They moved through slag before the sun had thought to lift its head and the snow beneath them carried soot like memory carries blame. Hadrun went last with his ruined foot scoring the white as if some future dwarf might follow that crooked line back to a moment before the killing started. The mountains rose black as apostasy. No bird flew there. The wind made a sound like ore carts emptied of their purpose. He had seen forty-three dragons die. Each one he held in the stone vault behind his eyes where a man keeps things he cannot afford to speak. The first had burned so bright the cavern wept with light and the smell of its dying had been sweet almost like bread or like spring though he knew nothing of spring having been born in the deep places where seasons were a rumor. The last few had gone quietly with smoke instead of flame and their eyes at the end held something close to recognition which was worse than rage worse than the thrashing worse than the sound wings make when they understand the air will not hold them anymore. Brin walked ahead with his hammer slung across his back and the eagerness coming off him like heat from a forge. He had never seen the sky go dark with wings. He had never heard the old songs sung without irony. For him the dragons were mythology made flesh and killing them was a kind of prayer he had been born to speak. The priestess walked between them with her hands touching stone wherever she could as if reading scripture written in granite. Her lips moved but no sound came or if it did the wind took it before it could become meaning. She had told Hadrun once that the mountain used to sing low and constant like a mother humming to a child who could not sleep. Now there was only silence and beneath the silence something that might have been a heartbeat or might have been her own blood lying to her about comfort. They passed through a city the old dwarves had carved when the world still made sense. Statues lined the avenue with their heads broken off at the neck by hands that needed something to destroy when faith began to feel like failure. Hadrun ran his fingers along claw marks in the wall deep gouges that ran vertical like something trying to hold on or something being dragged down into the earth's embrace. The stone there still held warmth if you knew how to feel for it a phantom heat that lived in the rock the way grief lives in a name you cannot say. In his pack he carried the notebook bound in dragonhide its pages filled with marks he could not read. A human scribe had made them generations back before humans stopped coming to the deep places before the dwarves stopped letting them. Hadrun would open it at night and press charcoal to paper making shapes that meant nothing practicing a literacy of ash and witness. He told himself he was recording the hunts but what he was really doing was trying to remember how to regret which was a skill his people had bred out of themselves the way you breed the light-hunger out of pit ponies. On the fifth day they found the temple. Most of it had been unmade with hammers and systematic rage but one wall remained where the iconoclasts had maybe grown tired or maybe seen something that made them stop. A mural mostly chiseled into abstraction. Hadrun sat before it while the others slept their breath misting in the cold that had started to feel permanent. He traced the faint lines with fingers black from years of handling char. A dragon's head bowed low. A circle of dwarves with their hands open not clenched. Fire passed between them like a gift like an agreement like a thing that could only work if both sides remembered they were necessary. The runes he could not parse but the image spoke a language older than runes. This was not subjugation. This was not war. This was something his people had worked very hard to forget the way you forget the face of someone you betrayed so thoroughly that seeing them again would mean admitting what you are. The priestess woke and found him there. She looked at the wall and her face did something complicated. When she spoke her voice came from a long way off. The stone is forgetting how to be warm she said. When the last fire goes we will all be weight and no heat. Just the pressing down of things with no light to see by. Brin wanted to keep moving. He had the hunger of a man who needs his myth confirmed. For him the dragon was a monster and killing it was the only story that made sense of his life. He did not want complexity. He wanted a villain clean and simple something his hammer could solve. They found the lair on the seventh day in a cavern that opened to a wound of sky. The dragon lay coiled around eggs that would not hatch. It was old beyond old scales sloughing like bad skin breath more rattle than roar. When it saw them it did not rise. It made a sound like continents grinding to a halt. The language was stone and sorrow. Hadrun understood it the way you understand a song in a tongue you never learned but your grandmother sang before you had words for loss. The dragon was saying something about pacts. About the old agreement. About fire shared not stolen. It was saying the eggs were cold because the earth itself was dying and no amount of marrow ground to powder would resurrect what they had killed when they decided their fear was more true than their memory. Brin raised his hammer. The priestess stood very still with her hand on the cavern wall feeling the mountain hold its breath. Hadrun stepped forward with his ruined leg screaming and put himself between steel and scale. He tried to say what he had learned. He tried to explain that they were killing the last thing that knew how to keep them alive. That the dragons had been tending warmth not hoarding it the way a shepherd tends a fire through a long night so that dawn would still mean something. But his words were wind against stone. Brin's faith was louder. The others moved with the momentum of a people who have been ending things so long they no longer remember how to begin. The dragon died without much sound. A sigh of smoke that rolled across the ceiling and extinguished the torches. The eggs broke under boots that did not even slow to consider them. Just the wet crack of potential rendered into ruin. In the dark Hadrun felt the temperature begin its long decline. The mountain shuddered once or maybe that was his own body understanding what they had done. They descended through snow that fell harder now through a cold that had a new quality to it something absolute and patient. When they reached the forges the fires were out. Not banked. Not sleeping. Out the way a star goes out when its fuel is spent and the universe makes a small space where light used to be. The others scattered to their houses looking for warmth they would not find. Hadrun went to the oldest shaft the one where the first dwarves had struck their first bargain with the earth and he sat in the dark with his useless book. In his coat wrapped in rags he carried one egg. Cracked but not shattered. He had taken it while the others were still drunk on their own righteousness. He knew it would not hatch. He knew the cold had already taken it. But he held it anyway in the furnace of his hands trying to will heat from a body that had none left to give. He thought about the mural. About the circle of dwarves with open hands. About how his people had decided somewhere in their long decline that closed fists were safer than open palms that taking was simpler than tending that if the world was dying it was better to hasten the end than admit they had been the blade all along. The dragons had known the names of things. Not the names dwarves gave to make the world smaller and controllable but the true names the ones that sang in the stone before anyone was there to hear them. His people had killed them for knowing because a witness to your diminishment is a mirror you cannot break without breaking yourself. In the dark he began to hum. A song he had heard once when he was young before the last of the old singers died. It had words about fire and agreement about a world where warmth was something you were trusted to carry. The egg would not quicken. The forges would not light. The mountain had already begun its long work of forgetting them the way it forgets snow the way it forgets everything that cannot hold on when the heat goes and the stone remembers only its own weight. But Hadrun sat there anyway with his broken book and his dead witness humming a song for a world that would have no ears to hear it practicing a faith he no longer believed in because the alternative was silence and silence was what they had chosen when they needed absolution more than they needed truth. Outside the snow fell. Inside the dark grew. And somewhere in the pressing cold the last echo of dragonfire went out like a word spoken into wind like a name no one would remember how to say.
You have a charisma through words, thank you, friend.
Beautifully written