" Finn shouted.
I dove through the opening.
Cold air hit me like a slap.
Sky. Trees. Rock. The world outside the cave flashed into existence all at once—gray daylight, jagged stone ledge, steep drop beyond, and below that a river cutting through the forest like a strip of moving steel.
I hit the ground hard on one knee and one hand, skidded across gravel, and almost went over the ledge then and there.
Then the dragon roared.
Sound was the wrong word.
It was force.
It hit me from behind like the world itself had decided to strike. The roar exploded out of the cave mouth with enough violence that the air turned solid. My ears rang instantly, then stopped hearing anything but the roar itself. The stone ledge beneath me cracked. Trees farther downslope bent as if blasted by a storm wind.
The impact lifted me.
Not metaphorically.
One second I was half-crouched on the ledge, the next I was airborne, torn free of stone and balance and thought alike. The fruit stayed trapped in my fist by pure reflex. My other arm flailed uselessly in the open air.
The world became fragments.
Grey sky overhead.
The cave mouth behind me with something vast moving in its darkness.
Forest canopy spinning below.
My own body twisting in empty space.
I tried to scream and heard nothing.
Then the river hit me.
It was like being dropped onto stone that shattered into ice at the moment of impact. Water slammed into my side and chest hard enough to force the last of the air from my lungs. The fruit almost tore out of my grip. I curled around it instinctively even as the river swallowed me whole.
Cold.
Blindingly, violently cold.
After the heat of the cave it felt unreal. A knife driven through every inch of skin at once. The current seized me before I knew which way was up, dragging me sideways and down together. My shoulder smashed against submerged rock. Pain flashed white. I opened my mouth by mistake and inhaled water so cold it felt like swallowing broken glass.
Panic detonated.
I kicked.
Wrong direction.
Hit nothing.
The current rolled me end over end. Light flickered above me in broken strips. Dark stone flashed past inches from my face. My lungs convulsed uselessly. One hand still held the fruit. The other clawed at water that gave me nothing.
Up, I thought.
Or maybe I screamed it inside my own head.
Up.
I kicked again, harder this time, followed the faintest brightness, and broke the surface with a ragged choking gasp. Air flooded in and half of it became another cough as the river immediately slammed me into a half-submerged branch. I twisted, barely managed not to lose the fruit, and was swept onward again before I could grab anything properly.
The river was not wide, but it was fast.
Too fast for a body as torn and exhausted as mine to control.
I spun onto my back for one precious second and saw the cave high above on the rocky rise, a black wound in the hillside. The dragon's head emerged there a heartbeat later, vast, horned, impossible, framed by shattered stone. Even at that distance I could see the eyes.
Fixed on me.
The sight hit harder than the river.
It had followed to the mouth.
It was watching.
Then my back struck another rock and the sky vanished in a burst of pain.
The current dragged me under again. I tumbled through dark freezing green, hit bottom hard enough to scrape skin from my knees, then kicked upward blindly until I surfaced once more.
I was farther downriver now.
Trees blurred past on both banks. Branches leaned low over the water. The current had me completely.
I coughed so hard my chest seized.
The fruit remained in my fist.
I was dimly aware of how insane that was.
Not fighting for a branch. Not trying to protect my ribs. Protecting the damned fruit.
"Do not let go," Finn said, his voice thin and distant under the roar of water in my ears.
"I'm trying," I gasped.
His answer came colder. "Try harder."
A bitter laugh almost rose in me and died instantly as another surge of current pulled me toward a clutter of stones jutting from the middle of the river.
I twisted at the last second. My hip clipped one of them anyway, pain spiking so hard my vision blurred. Water closed over my head for the third time. This time when I came up, I was weaker. My strokes had lost force. My limbs felt heavier. Every injury I had ignored in the cave was returning with interest now that raw fear and motion were no longer enough to drown them out.
The river curved sharply left.
For one second the cave vanished behind the line of trees and rock.
Then another roar tore across the forest.
Even from that distance it was deafening.
Not as physically devastating as the first. The river and terrain broke some of it apart. But it still rolled over the water with enough force to make my whole body flinch. Birds burst screaming from the trees downstream. The surface around me trembled in overlapping ripples.
I looked back despite myself.
Couldn't see the dragon anymore.
Only sky and dark treetops and the far rise of stone where the cave mouth lay hidden.
But the roar had followed.
The sound carried one clear message even without words…
Mine.
The thought hit me coldly.
Not me.
The fruit.
Or maybe both now.
I coughed again, swallowed more water, and went under for what felt like forever. When I surfaced this time the river had widened slightly and lost some of its violence, but not enough to make me safe. I was beyond thinking clearly now. Beyond planning. All I had left was instinct and the dim command to keep my head above water one more second, then one more after that.
The fruit felt hot against my palm now.
Not truly hot. More like warmth that refused to be drowned, steady and impossible.
The detail fixed itself in my mind for no good reason.
A warm fruit.
An ice-cold river.
A dragon's roar fading behind me.
Everything else seemed to come apart around those facts.
My strokes weakened again.
The current pushed me sideways into the shallower edge of the river where reeds and low branches dragged over my shoulders. I caught at one by instinct and nearly lost my grip when the current jerked me past, but the second grab held. A branch. Thin, bending, alive.
I latched onto it with my free hand.
The river fought against me instantly.
Cold water slammed against my chest and legs, trying to wrench me back into the current. My shoulder screamed. My ribs burned. But the branch held long enough for me to drag myself half sideways toward the muddy bank.
I got one knee under me.
Then I lost it.
Then I got it again.
The river kept trying to pull my lower body away, but the bank was there now. Real. Solid in the most miserable way possible, mud, roots, wet stones. I clawed at it, slipped twice, then hauled myself far enough that the current no longer had all of me.
For a long moment I stayed there on hands and knees in the shallows, coughing water onto mud and dead leaves.
The world tilted.
The forest blurred.
Every part of me shook.
I looked down.
The fruit was still in my hand.
Of course it was.
Some part of me almost wanted to laugh again.
Instead I let myself collapse the rest of the way onto the bank, one arm folded under my chest, the other still bent inward around the fruit like I didn't trust the world not to steal it if I loosened my grip even a little.
My ears were ringing too badly to hear clearly now. Just the river. My own ragged breath. Something high and thin in the distance that might have been wind through branches or might have been pain living in my skull.
Finn's voice came as though from very far away.
"You survived."
I wanted to answer something sarcastic.
Couldn't manage it.
My vision had narrowed to a tunnel. The gray of the sky between branches. The dark smear of wet earth beneath my face. A drop of water falling from a leaf near my hand, hitting the mud, disappearing.
Somewhere far off, or maybe only in my own memory, the dragon roared again.
The sound rolled through me more than around me now, fading and distant and yet still powerful enough to tighten every muscle in my body with remembered fear.
I tried to move farther from the water.
My arm twitched.
That was all.
The cold was sinking into me now that the motion had stopped. My body felt at once too heavy and not fully connected. My side throbbed with a deep wet ache. My shoulder felt half-dislocated. My lungs burned.
The fruit's warmth remained in my hand.
The last clear thought I had before the dark began closing in was absurdly simple…
I actually got it.
Then the river noise drifted farther away, the branches above me blurred into one gray shape, and with the profound spirit fruit still clutched against my chest, I slipped into unconsciousness, falling back into the water.