Chapter 51: Bzzzt!

“Did you and Biscuit meet here?” The question plucked them straight out of the probable horrors of smacking somebody with a rock they were all imagining. And Sylph could not hide her curiosity about the kinda odd and open couple.

“Oh yes,” Elina chirped and leaned against the bars, glancing over her own shoulder as she talked. “We met while cleaning up after a party for Nahana’s fortieth hatching day.” She started a hearty giggle as she continued. “It was great, so many leftovers and wine for us. Biscuit was pretty new to the kitchen staff, kinda awkward about indulging. Until we got a bit buzzed.”

Biscuit awkwardly looked down at the floor as he pulled himself upright on the cell door. “It is not fit for a cook to eat leftovers, or so I thought. Then I realized it would all go in the trash if we didn’t. That day was almost worth the punishment.”

“Almost? Was I not entirely worth it?” Elina playfully flicked his wings with hers before she turned back to Sylph. “Ever scrubbed a kitchen seven times?”

“Seven times? That seems excessive,” Sylph sat down in her cell, “who did you piss off?”

“It was two times after being caught by the chef in the pantry the first time.” Elina brought up her pfod to count. “Two dragons, two times the scrubbing he said.”

“Two more after being caught the second time in the storage room,” Biscuit continued. Elina counted, and Sylph regretted asking.

“After that, the head chef had a guard watch us closely, and that he sure did.” Elina winked at Sylph.

“Being caught that time, the chef threatened me with losing my job. But scrubbing the whole place down with three dragons was far faster. Plenty of time to get to know each other.”

Sylph shook her head. She had expected something a bit more secretive, considering they were both servants. “Nahana’s punishments are insane. Why would you risk that?”

Elina looked at Sylph with a glint in her eyes. “It was autumn. And Nahana has no interest in the kitchen at all.” She pressed the tip of her snout back through the bars. “But enough about us. What about you? Anybody waiting for you back home?”

Sylph never considered a relationship. Sure, there were some she might have fancied, but she could not get physically close anyway, so she never bothered to follow those thoughts. “I’ve not met a dragon like that. Apparently, that also makes me less of an Aer if Nahana is concerned.”

Elina scratched the side of a bar. “Nahana is wrong. Being physical is only a part of it.” She scraped away a bit of rust. “Back in the mountains, in our tribes, we had two sides, two philosophies. One only believes only in pleasure, the other in love.”

Elina turned to Biscuit, and their tails twined anew. “I don’t think it is that easy. The way I feel towards Biscuit is how I feel towards quite a few others, but if I had to choose, I’d pick him again. It’s not that Aer don’t love, it’s the opposite, we have far too much love to give. Occasionally it is for the thrill. They are beautiful, exciting and you just crave a piece of that. Most times, I wish to understand them more intimately, see what makes them act, and feel the way they do. And sometimes one dragon just ticks more boxes than the rest.”

Biscuit grabbed her and pulled her close. “My heart beats for her only. But I’ve come to accept her ways and grown strangely fond.”

Sylph felt as though she was no longer part of the conversation as Elina laughed. That was until she fixated her again with her deep black eyes. “Metia have to choose wisely, Sol rarely get a choice at all. It is up to us Aer, to spread all the love we have. You are allowed to experiment and to fail. There is no harm in trying. You are always invited once we make it out of here, the more the merrier.”

“I’ll pass on that.” Sylph took a cautious step backwards. While Elina probably meant well, the things she said were uncomfortable at best, even though her voice oozed with sweet, comforting words that begged her to reconsider despite the expected outcome of pain.

Biscuit jumped up. “We should go back to work. We’ll be back tonight with the keys.”

Sylph’s tail fell flat on the floor. “I figured it was nearly time to start?”

“Sylph, it’s early morning. Most servants have not even gotten up. You should get some sleep too. The guard will bring you some food come midday.”

She had severely lost track of time. It had been a day already. Judging by her empty stomach, it could very well be the truth. “See you tonight, in that case.”

********************

Heeding their advice, Sylph found a little sleep before the thunk of a sparse meal dropped in front woke her. After making quick work of the small loaf of gray bread and thin soup, she waited, and worried. Their escape plan depended on an overly eager dragoness seducing a guard and, when put like that, it sounded anything but promising.

After a few hours passed, she guessed it should be nighttime. A metallic chirp, followed by a thump, echoed down the corridor with the same surprised urgency as a bucket dropped down a well. Sylph jumped to attention. Nothing should have made such a sound.

Claws scraped over stone in the rhythm of a desperate run. Biscuit and Elina slid to a halt in front of her cell. Biscuit panted and held up the key-ring with a shaking pfod. Elina stared right past, the dark scales on her face drained of all color. Something must have happened. Perhaps they hit him too hard.

Between sharp breaths, Biscuit fumbled the key into the lock on his third try. Sylph snatched the keys from his pfod as soon as she fit through the half-opened door and hurried to Brandon.

“We are getting out of here,” she said and tried for the right key. Brandon faced the wall and his large incoherent scribbles done with a small piece of limestone. He was not as bored as she was. The symbols and ingredients appeared alchemical. One of them meant silver, but the rest might as well be gibberish to her. Sylph fumbled with the keys as much as Biscuit, finding them slipping through her digits and made to be unshapely on purpose.

“I had an idea,” Brandon said, and Sylph knew she was in for a small lecture. Now was not the time. Brandon spun around on the spot to face her with a bright smile, but she could not help but notice the dark crevices beneath his eyes. “Our talk inspired me. If we grow above the past, why shouldn’t my alchemy match it?” He turned to peek down the corridor at the servants. “I’ll tell you later. Did everything go according to plan?”

“I—” Elina stammered and tapped the floor with her claws without rhythm, “The guard will not be a problem. Now we are doing this and-, it has started and- and there is no way back now, is there?” The excitement in her voice quivered as much as the terror in her emotions. Biscuit enveloped her with his wings, and she stopped shivering for but a second.

Perhaps it was best not to ask what happened. They had the keys; the guard was down; it was all that mattered. “We gotta move. Washroom or bath? Which one is closer?” Sylph pressed on. While she felt awful about pushing them, they had no time to waste.

Biscuit let go of Elina and lumbered to the front. “Follow me. I hope you are right about this.”

Elina trailed behind them, staring at the ground. Sylph turned to Brandon and whispered. “Please, keep an eye on her.” Leaving her to follow behind in that state was a recipe for disaster.

They passed through the dimly lit, narrow passages and Sylph caught the shimmer of a red puddle under the cold light. The lifeless corpse of the guard rested against the wall, face in the puddle. Sylph swallowed hard, and the group held their breath as they walked past.

They had killed him. She tried to pay as little attention as possible, but the macabre scene, the limp wings and the scales devoid of all life beneath the haphazardly thrown on armor, it commanded her to look, to see what their escape had done. In the last moments, the young Metia clutched his throat and- Sylph stopped in her tracks. While the crimson puddle grew to twice the size of his head, she had seen worse nosebleeds on the training field. A silent, desperate wheeze tickled her ears as he failed to hold his breath any longer.

“He is just pretending!” Sylph lunged forward, grabbed his collar, and pinned the guard to the ground.

“No, I am dead!” he wheezed.

“Sylph, no.” Elina dashed past, her earlier desperation gone and struggled to pry her pfod away from his collar. Sylph forced her back to charge. Had they betrayed her?

“Asking Elina to do such a thing, you are as much as a monster as your mother,” the guard wriggled beneath her, but made no actual attempt to escape.

Elina tried her hardest to push Sylph’s arm aside without success. “I knew I could convince him. And I did.” Realizing the futility of pushing, she pushed her head between Sylph and the guard’s, facing her directly. “Honestly, not everybody is a loyalist to the extreme. He took this job to take care of his grandmother. How could I hurt someone that just does this job for his only family?”

Sylph peered down at the guard beneath her, and things did not add up. She would not have put somebody as young as him on duty, so why did Nahana? He was perhaps in his mid-twenties, the armor he wore far too large for his body and needed to be grown into. While he might put up a proper fight against her, right now he looked up with slim and sorry eyes and she could see tears well up as he mentally prepared for the worst. “He could tell her we ran the second he is free. I don’t trust him being here. He is small and weak. Nahana does not do that without a plan.”

Elina flared her wings. “Why would she waste one of her senior guards in the dungeon? There are literally only two ways out, both guarded. Nobody ever escaped the cells before, either. You are not thinking like her. Nahana does not have a hundred guards to command around. So while the big boys are out there in the streets looking impressive and menacing, the small boys are in here, where nothing ever happens.”

Sylph felt the guard trying to nod. “It does not stop her from dividing our shifts like we were a hundred, though. I am mainly here to scream if I have to. I didn’t.”

“We did not want to hurt him, so we settled on faking his death,” Elina sounded quite proud of that idea. “Is there even a difference between being knocked out and pretending to be?”

Sylph turned to Brandon for support. This had not been the plan. Why would she choose to randomly trust some guard to keep that secret? Maybe it was wishful thinking that someone was on her side, or maybe this was all a trap laid out by her mother. The young guard, looking sorry instead of fierce because Nahana knew Sylph would choose not to hurt somebody like that. Nahana knew she would believe that story Elina had just told her. Nahana was always ahead of her in knowing.

Sylph charged up the organs in her back and closed her pfods around the guard’s head, squeezing his snout closed so hard her claws drew blood. A knocked out guard could not have seen them, but now he did. His eyes went wide, and he wiggled in desperation. He knew what this meant; he had seen it too.

“Don’t!” Elina screamed.

There was a second of silence.

“Bzzt!” Sylph made a hissing sound with her mouth and let go of the guard’s head. “You are dead. I fried your brain, am I clear? I am just terrible at it, so I don’t know that you survived it.”

The guard sighed and let his head drop into the puddle. “Thank you. My lips are sealed.”

“Dead dragons don’t talk.”

The guard silently nodded.

Elina pushed her forward. “I knew you were not like your mother. You have a heart.” Without the influence of a burning dragonheart, her touch sent a painful sting through her side.

Elina was slightly wrong about that. The decision had been made with a sound logic in mind. “I figured that if this was all on purpose, then Nahana knows anyway and there is no need for me to hurt him.”

The expansive network of caves stretched and wound itself through the rock in an even worse pattern than Sylph recalled. Echoes bounced multiple times on the low-ceilings and the few lightglobes barely lit the way enough to not step on your own pfod. It was then that Biscuit reached into his satchel and brought out a pointlight. He shook it and attached it to his shoulder. Unlike the one Sylph had at home, it shone in a dim orange that only helped to illuminate the darkest shadows enough to be able to safely walk. The servants must use them at night to not disturb anybody with a sudden bright shine.

Brandon walked up and flanked her. “You know, I was not sure what you would do with the guard.”

“Me neither. I considered it just to be ahead of Nahana, to be sure that he could not talk.” She took a long look at her claws. “I hate to be the one making such a decision. What if I made the wrong choice?”

“Then you at least saved somebody from being sacrificed for Nahana’s ploy.”

A soft, muffled footfall reached Sylph’s ears. “I hear someone. Up ahead.” She stopped and pressed herself against the wall.

“Don’t worry, he does not walk past here,” Elina said and continued after Biscuit, who had simply passed Sylph’s attempt at hiding in an open corridor. “He handles the arena’s storage locker.”

Blindly following what they claimed was not her favorite thing to do, but they knew how to move around beneath the palace. They spoke no word, listening and imagining an ambush around every corner that had Sylph’s dragonheart in a constant state of embering in her chest. A few minutes later, they passed through a paved arch and entered a larger hallway with trodden ground. “We are now below the arena, in the publicly accessible parts of the palace,” Biscuit nodded, “nearly there.”

“How do you find anything in this maze?” Sylph had tried to remember which path they took, but the maze lacked all landmarks to orient by. It was all just sandstone walls and sand and rock.

Biscuit pointed his shoulder and the light at the wall. “These markings.”

What Sylph believed to be acts of vandalization at the edges actually showed the way. The symbols and shapes looked like branches of a tree.

“That is a brilliant way to navigate,” Brandon stepped closer to inspect. Sylph kept staring, but the lines would not share their mysteries.

While Biscuit and Elina nonchalantly walked through the near dark, Sylph kept at attention. If she had been wrong, these corridors were the perfect place to trap them against a wall. None of her worries proved correct as Biscuit shone the light at a sign depicting a dragon crouching above a stream of water.

“I hope you are right about the drains,” Biscuit said, and pushed open the door with great care. Sylph’s first glance went to the large stream of water in the back, vaguely hidden by a chest high room divider. It appeared to be much larger than the one in Nahana’s private quarters, so even Biscuit should have no problems fitting through the drain. Then the smell hit her like a wall, as if it had all built up against the door to jump her.

Biscuit gagged, as did Brandon. “Great day to have a terrible nose,” Sylph snorted and stepped inside.