FanStory.com - Ol' Silver and Red, ch 8by Wayne Fowler

In the last part Ohmie and Blado managed to reach the dragon’s lair and encourage the dragon to leave his nest with catgut string attached to his leg. After loading up with valuables, they began their escape back up the shaft.

Chapter 8

Not hearing the dragon splash meant they would climb the rope if they reached it ahead of the dragon. They heard no splash. The dragon was still in the tunnel. What they did hear was a dragon’s roar. Like Ohmie recalled from the first episode in the lair, and just as unnerving, the dragon discharged a hideous, spine-tingling, nerve-jarring, fear-inducing, screeching, screaming roar. Ohmie and Blado both believed they would enter eternity with that heinous sound to listen to for all time. Blado fairly flew up the rope hand-over-hand, his feet rarely touching the sides of the shaft. Ohmie was not as nimble. And much heavier. His strongest and best efforts didn’t get him out of dragon-flame range.

Ohmie reckoned that the dragon had turned around at the pool where the tunnel widened and heightened to more like a cavernous cave than a tunnel. He hoped that the dragon did not tangle and break the catgut.

The first torching blast was the weakest. All it did was to singe off all Ohmie’s hair. The space between blasts was enough for Ohmie to make several more feet of elevation, motivated by the savage heat. The dragon’s second torching blast was by far the hotter and stronger. That one burned the tail end of the rope and burned off the back of Ohmie’s clothes, raining gold coins back down to the dragon. The falling glitter momentarily unnerved the dragon, causing him pause until the air between him and Ohmie had cleared. He then belched his worst, a flame that ignited the chips of coal on the shaft walls. One of those chips contacted the rope above Ohmie, burning it apart. Ohmie fell like one of the shiny coins.

Fortunately for Ohmie, the dragon cease-fired the blazing flares of death. Ohmie spun like a cat, trying to right himself enough to face his danger. He knew better than to waste time grabbing at the stony walls of the shaft. His only hope was one, not to roast like the last summer solstice hog, and two, try not to smash into a broken heap on his landing.

All he could see were two red eyes glowing up at him, getting very large, very quickly. Instinctively he drew his belt knife.

The dragon’s predicament was that he could either see, or shoot flame. He couldn’t do both. The passage was so narrow that he didn’t have the freedom of movement necessary to stick his whole head up the shaft. The horizontal tunnel was so narrow and short that his progress was one-way only, and that, at a crouch. When he was headed for the lair, he had to go all the way to the cavern in order to move normally or to turn around to go back. It was too tight to even back up. He had to go forward. And when he was headed for the pool, he had to go all the way to the water’s edge before finding enough space to turn around. At that end, the cavity was barely large enough to get this done. If he’d grown any larger since his last turning around, he wouldn’t be able to do it there either; he’d have to continue through the water.

Once in the tunnel, his eyes could look into the entry shaft above as he crossed under it, but in order to direct his torching muzzle from the crouched position, he had to crane his head and neck to a nearly impossible angle. That was why the coal chips on the shaft wall ignited; the torched flame was not straight up the tube, but angled, deflecting off the sides. But still, it was direct enough, and hot enough, to blister Ohmie’s rump.

Ohmie’s knife, preceding his body by the length of his arm and the length of the blade, broke Ohmie’s momentum and his fall by breaking both the blade and the arm. Since the silver and red dragon’s eyes were Ohmie’s focus, that was the point of his aim. The razor-sharp, pointy-tipped hunting knife along with the force of all of Ohmie’s falling weight easily slid above the dragon’s eye just below the eye socket and orbital bone, breaking the blade and Ohmie’s arm, as well.

But the hardened steel did not break before severing the muscle tissue that operated the dragon’s eyelid. The eyelid would never work again, but forever droop over the dragon’s left eye. From that moment on his left eye was as good as blind. It could see, but only the underside of the drooping eyelid, no further.

Ohmie’s arm had snapped like a chicken’s wishbone halfway between his wrist and elbow. It would have hurt badly had Ohmie remained conscious. But he didn’t, his head smacking first the tunnel wall, then the silver and red dragon’s iron-tough scales. Since there was no room to fall to the floor, wedged onto the dragon’s neck, there he stayed, pretty much in the same position as when he had ridden the dragon into the lair. By the time the dragon eventually made it into the cavernous lair, Ohmie was astraddle the dragon, his tunic hooked on the knife handle that projected from between the dragon scales like a horn. There Ohmie remained.

Blado thought he’d been deafened. The dragon’s bellow was so loud that droplets of creamy, oozy, blood trickled from his ears. The force of the scream virtually propelled him up the last distance to the top of the shaft. Rocks around the crevice mouth shook in empathetic response.

Princess May shuddered in tremors at her encampment by the lake. Her job was to watch for the bladder balloon that had been affixed to the dragon, and attempt to secure the cord, careful not to be seen by the dragon when it emerged from the water’s surface.

Blado had a dilemma. He was in a quandary. He was flummoxed and perplexed. The loose dangling rope told him Ohmie was no longer on it. The dragon's roar told him that the dragon was mad. The continuing rumble that he felt, more than heard, told him that the dragon was still alive. The silence from Ohmie told him that it was possible Ohmie was not. He pulled the rope up, finding that a large section was gone, burned off. Blado was bewildered as to his proper course of action. He was not prepared for such an eventuality.

Ohmie might need his help. Ohmie might already be dragon scat. To go for help might delay Ohmie’s rescue to the point that the mission would be recovery, not rescue. What would Ohmie do in this situation? What would he, Blado, want Ohmie to do?

That answered it. Without hesitation, Blado lowered the remaining length of rope down the shaft, following its path, hand over hand to its burnt end, then rock by rock to the bottom. Once at the end of his rope, Blado gave it a snapping flip, ducking as the knot joining the two sections whip-sawed down, barely missing his noggin. Dragon-smell told him to go left once he landed atop the rope pile on the shaft’s floor.

One red eye told him he’d arrived at the lair. Blado didn’t know what the dragon had done with his other eye. He knew from Ohmie’s description that the dragon slept with both eyes open, so again; he became flummoxed and perplexed, and standing stock-still until certain the dragon was all there, surely not half somewhere else. Like his other half, with his other eye, behind him, ready to toast and eat him. He rooted there until positive that the dragon was indeed sleeping. Dropping to all fours, Blado searched the cavern floor for his friend, Ohmie.

He’d searched the entire base of the cavernous cavern, right up to and all around the pile of gold and jewels before hearing Ohmie’s faint groaning from above. Blado could only barely make out the dragon’s outline from the reflected light of the dragon’s single eye off the cavern walls, the geodes acting as infusers. The line of the dragon’s neck didn’t seem right. Either it had a cancerous growth, or Ohmie was in his saddle. Blado opted for Ohmie since the groaning seemed to come from there.

Now what was he to do? Yet another flummoxing perplexity.

Blado dropped to his haunches, squatting aborigine fashion as he thought.

Outside, Princess May, spying a suitable rock, suddenly sat and thought herself. She thought about the adventure, about their scheme and plan, and about the team. She thought about Blado and Ohmie, Prince Waynard – mostly about Ohmie. She thought about him as Ohmie, how she learned from him, how she’d taught him. She thought about how she felt about his deception, about how self-serving it was: he could decide whether he wanted her, but did he care about whether she wanted him? Would his under-cover guile afford her the discovery he’d awarded himself?

What if it had been she first to plot the ploy? Would she have? Of course, she would, had she thought it up. It was brilliant. She could have marched herself into King Jear’s castle, explain the Princess’ absence, and study the Prince just as he had her. She could have fallen in love with Prince Waynard first, instead of second, Ohmie first.

That was it! Her first revelation, reward for rock-sitting! She loved Ohmie.