Tarin's wings thumped as he clutched Lyska's limp form against his chest, her usually radiant corona of light reduced to barely a flicker. The acidic slime had caught her off-guard, its translucent bulk erupting from the cavern wall with the patience of a glacier. Now it pursued them through the winding passages, its gelatinous mass flowing after them like living quicksilver, trying to tackle them into dissolution.

  "I told you," Tarin hissed through clenched teeth, his hands glowing as he channeled light through his palms to examine her injuries. "Never leave the village without a partner. Never."

  "You... you're here, aren't you?" Lyska managed weakly, attempting her usual defiant smile even as her wings drooped.

  They had been flying for what felt like hours, through passages that twisted. The stone wasn't stone, as It flexed beneath Tarin's touch when he braced against a wall. It was warm and faintly ridged.

  "Where are we?" Lyska murmured.

  "I don't know. The caves don't usually..." Tarin trailed off as they rounded a bend into a chamber that stole his breath.

  Treasure.

  Mountains of it, piled in glittering drifts behind a translucent membrane that stretched across the passage like a spider's web. Gold coins, gemstones the size of Tarin's fist shone in colors he had never known. Crowns and scepters; broken weapons, all jumbled together.

  "Tarin," Lyska whispered, her eyes wide. "Is that a membrane?"

  The thin veil rippled as something shifted behind, contracting slightly before relaxing again. Tarin's stomach turned. He'd seen tissue like that before, in the gutted carcasses of large animals. Lining. Internal lining.

  "Keep moving," he said, his voice went tight.

  They pressed on, entering a chamber where the walls curved into rippled domes. Lyska's light revealed what lay within the alcoves: eggs. Dozens of them, each one larger than a village hut back at the village. Their shells mottled with patterns of deep crimson and blueberry black. They rested in nests of compacted hair and bone fragments.

  "What kind of creature lays eggs inside a cave?" Lyska asked, reaching out.

  "Don't touch them." Tarin grabbed her wrist, pulling her away. The eggs weren't resting on the ground; they were embedded in it. Partially sunk into tissue that had grown around their bases like protective cushions. "Just don't, something doesn't feel right. Let's keep going."

  The next passage opened into rolling hills stretched before them. They rose and fell in moments of your deepest multiplied by three. Thick vessels snaked across them like rivers of darker red, pulsing with movement.

  "Oh ancestors," Tarin breathed. "Oh no."

  "What? What is it?" Lyska pressed against him.

  But Tarin couldn't answer. He was too busy pulling her forward, faster now, as understanding began to creep into his mind like frost spreading across glass.

  They crested one of the beating hills and found themselves staring at a vast lake. The surface rippled with viscous waves, more syrup than water, and the smell hit them like salt in a sea breeze. The acrid, burning, steam rose from the liquid in lazy spirals, and where it touched the walls, the tissue sizzled and reformed in endless cycle.

  "We have to cross it," Tarin said, eyeing the narrow ledge that ran along one wall as they took flight. "Stay close to the edge, don't touch the..."

  A gust of wind roared through the chamber, but it carried with it droplets of something that made Lyska cry out as they spattered across her skin. The air itself became thick, almost tangible, pressing down on their wings until flying became wading through invisible mud. So in the end, they dropped.

  Tarin managed to angle their descent toward the ledge, skidding across the slick surface as the gaseous air settled over them like a suffocating blanket. His wings strained uselessly in air that had become more liquid than gas.

  "Crawl," he gasped, dragging Lyska forward along the ledge. "We have to crawl."

  Grotesque shapes moved in the shadows around the lake's edge. Creatures that were all grasping appendages and grinding mouthparts, their bodies segmented and glistening. They scraped at the walls, harvesting the tissue that the acid constantly renewed. One passed within arm's reach of Tarin, its eyeless head swiveling in their direction before dismissing them as irrelevant.

  "Remember," Lyska whispered, her voice shaking as they inched along the ledge, "remember this morning? The meadow?"

  Tarin's mind reached back, grasping for the memory through the haze of fear. Yes. The meadow, with sunlight filtering through leaves. Lyska laughing as she wove flower crowns in the light; leaving a memory like stained glass.

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  "The stream," he said softly. "You wanted to find where it started."

  "And we did. That little grove with all the..." She paused. "The flowers."

  The dragon lilies. Crimson and beautiful and swaying in the breeze. They'd been so tired from flying, and the flowers had seemed like such a perfect place to rest. But it was just for a moment. Just to close their eyes.

  They cleared the lake, the air gradually thinning until flight became possible again. Tarin pulled them upward, away from the creatures and their endless, mindless labor. And that's when he saw it.

  A flower. Half-dissolved, its petals still recognizable despite the acid that had begun breaking down its cellular structure. It drifted on the surface of the lake, and from its stem stretched roots that had burrowed into the tissue of the wall itself.

  "Tarin?" Lyska's voice was very small. "Dragon lilies have healing properties."

  "For pixies. When we eat them." His throat felt tight. "But inside a..."

  The wall contracted. Both of them felt it this time, an unmistakable pulse that ran through the entire passage.

  The cavern shuddered, and Tarin felt it before he saw it. A periodic gust of wind that had saved them twice already, powerful enough to scatter their scent and slow the eel-creatures that glided along the floor. Their serpentine bodies flattened for maximum contact with the ground as they sought anything intact, anything that hadn't yet dissolved in the dragon's digestive tract.

  One of them lunged. Tarin's armor took the impact. It was chitin harvested from beetle shells and woven with spider-silk but the creature's teeth drilled through. He felt the sickening tear as it ripped the chest plate clean off, its elongated jaws scissoring through the straps like they were flower stems. The eel twisted away triumphantly, already consuming the armor as it retreated, grinding the organic material between rows of teeth.

  "Tarin!" Lyska gasped, her light flaring in alarm.

  "I'm fine, fly!" He banked hard into a side passage, the slime creature's bulk forcing it to slow as it squeezed through the narrower opening. Tarin's free hand whipped to his belt, seizing the collection of odds and ends every scavenger carried. Bones from their last meal; some kind of bird the dragon had eaten weeks ago. Fragments of fruit rind that had somehow remained whole. A leather pouch half-full of seeds.

  He hurled them backward in a scattered arc.

  The eel-creatures went mad. They converged on the scattered bounty, their bodies tangling as they fought over a femur still thick with marrow, a chunk of undigested sinew, the leather pouch itself worth more to their digestive systems than ten pixies.

  "Now!" Tarin dove into a vertical shaft, his wings creating a strobe effect as he pushed his light manipulation to its limits. he refracted, splitting his form into a dozen phantom images that scattered across the cavern walls. The slime creature lunged at three of them before its primitive nervous system registered the deception.

  Another gust roared through the passages. Stronger this time, carrying with it the scent of partially digested grasses from some meadow. Tarin rode the wind current, letting it carry them upward through a twisting series of chambers that grew progressively warmer and drier.

  "That's the fourth gust," Lyska whispered, her voice gaining strength as her natural healing kicked in. "Tarin... I think..."

  "I know." His jaw tightened.

  They emerged into a vast chamber where the walls beat with rhythmic contractions. Massive stalactites hung from the ceiling, organic tissue that had calcified over centuries but still retained hints of flexibility. And everywhere, that periodic wind, rushing in and out with the regularity of...

  "Breathing," Lyssa finished, her eyes widening. "Oh ancestors."

  Tarin spotted the opening; a crack between two enormous ribs where filtered light penetrated from outside. He shot toward it, his wings beating frantically as the cavern floor began to shift beneath them. The eel-creatures had given up pursuit, retreating to safer depths as the environment grew less acidic.

  Massive acidic slugs glided around towering conical monuments. Their secretions eating away at accumulated grime and weathering. They battled the torrential wind surging in intervals of an hour. The wind was mandatory for these colossal gastropods; as they work across the rolling hills that were painted in alternating bands of soft pink and deep black.

  It is when the wind dies and air becomes thick and oppressive. That their instincts prove wise to scatter when the mountain stirs. They burst through the opening just as the chamber contracted behind them with a force that would have crushed them flat.

  Sunlight. Real, unfiltered, glorious sunlight.

  Tarin didn't stop until they'd cleared the dragon's flank entirely, finally settling on a nearby boulder to catch his breath. The dragon slept peacefully; Steam rose from its nostrils in gentle plumes. Fields of flowers grew around it, drinking the nutrients from its breath.

  Dragon lilies. Of course.

  "We fell asleep in the dragon lilies," Tarin said flatly, staring at the crimson blooms that dotted the dragon's back like a living garden. "Their pollen is hallucinogenic."

  "How was I supposed to know they'd make us sleep hard enough for a dragon to swallow us?" Lyska protested, her light finally returning to full strength as her body knitted itself back together.

  Tarin looked at her; taking in the stubborn set of her jaw, the way her wings still trembled slightly from the ordeal, the fierce independence that made her both infuriating and irreplaceable. Then he pulled her close, feeling her heartbeat against his chest.

  "I'm positive that's not what occured but i second never sleeping in dragon lilies again," he muttered into her hair.

  "Agreed." She paused. "But maybe we could..."

  "And you're never leaving the village without a partner."

  Lyska pulled back just enough to meet his eyes, only to see her glow intensifying with defiance. "Tarin, you are my partner."

  He wanted to argue, to remind her of every close call, every reckless decision. But the dragon stirred in its sleep below them, and somewhere in its belly, more dragon lilies swayed in the breeze.

  "Then let's go home," he said softly. "Together."

  They rose on luminous wings, leaving behind the sleeping titan and its deadly gardens, becoming two points of light ascending into the safety of the mountain peaks where their village awaited.

  A maw shut and a dragon awoke from a nap before her home. A mind dispersed by a millennia of fatigue left her worst than expected. "A thousand wrong doings may form the basis of my proclivities but sleep cannot take me any longer". A colossal waterfall thunders down from a cavern shattered by Xerxes arrival to Draco Isles.