Aexilica blinked, and sat bolt-upright as she heard the thudding. It was…Not exactly distant, but far away. Below her. Well below her. The floor felt like it…Not trembled but something close to it, a shiver perhaps. It was like the sound of a great rockslide picked up from her ear pressed against the ground, yet far away to be beyond sight.

It was misleading, she knew. Only a great impact could make that kind of noise under any circumstances, even if she was dealing with a relatively small formation of protruding rock rather than an entire plains. Had some minor earthquake rocked the tower? Or…Perhaps…

No, surely not. Not even Emma could unleash enough force to do that. Not without being suicidally stupid…

Oh Gods.

***

Emma would've died if it weren't for her yellow energy. That thought kept rattling around in her head, even as she let the stuff hold her against the cliff face and tried to regather her wits. She would have died. Instantly, and probably without even feeling a thing.

The mangled remnants of her glider fell down, really no more than a cloud of dust now. It swirled away in the wind, coiling and twisting. Pretty, she thought. Blue crystals in powdered form. They sparkled.

Beside her, Eirik was coughing and groaning. He'd actually taken less of the hit than her, but you wouldn't have known it by listening to the old fuck. Some people just had to be the victim, no matter what.

Emma shifted, and felt something stab in pain deep within her back. Fuck. All this, and she still hadn't gotten Aexilica and Vari back. Why was the whole universe always against her?

Rocks moved, fell. Emma almost joined them. She was pressed into a big crevice left in the cliff face by…well, by her. Her yellow energy—which she would hence be referring to as "hardlight" to avoid sounding like one of those women she'd listened to lectures about aura from in the hopes of getting in their pants—was springy, semi-solid and bouncy. All the things she'd needed to live just now. Prior to impact Emma had made a big battering ram at the front of her glider and separated it from her and the other passengers with a full three metres of yellow hardlight.

She did some hasty mental calculations. Call her velocity sixty metres per second, reduced to zero over three metres and that was…How fast?

Another rock fell from the jagged crater she'd left, which Emma now saw sprawled wider than she could have reached by pressing the tips of her toes at one end and the tips of her stretching fingers at the other.

Very. She had decelerated very fast, despite her best efforts.

But not fast enough to kill, in accordance with them.

"Don't ever fucking do that again." Larry growled. "We would've died if you'd made a single mistake, you realise that?"

But they hadn't. Emma felt almost…disassociative, and not for the first time. It hit her, then, how absurd everything was. Magic, a talking head, questing to save her friends from a dragon. Laughable. Ridiculous. How easy to fall back into believing it was all fake again. So very easy.

The easiness wasn't what surprised her, though. Wasn't what disturbed her. That was the realisation that it was tempting, appealing. Intoxicating.

I'd actually prefer to be lying unconscious somewhere? Why?

Emma pushed that thought aside, too. She just didn't have time for it.

Her first obstacle was getting out of the indentation she'd left in the cliff, and doing so safely. Oh. She probably ought to stop Eirik from falling and dying too, so that she actually got paid for all this.

Emma splashed some yellow hardlight down at the bottom of her crater, then set out a platform of blue to cling to it. The gluey nature of her new material just about held under her own weight. Emma set a support beam of blue hardlight under it to be safe, securing that at several points below it with yet more yellow.

Eirik plopped down onto the platform and barely even made it shudder. That didn't stop the old fuck from crying out in terror, though.

"Be quiet!" Emma snapped, looking up at the top of the rocky pillar beyond them. "We're not that far from where the dragon probably is, and I don't know how good its hearing is."

She actually extended her mind with Cognition as she said that, seeing if she could sense any minds up ahead. She could not. That had a spasm of nerves running through Emma. No minds meant Aexilica and Vari might've been eaten, meant the dragon might just be gone and leaving a cave of chewed skeletons in its wake.

Or, it could mean you're out of range. Emma, once more, buried her panic and distraction as she started working on a way up the cliff. Getting Eirik to climb proved to be more work than it was worth, so Emma just scarpered up by herself using the help of another weight-reducing Force effect. Once at the top, she lowered down a strand of yellow hardlight. Eirik grabbed on when prodded, and Emma applied another Force effect to raise it up.

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She really could get used to this magic thing. In fact, she already had gotten used to it. And that's why she was completely fine with everything being real and not just in her head.

Now that she had nothing more to focus on, Emma was able to expand her Cognition again and feel out the minds ahead of her. She was a great deal closer to the cave, now, and felt an overwhelming flood of relief as her senses practically lit up with input.

Animals, for the most part. Minds as simple and limited as the rats Emma had practiced on aboard Storm-Eye's ship. But there were others too. One mind larger and more complicated, nothing remotely close to human but…something more. It was what she might have expected from the dragon. The real highlight was what she felt beside the larger mind, though. The largest ones yet, the most contrived, most knotted, most…human.

It was an imprecise art, gauging cognitive abilities to track things. Instinctively, Emma found herself picturing a tiny creature in what she assumed was the dragon's place. Not true. An elephant would register as smaller than a chimp through this lens, it was the natural danger of laser-focusing on cerebral activity instead of actual mass.

But it was clear enough.

"They're in there." Emma whispered, glancing at Eirik. "My friends, and…one other person."

"Astrid?!" The old man asked, face actually lighting up. Emma was almost surprised to see him genuinely care that his daughter had been located.

"Probably." She shrugged. "But be quiet, this can still go wrong fast."

He clamped up instantly, which was one of the more admirable things Emma had actually seen of him yet.

"What's the plan?" Larry asked.

"Shut up." Emma dumped him well short of the cave, not trusting the head to obey and not wanting to carry around an extra five kilos mid-fight either way. She started for the cave, assembling the armour around her with a touch of will directed at her Talisman and readying the most immoral attack she could think of. Her ring, as well, was a no-brainer.

It was dark inside, and getting darker by the step. Emma wasn't so far into the cave when she heard the sound of rushing air and grinding solids. Breaths, she thought. Giant, booming breaths taken in by a pair of lungs bigger than her entire torso scraping scales against stone.

Emma didn't feel afraid. That was interesting, on an intellectual level. She was snaking her way towards a giant, sentient war-crime dispenser and she wasn't afraid. Her mouth was dry, skin tingling, body twitching and spasming with the sheer adrenaline of it all. But mental fear was absent. Hardly the worst time to finally lock in, she had to admit.

Deeper, darker, more dangerous. The dragon revealed itself soon enough. Unconscious, of course. Emma had been very particular about tracking movement on her way in, so she'd known it wasn't mobile. The sound of its breathing as she'd entered had been regular enough to probably not been an active creature's, either.

Still, a slumbering dragon was a sight all the same. But not the one Emma was most concerned with.

That distinction belonged to the minds she followed behind it, and the bodies belonging to them. Aexilica and Vari were propped against a large boulder and staring up at her through blinking vision as she approached. Emma paused for a moment, cursing. She'd have to take her ring off to speak with them, if she kept it on they'd just hear some disembodied presence nudging at them. Communication would be slow, and noise-making. Dangerous. She became visible once more, feeling strangely naked as she did.

Aexilica was the first to speak, eyes wide and seeming to glow in the dark.

"Emm—"

—"SH!" Emma hissed, just gently enough to be quiet, just loud enough to be heard. "Weapon?"

"...We don't have them." Vari volunteered quietly, eyes flicking to the dragon between every word.

Emma nodded, then turned to the third mind she'd sensed. A young woman, a few years younger than her at least. Blonde, tall, seeming to sleep rather peacefully despite being in the dragon's throes.

Astrid, she assumed. Emma made her way to the girl quickly, pushing her just quickly enough for Aexilica's warning to come too slow.

"Y—who are you?" The woman stared up at her, blinking, frowning. She looked fearful somehow. "What are you doing in my home?"

"I—" Emma began, paused, heard Aexilica and Vari rise, call out and start scrambling for the entrance. Saw Astrid's face twist with suspicion and hostility. She pieced things together altogether too slowly.

"KALLVINDR!" The girl screamed, waking the dragon with a start. Emma screamed, punched her in the face and stumbled back as the dragon rose up and roared. Its tail came flying at her, Emma threw herself down to the ground and winced at the sound of it hitting stones. Fire billowed out, curled along the insides of the cave and left the hairs to wither and wilt on Emma's back. Aexilica yelled something, Vari screamed. The air filled of burning meat—Emma could only guess at what was causing it, how they were hurt. She threw herself to her feet and fired off her prepared energy lance almost at random.

Not her finest judgement call, even Emma had to admit. She fortunately—or unfortunately—seemed to miss everything animate in the cave and just kill a chunk of rock instead. The tail whipped out again and cracked across her helmet, throwing her down to the ground to curse and flail. More fire, a great whoosh of air and then the cave felt suddenly less cramped.

The dragon was gone, outside, taking to the air with great wingbeats powerful and loud enough that Emma could hear them even from a hundred metres away. It was tempting to feel relief at not being trapped underground with the thing, but Emma's mind was already churning away on what would happen next.

"We need to get out!" She screamed. "Grab your weapons and hurry!"

Despite needing their detour to arm themselves, both Vari and Aexilica were fast enough to beat her out of the cavern by a good few seconds. Just in time to see the dragon high above, circling the rocky plateau it'd made its second home…

…With the girl named Astrid on its back.

"Darling!" Eirik screamed from outside the cave. "What are you doing!?"

"I told you to leave me!" Astrid cried back. "Kallvindr and I love each other!"

He stared at his daughter, seeming legitimately speechless. Aexilica and Vari were just confused. Emma, though, found herself laughing. Laughing so much her sides hurt, her head got light, her throat convulsed and tightened and dried.

Laughed so much, it apparently registered as quite the slight by Astrid. The girl's face was just close enough for Emma to see it scrunch up in rage.

"Typical!" She spat. "I should've known you wouldn't understand. Kallvindr! Destroy these reactionary puritans, burn them to preserve our love!"

The dragon's mouth opened, and fire was dancing at its throat.

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