Astra's POV
I raced down the dirt, and by the time I stepped into the tunnels, I was desperately struggling for breath.
Air rushed in and out of my throat, each stinging just as it cools my insides.
I glanced back, and the iron gate looked like it was miles away. The city seemed to have vanished behind me.
The glow from the warning rune had faded. I waited for a while to steady myself, and then I ventured into the tunnels. And soon, light was quickly replaced by a sickly blue shimmer bleeding from veins of crystal embedded in the stone walls.
Mana. Real mana.
My breath caught, my lungs taking a brutal pause that almost made me surge forward.
Even the smallest shard of crystal glittered like trapped starlight, humming faintly. They glittered beneath my fingers when I brushed past one. The boys hadn't lied.
They were indeed crystals in the tunnel. No wonder the highborns had kept it guarded and made-up stories of a human-eating dragon to scare everyone away.
They were merely protecting their crystal mine.
Hope flared in my chest, my eyes sparkling, glinting like the stones themselves.
Finally, I can save mother and father from the disease, I can quicken Nathan's recovery, and I can change our lives for the better.
A tentative smile built carefully on my lips as I considered the endless possibilities of how our lives would change with even just one crystal.
I moved carefully, barefoot steps echoing softly against damp stone.
The air grew colder the deeper I went into the tunnels, and heavy with moisture, it soaked into my skin, my bones.
Gradually, the walls began to shift from the longer rough-hewn mine-like walls to being carved.
Runes spiraled across the stones, and they glowed a faint red. I leaned closer to read some, but I could understand nothing. The characters certainly weren't Nirvadian, or maybe ancient Nirvardian.
Some of the runes were fractured, others pulsed faintly as if reacting to my presence.
I shouldn't be here. If I didn't know that, the runes on the walls were a hint that perhaps the elites' stories hadn't been all lies. Runes meant magic, and I could almost feel magic pulsing in the air as I felt breath in my lungs. I felt so much magic in the cave than I had ever experienced in all my years as a Nirvadian.
Enough sightseeing. Lower tunnels, I reminded myself. Just the lower tunnels. Grab what you can and leave. Greediness, I had learnt, was quite dangerous.
I turned around and moved to pluck a shard of crystal from the wall when the ground suddenly sloped downward without warning.
I barely had time to gasp before my foot slid on slick stone. The world lurched around me. I screamed, and the tunnels swallowed every sound I made, no echo, no nothing.
I tumbled weightlessly like paper on the cold floor until the tunnel floor vanished beneath me, and I fell.
I had no idea how high I fell, but when I hit a stone. It was rough, and it was with a force that sent unimaginable agony through me, rendering every nerve a conduit of pain.
For a long moment, I could only lie there, gasping and fighting for air, the sound too loud in the sudden, cavernous silence around me.
It must have taken me an hour or probably more, or even less, to get some control over my own body, and I lifted my head. My heart stuttered instantly, my eyes jumping around, wild, hunting for familiarity and yet finding none.
This was no longer a tunnel. It was a chamber.
The ceiling arched impossibly high, and lost in darkness, supported by massive stone pillars etched with similar runes from the tunnels.
The air shimmered with dormant magic, thick enough that I could almost taste it. Crystals weren't embedded here—they grew from the ground like jagged trees. It was a miracle one was sticking through my body.
Their light dimmed and steadied, bathing the chamber in a ghostly glow.
And at its center—I froze on the ground I sat on, my hands covering my mouth to smother my scream, while ice slithered up my spine.
Oh! Mother Goddess, I screamed in my head, half of which made it out, echoing loud in the silence as ghostly as the monstrosity before me.
The massive creature lay coiled around a raised stone dais.
Scales the color of obsidian caught the crystal's light, its vast wings folded tight against a powerful body. Spines ran along its back, sharp, yet perfectly still. Chains—enormous and glowing faintly with ancient enchantments—wrapped around its limbs and torso, binding it to the platform.
A dragon. A living, breathing dragon.
I couldn't move. Each breath was a torture down my lungs. The stories hadn't entirely been lies. It was indeed a dragon—just one in a sort of magical sleep.
Each slow breath it took sent a ripple through its chest, the sound low and deep, like distant thunder trapped underground. Heat radiated from its body, warming the air around it despite the chill of the chamber.
My knees trembled, threatening to give way. Dragons were believed to be extinct. All had died in the numerous magical wars that had befallen humanity over the centuries.
The mages had worked collectively to kill them all when they realized they couldn't be entirely controlled and would crush humanity if left alone.
How could this one be living? And why was it trapped instead of killed like the rest of its kin?
How…
I decided to forget about all that. One mantra rang through my head. Leave. Now.
I staggered to my feet. I didn't care about the mana stones anymore. I had to get out alive.
I turned toward the chamber wall, and I saw it. A stone pillar near the exit bore a cluster of runes unlike the others, and a faint, pulsing glow gathered at their center, where a small crystal lever protruded from the rock.
It could be my way out. Considering the height I had fallen, I certainly couldn't leave the way I came.
Even though every breath in me warned not to touch it yet, I edged around it, careful, my breath shallow. My footsteps were unsteady, dragging on the stone floor.
Somehow, my foot caught on a loose chain, and I stumbled forward, my fingers flailing for balance.
My hand closed around the crystal lever, and it pulled.
Instantly, the world shifted around me, and magic surged.
The runes flared a blinding white, light flooding the chamber as the chains binding the dragon screamed in protest. A thunderous crack split the air.
I yanked my hand back, heart pounding so hard I thought it might tear free from my chest.
Then the dragon moved. One massive claw twitched, and then another.
The chamber shook as its wings unfurled with a sound like tearing stone. Chains snapped, one by one, the enchantments failing under a sudden surge of power.
What have I done? I muttered to myself.
I was still trying to think up an answer to that when the Dragon's eyes snapped open, and a molten gold gaze fixed on me.
I watched the consequences of my thoughtless action come alive before me, and fear unlike any I have ever witnessed barreled through me.
The dragon inhaled deeply. And gradually, its form began to shift, slowly, carefully.
At this point, I could do nothing but watch quietly.
I had seen so many strange things being born as a Nirvadian in this magical age, but what I hadn't seen and would never have mentally prepared for was watching a dragon shift into a man.
I could practically feel my brain frying itself up in my head. I followed every bit of transformation, the ritual of snapping bones, the merging of skin tissues, everything, until the dragon became a tall, broad-shouldered man. It happened effortlessly and quietly as if he merely changed a skin and not an entire form.
The man who emerged before me was perhaps the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
His eyes were of a molten amber, glowing with danger and pure evil as his face darkened to a tight snarl. Long black hair flowing over massive shoulders, and a body built like a super warrior's. Huge muscle, not bulky, every inch of which rippled with strength.
There was nowhere to run to. I had to wait and watch quietly until he walked to me.
The hate in his eyes didn't ease even for once as he paused before me, sizing me up, sniffing me, while my heart beat so hard, it drowned my loud breath and every other sound from my ears.
In one sudden moment, my neck was trapped between his thick fingers, and I was gasping for air. My windpipe protested for release.
When he spoke, his deep voice reverberated through my bones and soul. "Why did you release me, human?" He snapped at me. "Do you have any idea what doom you have just unleashed on your world?"