Chapter 571: The Sleeping Dragon

"We must continue forward."

Light already had his eyes on the slope below us when the words came out, like the matter was settled and he was only informing me of it.

I could barely make myself pay attention to him. Because by now, it was obvious to me that the Precipice was doing something to all of us.

It had gotten to the point where even I wasn’t sure what exactly was happening to me. I couldn’t trust myself.

And the only priority we had was to keep going down.

’Why are we even going down?’

Why, you ask? Beats me. Because that’s the only way out?

’How can we tell it’s the way out? How are we so certain?’

Wren paused for a moment too, like she was actually thinking about it.

True.

That was all she said. After that, there was nothing else for her to say.

Then I turned to Light. I felt like the only way to dodge whatever was going on was to do the exact opposite of what we naturally felt like doing.

So I opened my mouth and went for it.

"Why don’t we just go back up?"

Light’s face twisted into a grimace.

"That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard you say in a while. It’s comforting, actually. I was beginning to think you reasonable."

That one went straight in, like he’d stabbed me. For a moment I just stood there with my mouth hanging open and a frozen half-smile of disbelief stuck on my face.

’This bastard. Has he forgotten who he owes his life to?’

Light raised his head and glared at me from where he stood. "Do you want me to start reminding you all over again why going down is the only reasonable thing to do?"

I chuckled and straightened up.

"You know what? Alright. Remind me. Tell me. Why down?"

He went quiet for a bit. His gaze darkened and his focus thinned out, drifting somewhere past my shoulder. A moment later, his eyes came back to me, and he opened his mouth to speak.

But the words never came out.

Because a violent tremor hit us again.

The stone under my boots jumped like a kicked table. The jagged rocks jutting up from the ground split along a dozen lines at once and broke apart, flying off in every direction.

We had to run immediately, ducking chunks of stone as they came whistling past. I grabbed Ilse and vanished in a spray of feathers. I reappeared a few paces off and vanished again, then again, blinking in and out over and over to stay ahead of the stones. Every landing jolted up through my knees, and Ilse hung against my side, heavy and still hot from the seam.

Light’s wyvern threw out one of its broken wings and put itself between the stones and Light. Luckily, Bren was close enough to get shielded too.

Not everyone was as lucky.

The little guy dodged the first stone. So did Teller. But for the little guy, another one came straight after and cracked him on the head. It was a smaller one, so perhaps it wasn’t that bad, but his scalp split open at once and blood sprayed out.

And Teller... in fact, the man was already gone by then. As he dodged the first stone, the ground beneath him had fractured and started to crumble in on itself.

Before I could plant my feet, before Light could even turn, the ground under Teller had shattered and was falling away into the darkness beneath, and him along with it.

Light and Bren glanced down. The little guy was on his knees, holding his head, blood streaming over his hands and out between his fingers.

Light saw all of that, turned back to me, frowned, and shouted.

"We have to hurry forward now!"

Honestly, I wanted to give him a brutal punch right then. It hurt to watch him spare not one shred of sympathy for the ones we’d just lost. But he was sort of right.

We needed to run for it. What I didn’t agree with was that forward had to mean down.

One thing I did know, though. Running up was going to bring us to the end of this.

’We’ll be able to handle that end, though.’

I gritted my teeth, pivoted, and was already shooting toward the rocky plain that rolled upward like a valley wrapped around a mountain.

’Damn it. I need you. I need you, Kassie.’

I needed my summons, and I needed to find a way to call on them.

I thought about what to do. I thought about the one other time this had happened to me, with the lizard. I’d tried my best to reach my Soul Sanctum and I couldn’t, and the only thing I could do back then was get out of the gate. The problem had been the gate.

And just like that time, the problem now was the Precipice.

’Does that mean I have to get out of the Precipice to access my Sanctum again?’

I shook my head as I ran, the dread sitting cold and heavy in my stomach, my arm locked around Ilse.

’I can’t afford to wait that long. Damn it, I’m a summoner. I need my summons!’

I kept running the thought round and round. I was so buried in it that perhaps that was why, when Death Sense opened up and struck a chord so sharp and dreadful inside me, I was too busy and too absent to notice.

The cause of the tremor rose from underneath the stretch of ground we were running across, crumbling every piece of rock along with it.

The dark mountain was being torn apart as the thing hauled itself up out of its depths. It was as though it wore a whole ensemble of dark stone and was ripping free of it to rise. Grit and dust came down across my back in a hard rain.

The thing had clearly been slumbering beneath the rock all this while, and we seemed to have disturbed it.

Suddenly the tremors made sense.

I opened my mouth, and my face went pale as I glanced back at it. And in the same breath I realized the most likely reason it had woken up at all. Ilse and I had been going at it like we owned the rock we were fucking on.

’Did all that slamming wake it up? No way, right? No way, right?’

At the same time, from somewhere deeper and a lot more honest, the answer came back.

’Yes, Cade, you did this. This time it was you, not the Precipice. You went and fucked on top of a sleeping dragon. And you did not go easy on the poor thing’s head.’