Chapter 245: A Thread of Breath [BONUS]

"I know," Encrid said quietly. "I watched it burn a hole in the floor last night."

He was sitting up in bed with the blanket around his shoulders. Through the open window, the garden was grey under a thin moon.

{ It will not stop. }

"Then tell me what it is," Encrid said. "Not what it does. What it is."

The dragon was silent for a while before it answered.

{ I do not know what that thing is. I know only what it did. }

{ On the bridge, I breathed at you with everything that was in me. Your little cushion swallowed it. All of it. Nothing made by mortal hands should be able to do that. A sack of cloth should have burned before the light reached it. }

But it didn’t.

{ It held. Whatever it is, it is very old, and it is holding something it was never meant to hold. It has been holding it ever since. Now it is tired. }

Encrid looked at the stone hearth, where the Pillow sat swollen on his folded coat. He could still smell the scorched wood.

He did not say what he knew. The System had told him long ago what the cushion was. A Divine Relic. A god who had wanted to sleep. A consequence that could be delayed, but never cancelled. The debt remains until it is taken.

He had taken a debt like that once before. On the bridge, he had let a stored blow out of the Pillow and into his own body, and from his body into his sword. He knew how it worked.

He also remembered how much it had hurt.

"What would happen to a man," he asked carefully, "who stood in front of your breath now? Not on the bridge. Now."

{ He would be ash. }

The answer came so fast that it was almost rude.

{ On the bridge, you were something else. I felt it. For a little while you were cold and wide and heavy, like a winter that had learned to walk. I do not know what you were for that minute, and I do not care. }

A pause.

{ Now you are a frail mortal who needs an old man’s arm to walk as far as a bench. If my breath touched that body, you would not even feel it. You would be gone before the feeling reached your head. }

Encrid did not argue with that even though he felt insulted.

"Then what can take it?"

{ Only one kind of creature can take a dragon’s breath head-on and live. }

"Another dragon?"

{ Yes. }

"And the only one I know is sitting on the garden wall."

The dragon did not answer that.

Encrid waited, and then decided to ask it plainly, because there was no kind way to ask.

"Why can’t you take it back?"

The silence that followed was the longest yet. When the voice came again, it was quieter, and there was no contempt in it at all.

{ Because the breath in that cushion is larger than what I am now. }

The dragon for once was explaining itself.

{ When I breathed at you on the bridge, I was not myself. The silver was in my blood, and something far away was pulling on me through it. It dragged that breath out of me with all the strength it could find. More strength than was mine to give. } A pause. { The breath is still that size. I am not. My wing has not healed. The silver is still in me. If I swallowed it all now, it would burn its way out through my chest. }

"Is there nothing at all you can do?" he asked.

The dragon did not reply.

Instead, Encrid felt its presence move.

For weeks, the weight on top of the wall had been as still as a stone. Now it slid down and across the garden, and stopped just outside his window.

He saw nothing. But on the hearth, the Pillow’s glow brightened.

A thread of white light slipped out of the seam, thin as a hair, just as it had the night before. This time, it did not bend toward the floor. It lifted. It curled through the air of the room, slow and straight, and went out through the gap in the window as if something outside were drawing it in like a breath.

Then it was gone.

From the garden came a sound.

It was very small. A sharp, hissing breath, like a man gripping a pan he did not know was hot, and then a low growl, quickly swallowed.

Encrid gripped the edge of the blanket.

"What did you just do?"

{ I drank a thread. }

The voice was steady, but it was thinner than before. It sounded like someone speaking through clenched teeth.

{ I cannot drink the river. But I can drink a thread. If I take what slips out each night, the cushion does not have to bleed onto your floor. }

A window opened in front of Encrid’s eyes.

[ Pillow of the Sleeping God ]

[ Containment: 89% ]

[ Leakage: absorbed by an external source ]

He stared at the last line.

"Does it hurt?"

{ Do not presume to question me, frail mortal. }

"It hurts," Encrid said.

The dragon did not deny it.

He thought about the scarred back, the broken wing, the silver forced down its throat. And now, every night, it would swallow a little of its own fire, which it was not yet strong enough to hold, so that the floor of a house it did not care about would not burn.

So that he would not burn.

"Will this slow your healing?"

{ A little. }

"How much is a little?"

{ More than you would like. Less than you fear. }

Encrid pressed his palms against his eyes.

He understood now what it meant. The Pillow would not hold forever, even like this. The dragon could slow the leak, but it could not stop the cushion from getting weaker. One day, the seam would not just leak. It would open. And on that day, if the dragon was not whole, there would be nothing in the world to swallow what came out.

"How long can you keep doing this?" he asked at last.

There was a pause, and then a faint return of the old, cold certainty.

{ Long enough. If you stop asking questions and let me rest. }

Encrid lay back against the pillow, the ordinary one, and looked at the dark ceiling.

He did not sleep for a long time. Neither, he suspected, did the thing in the garden.

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Bonus Chapter for 100 power stones ~