Prince of Time

Chapter Forty - Dragon Gold

Nicanor awoke with a quiet groan. The place where he lay was hardly comfortable. He shifted and a million tiny sounds clink-clinked beneath him. He breathed deeply and his lungs rattled, full of the smell of sulphur.

“You wake,” a voice intoned. “You are not dead.”

Nicanor’s voice rasped when he spoke. “Good to know.”

He opened his eyes slowly, his eyelashes seeming to have glued themselves together. Faintly golden light swum into his blurred vision. He groaned as he sat up, head spinning, trying to blink his sight clear.

“You are curiously resilient,” the voice added.

Nicanor closed his eyes again and raised his hands to his head, which pounded like a million hooves trampling across his brain. He didn’t care where he was as his senses slowly returned to him. He only wanted to curl up and die.

“It would help you to drink water,” the voice continued, without sympathy. “You’re on the edge of a lake.”

Nicanor forced his eyes open and, this time, his vision cleared correctly. His mouth fell open in wonder at the place he was in, a million miles from a sensible reality.

 The cavern was the size of a cathedral, the vast vaulted roof disappearing into the shadows above. A few torches glowed with flickering orange flames and the flames reflected off…everything.

 The cavern was full of treasure. Foothills of jewels swept up into mountains of gold. Coins twinkled beside glittering gems. Necklaces lay with goblets amongst bejewelled daggers. Anything, everything, a small country’s worth of wealth held within one place.

  Nicanor lay upon a heap of sacks, their hessian sides split open to reveal a trickle of coins spreading across the floor towards the dark waters of the lake which reflected the rainbows thrown by the riches on its shore.

 Nicanor’s gaze rose across the lake, chasing over the water to where it stopped and only a rough rock ledge the size of a ballroom remained. On that ledge stood a sight that Nicanor had never seen and yet had always longed to behold.

“Drink,” the dragon said. “The water will not harm you.”

It was a real dragon, an ancient dragon. Not the green and red, fire-bellied, easily tamed dragons flown by the dragon riders of Merdia. An old dragon of the mountains, one beyond the reach of humankind for centuries, perhaps thousands of years.

 The head was noble, the eyes full of passion and fury and wisdom and grace. They were black as darkest pits, deep as fathomless oceans. It was indescribably huge not in the way mountains are huge, as if they were part of the landscape so you never notice, but in the way a castle could be huge, dominating the world, bending the universe.

 The scales across its body shimmered, a bedazzling mix of red and green and gold and black. Nicanor found himself mesmerized, entranced. He was a dragon rider. It was in his soul. And this was everything that he had lived for.

 But his more material side wouldn’t let him marvel for long. He leant forward and trailed his fingers in the cold water. His nerves flared painfully, startled into life. He ducked his head down and drank.

 It was icy and made his teeth ache but it refreshed his throat, washed the taste of ash from his mouth and allowed the pain in his head to ease slightly. Nicanor sat back, acutely aware of his own vulnerability.

“Why am I here?” he asked.

The dragon regarded him for a long moment. “You fell.”

“Into an underground cavern?” Nicanor tried not to sound too suspicious. “I don’t think so.”