said.
The rumbling continued to echo, but it was different than it had been before. There was less of an intensity to it, almost as if they were heading the wrong way.
The ice dragon veered off, heading in the direction that the earth dragon guided.
“These make any sense to you?” Jason asked, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the smaller bone fragments that he had taken when he had first gone chasing after the earth dragon.
The dragon queen took them, holding them and frowning. “Where did you find these?”
“The earth dragon showed them to me.”
He watched her, but she didn’t give any sort of reaction.
The trembling of the earth began to build, and they started to descend.
They were in the mountains. It wasn’t the cold northern mountains like Jason had known his whole life, but a tree-lined mountain. The earth dragon rumbled from a rocky portion that was more barren than others, and the ice dragon headed toward it before hovering in front of the rocky section.
“This is as far as I can go,” the ice dragon said.
“Are we supposed to go somewhere else?”
“It seems he wants you to go closer,” the ice dragon said.
Jason could feel the trembling of the earth dragon. He had no idea what exactly it meant, but realized that the ice dragon was right. The earth dragon did want them to go somewhere. He wanted them to head toward this section of rock.
He stood and climbed forward on the dragon’s head, and then jumped.
It carried him to the rocky slope and he started to slide, but the earth dragon shifted something. He created a small ledge and Jason stopped sliding.
The dragon queen jumped and landed next to him, though she didn’t slide.
She looked up at him, her dark eyes brimmed with suspicion.
“If you try to harm me, the earth dragon will protect me.”
“I’m sure that he will,” Jason said.
“If you try—”
Jason chuckled. “The dragon brought us both here,” he said. “I’m not going to try to harm you, and I think that the earth dragon realizes that. He wants us to come here.”
He climbed up the rock wall, following the rumbling that the earth dragon guided him toward, and found a small opening in the mountain. A cave.
He crawled into it.
It was narrow at first, but it opened up immediately as soon as he was inside. He drew upon the power of the iron dragon and his glove started to glow, illuminating the inside of the cave.
It was far more massive than he would’ve expected.
The dragon queen came behind him, and she frowned as she looked at his glowing glove. “What are you doing with that?”
“This is the dragon pearl that one of the dragons gave me. It turned into a glove.”
She frowned at it and Jason held it away from her so that he didn’t burn her. He didn’t know if he could harm her, but with the power radiating from it, it was distinctly possible that he could emanate enough heat that he could actually cause some problem for her.
They headed down the tunnel, making their way deeper into the depths of the cave, and the farther they went, the more that Jason wondered why the earth dragon would guide him here.
He saw no evidence that anybody had been through here.
“Why would he have brought us here?” he asked, looking over at the dragon queen.
“I do not know.”
The tone in her voice had shifted; she was no longer nearly as agitated as she had been before, which he appreciated. He didn’t want to deal with a frustrated woman, and certainly not a woman frustrated at him.
They headed along the tunnel and he began to feel something in the distance.
Not just the rumbling, not as he had found before, but there was a warmth.
“Do you feel that?” he asked, looking back at the dragon queen.
She frowned at him and headed forward, pushing past him until she could squeeze in front of him.
Jason smiled to himself.
This was somebody he would have appreciated knowing long before now.
“How did you and Lorren end up together?” he asked. They had some connection together, and whether or not it was familial, he wanted to know.
“He found me,” she said softly, hurrying into the cavern.
The tunnel was far longer than he would’ve expected, and wide enough to be easy for them to walk next to each other. It felt like they were heading all the way through the mountain.
The warmth in the distance continued to increase, gaining more and more