Chương 153: 11. People of a Millennium Past 2

By evening, the bad feeling had delivered on its promise. It started with a sound in the sea wind that didn't belong to nature. Unlike the deep, hull-against-water rumble of the warship circling last night, this was lighter—closer to the shoreline—the sound of something sliding into shallow water. When I pressed myself low and looked through the gap in the shack wall, the first thing I saw wasn't a vessel. It was silhouettes moving through the sea fog.

Though calling all of them "people" might have been technically generous. The figures were taller than average, but their movements had an unnatural fluidity—a quality of gliding through the damp air rather than walking through it. Some wore dark waterproof cloaks, their footsteps nearly silent on the reef sand. Others carried crossbows on their backs, short hooks and coiled rope at their hips—the equipment of people intimately familiar with this kind of wet, treacherous terrain.

They'd come ashore from several shallow-draft skiffs, hulls painted so dark they'd approached like ghosts. My throat went dry after just a few seconds of watching.

"They're here," I said quietly. Ignicia had appeared at my shoulder without my noticing. She took one look through the gap, and her expression went stone-cold.

"Sea-dragon people." She said it with icy finality—not identification, but confirmation of bad news she'd already predicted.

"So last night's ship really was just marking the target." I looked out again. These weren't a disorganized search party. They didn't scatter and start tearing through the island at random. They fanned out, moved quickly to secure elevated positions and confirm the direction of the water source—their movements carrying the efficiency of people checking a familiar warehouse.

"They know this place," I said quietly.

"Too well." Ignicia's voice barely moved.

"This isn't an improvised search. They know which side of the island to land on, and they know which positions to secure first." Which meant this was almost certainly not a deserted island at all, but a node on someone's route. And worse, that route had apparently been entangled with the sea-dragon clans and the Blazing Yanxia Empire for some time. I looked back at her.

"Can we fight?"

"Yes," she answered immediately. I'd started to exhale when she added:"But after that, I'll probably have about half a quarter-hour of flight left before we both go into the ocean."

"... Forget I asked." She made a cold sound and turned her gaze toward the back of the island.

"The spring. We go that way." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"You said we weren't going in yet."

"I changed my mind." This was one of the most valuable lessons I'd accumulated from our time together: the Dragon Princess's judgment was usually accurate, and whenever she changed her mind, it meant the situation had deteriorated past the point where the original plan was viable. We slipped out through the back of the shack immediately, keeping low, using tree shadows and natural terrain to move toward the spring. We didn't get far before our luck proved, once again, entirely consistent.

A short whistle cut through the air behind us—then the sound of brush being pushed aside. Not the noise of an unfocused search, but the rhythm of people signaling after finding evidence. They'd found the traces of habitation around the shack.

"Faster," I said quietly.

"Shut up. I know that better than you do." She kept that sharp edge right up until her feet were already moving faster. I guided her through the thicket, half-pulling and half-pushing branches aside until we'd uncovered the dark grey panel we'd carefully concealed that morning. This time I noticed something I'd missed: on one side of the panel was a protrusion—not quite a handle, not quite a lever—mostly buried under layers of dirt and vine roots. I grabbed it and pulled. Nothing. I tried pressing down. Nothing.

"Move," Ignicia said. I moved. She placed her palm against a recessed groove beside the panel. A deep crimson-gold light bloomed in her palm—not pure flame, but something more concentrated, a focused current of heat that she pushed directly into the material. Nothing happened at first. I was about to ask if she was certain she wasn't just pressing random surfaces when a vibration rose from somewhere deep beneath us. That sound made every hair on my body stand on end.

It didn't sound like rock shifting or a mechanical trigger. It sounded like an enormous iron organism that had been buried for thousands of years, finally stirring in its sleep. Dust and cold air burst from the seams in the panel. Then came a steadier sound—a deep, subsurface flow, like wind being pulled from another world into this underground structure by force. I took half a step back and raised my hand over my mouth and nose.

"What in the—""Ventilation," she said, with the calm of someone cracking a window.

"Keep walking without it and you'll suffocate eventually." I looked at her.

"You can read ancient script?"

"A little." She withdrew her hand. Something in her expression shifted—a slight, deliberate avoidance of eye contact.

"I learned it when I was bored."

"A Dragon Princess's version of 'bored' sounds considerably more industrious than anything humans manage when we're trying." She made a dismissive sound and had already turned to walk on—then stopped, half a beat, as though something had surfaced unexpectedly.

"If you want to learn," she said quietly, "next time... I wouldn't be opposed to teaching you." I blinked. She'd delivered that sentence at speed—the speed of someone hoping to drop it into a crack in the floor before the other person could process it. And her ears, I noticed, had gone slightly red. That image, set against the backdrop of this ancient facility that felt like a crypt with architectural ambitions, was so cosmically mismatched I nearly lost my composure entirely. I didn't.

Because I valued my continued existence.

"Let's survive this first," I said, with complete sincerity. She shot me a look. This time she didn't argue. The footsteps in the passage behind us were getting closer. We moved without discussion. Ignicia swept the space with a quick scan and located a large metal frame nearby—half-toppled, some kind of ancient transport chassis with flat wheel housings long since rusted solid. Without a word, she grabbed the side and dragged. Metal shrieked against stone.

I watched her—wounds barely suppressed, somehow moving this thing with her bare hands—and couldn't stop myself.

"Your Highness, aren't you still recovering?"

"I am recovering," she said coldly.

"Not decorating." She shoved the massive frame into the passage entrance, jamming it across the center of the corridor. Then she tore a half-collapsed shelf panel free and wedged it diagonally on top. The whole process had all the elegance of controlled demolition, but the result was considerably more useful than anything polite would have achieved. Almost exactly as she finished, the first impact came from the other side.