CHAPTER FOUR

Nerra knelt by the waters of the temple fountain, among the bones of those dead who had tried it before. Above her, the slopes of the volcano seemed to look down angrily, forbidding her to try what she was about to try. Looking at her arms, she could see the patches of scale sickness there, the lines of it dark on her arms.

She would not die like Lina. Even if these waters meant death, it was better than waiting for the sickness to claim her out here on the island her dragon had brought her to. Seeing her friend die had been the fuel to propel her all this way to the temple, to the fountain she had promised the island’s keeper, Kleos, she would not seek.

She drank its waters now. She took in the water in a single long swallow that drained her cupped hands. There seemed to be no point in just sipping when any touch of the water was supposed to mean death.

She did not dare to hope for what else it might mean.

“They wouldn’t call it a healing fountain just as a lie,” Nerra said aloud, as if doing so would make it true. “They wouldn’t build all this.”

Why build an open air temple if the only goal was to kill those who came? Why bother with a fountain at all, or the strange pressure that had seemed to push her back from the place as she had walked the volcano’s slopes? Kleos, the keeper of the sick, had told her that to drink was death, that it was all just a way to let those with the dragon sickness kill themselves, but Nerra had to hope that he was wrong, or lying, or both.

It would work. It had to.

Nerra stood and looked out over the island around her, so close to the continent of Sarras and yet not quite a part of it. She looked out over the fiery volcanic landscape she had crossed, and over the jungle of the rest. From here, she couldn’t see the small village that sought to contain the sick and the dying, those slowly transforming from the sickness into monstrous things that knew only hunger and death. Wasn’t it better to try this than to sit there, waiting for the bitter mercy of Kleos’s knife when she became too twisted?

Nerra stood there, waiting, trying to imagine the water working inside her. Should she have felt something by now? She knew herbs well enough to know that the effects were rarely instant, but somehow, she’d expected healing waters to be—

Nerra screamed as the pain hit her, so sharp and so all-consuming that it drove her to her knees once more. She clutched at her stomach as her body writhed with agony, her cries coming so quickly that she didn’t even have the breath for it.

Kleos hadn’t lied; the fountain was poison to those who drank from it. Nerra could feel the water within her now, twisting through her like some kind of barbed serpent, burning through her as if she had swallowed the volcano’s lava rather than mere water. She tried to throw it up, but it wouldn’t come; she didn’t even have enough control over herself for that.

“Please…” Nerra cried out.

She felt as if her whole body were tearing itself apart, muscle by muscle, bone by bone. It felt as if every scrap of her was at war with the rest, waging a conflict where she was the battlefield, the warriors and the barren plain it would leave behind, all life ripped from her.

“No…” Nerra cried out. She found herself thinking in that moment of everything she had been forced to leave behind in the Northern Kingdom, everything that she would never see again as the agony of the deadly waters ripped into her. She thought of her brothers and sisters, elegant Lenore and anything but elegant Erin, Rodry who was always so quick to charge in to defend others and Greave, who was so quiet and thoughtful. She even found herself thinking of Vars.

Above all of it though, she found herself thinking of the dragon she had found. In her mind’s eye, it was grown, impossibly quickly, its scales shining with a rainbow sheen, its wings spread wide as it soared. The image was so clear that Nerra looked up, half expecting to see it in the sky, as it had been when the bandits had come for her in the woods. It had carried her here, so why would it not be here?

She was alone, though; more alone than she’d ever been. Even in the forest, there had been animals, and a sense of peace. Now… now there was only the pain that filled her, twisted her, broke her. Nerra felt her arm snap, and she screamed with it, felt the muscles of her fingers contract so hard that they shattered the bones within.

Somewhere in it, she must have passed out from the pain, because she saw the dragon again, saw more dragons, rising again on Sarras, in flights and flocks that filled the sky. They spun above her, and then she was among them, taking in the multitude of their colors, black and red, gold and emerald and more.

She was on the ground now, moving through the remnants of buildings now far older than anything in the Northern Kingdom, things that looked as though they had been grown, not built. She thought she could see other figures moving among those buildings, flickering in the corners of her vision, yet every time she tried to turn her head to get a better view, it seemed that they scattered, fading away into the distance, impossible to catch up to.

Nerra tried to chase them, but they ran into tunnels where the walls seemed to shift and stretch even as Nerra plunged into them. It was this living stone that reached out for her, and grabbed her, and twisted her like clay until Nerra ran out of the breath even to scream anymore in her dreams.

Then she did the one thing she had never expected to do: she woke up.

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. The sun was still in the sky, but a dozen days might have passed for all Nerra knew. Her body ached with the memory of all the agony the water had put it through, and she felt so weak that…

No, wait; she didn’t feel weak. She felt thirsty, and hungry, and tired, but not weak. If anything, she felt strong. She stood, and for the first time in what seemed like a long time, there was no hint of dizziness as she did it. Even so, Nerra almost fell. The muscles of her legs felt… wrong, somehow. Different.

Even the world around her seemed different, changed somehow. The colors of it seemed subtly changed, as if she could see more of them than ever before, while it seemed that the smells of the jungle nearby were so strong that she could all but taste them.

Right now though, that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had survived. Did that mean… did it mean that she was cured? Had the fountain healed her?

Nerra barely dared to hope that it might be true, that she might have survived when so many others had died, but hope did start to rise in her. She was definitely alive, and all of the awful, bone-breaking sensations in her body were gone. If she was whole, was it too much to hope that she might also have been cured?

Then Nerra saw her arm. It was still a humanoid arm, not twisted into the hideous, misshapen things those with the dragon sickness became down in the village, but it was completely covered in iridescent scales of a deep blue. Muscles moved under the skin, far thicker than they had been before, and even as Nerra watched, she saw claws extend from her fingers, wickedly sharp-looking.

She cried out in shock at the sight of her arm like that, clawing at the scales, and there were claws with which to do it, which only made it feel worse. What was happening to her, what had she become? She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, and this had nothing to do with the illness and everything to do with the sheer strangeness of what was happening. She took a step back, but that only took her toward the pool of water. She couldn’t stop herself; she had to look.

The being that stared back at her was utterly changed from who she had been, and yet not the broken, twisted thing that she had been so scared of becoming. Nerra could only stare at it for long seconds, unable to make sense of it, horror, shock, and sheer fascination battling for supremacy within her.

Her skin was scaled, her eyes yellow as a snake’s, her features extended into something more draconic, yet there was an undeniable symmetry and beauty to those features. Nera would have rejected it all, even so, but there was still something about them that reminded Nerra of herself. Even the memory of her hair was there, in frond-like strands that were more like the crest of a lizard. Her body was just as scaled, and more muscled with it, able to move in sinuous ways thanks to the rearrangement of her joints, yet she didn’t look like a monster.

“Of course I’m a monster!” she said aloud, and her voice was the only part of her that didn’t seem changed. That made it worse, somehow, not better. How could that part of her be the same, when so much of the rest of her was so twisted? A thought came to her, that none of her family would recognize her now, that she had lost everything. Rage came up inside her, swift and sudden and total, and she picked up a lump of temple masonry and crushed it between her hands. It was only as she did it that she realized just how strong this new form had become.

The rage was still there, and Nerra could feel it fighting to bubble up, to take her over, the way all the transformed ones in the village turned into mindless things. Nerra fought back against that, against the shock, against the sheer grief of this transformation, forcing all of it down inside her, refusing to become anything like that. She clung to the side of the pool, staring down into the water, forcing herself to look at this changed version of who she was until she thought she could bear it.

The fountain hadn’t killed her, hadn’t healed her, it had changed her. It had been like a catalyst for the transformation the sickness brought, but it had taken her right past the twisted forms it usually created, into being something sleek and lithe, lizard-like and human all at once.

Nerra didn’t know what to do with that thought, didn’t know how to get past the shock of what she was, what she’d become. She didn’t understand this, didn’t know what to do next. She needed to know what was going on, and what had happened to her, but there was only one place she could think of that she might get answers, and that was one where they might kill her just for what she was.

Striding out over the surface of the volcano, Nerra set off back in the direction of the village.