Chapter Seventeen
“Nngh—nngh!” The Little White Dragon shoved an old, rust-scabbed iron bar upward, sweat beading like dew, prying open a gap she could snake through.
“I’ll go first. You wait here.” The slit was too tight; even crouching, Nidhogg couldn’t fit. Lilith slipped past the barricade of rusted frames and plates, while the Little White Dragon lifted her Astrolabe, its glow white as moonmilk.
“You can come—something braces it from the back.” Lilith wriggled through; star-bright light pooled around her boots. Behind her, the tangle of iron was a briar of angles, and her smooth, plain-like head wasn’t built for scheming out safe dismantling.
She spotted a post wedged behind the barrier, holding the whole mess up like a tree under snow. With that support, she could widen the slit, and Nidhogg could follow.
No hesitation. Her rose-white long blade slid in, like a hot knife through butter. She peeled a plate free, iron sighing, then waved to Nidhogg with a grin like sunlight.
“Hurry up. We’ve got ground to cover!”
They were wrestling with a wall of scrap because of what happened after they left the tavern. The Little White Dragon aimed for Bosaklie’s underbelly. They’d already reached the lowest residential tier; deeper down lay the unlucky laborers and day-hire drifters, huddled around the city’s meanest, oldest furnaces that breathed black smoke like wounded beasts.
She planned to slip into those soot-belching bellies and scout for a way down. The furnaces were shabby, but guards circled like crows; maybe they feared someone would get burned, maybe they just hoarded rules. Either way, a license-less Lilith wasn’t welcome in Bosaklie’s deepest industrial maze.
So she took another path. Her head might be empty as a swept plain, but her road-sense was a fox in fog. Even Nidhogg and Litt together couldn’t match her nose for ways.
Tail swaying like a cattail in wind, Lilith hunted the alleys. In heavy white mist, she locked onto a deeply hidden lane, and on intuition alone she slipped in. A rotting, barely used door waited there, warped like driftwood.
Curiosity pushed; she eased it open. A passage yawned beyond, its walls splashed in red and white paint, scrawled with Common words like graffiti on rain-stained stone.
Filthy curses covered it, sharp as thorns. By the tone, kids had written them—little adventurers who found a “secret tunnel,” then learned the under-city was only filth and stink, no wonders, and vented their fury with the dirtiest words they knew.
Ugly or not, a tunnel is still a vein through stone. Lilith could follow it down to Bosaklie’s deepest layer.
No speeches—thank you, nature’s gift and all that. They took that narrow vein, slipping deeper into the iron heart. The Little White Dragon passed soot-spraying furnaces, threaded black fog like smoke-silk, and pried away barriers one by one, hunting the secret Bosaklie buried like bone in sand.
“What do you think waits ahead?” Her voice was bright as a bell as she opened a wider route. Nidhogg moved with her. Beyond the iron-sheet barricade, the ground shed its ash and ember-dust like a snake sheds skin. In place of furnace grit, pale gold unfurled—exactly like in her memory—like a river of melted sunlight flowing underfoot, guiding them forward.
“What are these golden things?” she asked, head tilted. Lilith knew that thick pale gold came from somewhere in dreams—likely the Golden Dragon—but she didn’t know what it truly was.
“Maybe the Golden Dragon’s blood,” Nidhogg said, voice low as distant thunder. “He’s older than dragonkind itself. Even when life ends, and the soul returns to the Star Canvas, and bone sinks back to the earth, his blood doesn’t dry. Time can’t scour it away. It endures.”
“Dragon blood should run to the sea,” he went on, sand-breath steady. “But this desert won’t let it leave. The pale-gold current becomes part of Bosaklie—inseparable—as his bones already serve as the city’s spine.”
Lilith nodded, eyes reflecting that river-light. She didn’t grasp the lore, but the feeling was enough—the golden stream would carry the Little White Dragon to the truth she craved.
“Nidhogg, look—what’s that?” Her voice jumped like a sparrow. Ahead, a knot of gold pulsed, bright as sunrise. Curiosity tugged her forward; tap-tap-tap went her small steps.
“Don’t sprint.” She darted anyway, a white streak in gold haze. Nidhogg called a few times, but her wonder drowned his words. He sighed like wind over dunes. After the Grand Mausoleum, her growth was more than a handspan; she was no longer the Little White Dragon whose legs Sakunae Mashiro could snap like twigs. Ordinary dangers had lost their teeth.
But this gold-lit place wasn’t ordinary. Worry pricked him like thorns; the Black Dragon followed close, shadow to her heel.
“Wow.” Curiosity bloomed like a lantern. She reached the glow, which matched her memory like mirror to moon. Guided by that remembered script, she opened the thin, skin-like film around the light with practiced hands, as if she’d done it a hundred times.
The membrane peeled back. No stored memory waited. No skeleton of the Golden Dragon lay within. Instead, a crimson soul floated in the center like a coal ember in frost.
“Hello,” the soul said.
