In the Dragon Lands, the earth bleeds.
Black, cracked volcanic rock seethes with impossible heat from the magmatic rivers that flow, unceasing, from the countless volcanoes that dot the blasted landscape. An endless line of twisted peaks runs from horizon to horizon, squatting giants that belch ash and gas into the sky, burning the clouds black. Some of them lie dormant. Most of them die.
Together, they are known as the Worldspine.
The Scar is not a volcano, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it is. The draconic creatures that call the plain home certainly believe it to be. They spin and twist within the boiling air currents that churn from it, soak in the pools of lava at its base, leap and surf down the waterfall of molten rock that has cascaded languidly down the sides for eons.
Sometimes, dragons find patches in the cemented ash that covers the sides of the peak – places where the rock comes away in their claws in crackling, crystalline dust. The dragons don’t think about it. The dragons don’t recognise it, because it dried up so very, very long ago.
The Scar is not a volcano. It is where the Earth bleeds.
The Scar sits alone.
It boils up out of the ground around it like an abscess – the enormous circular crater glows white-hot with pus, the edges an angry red. The caldera crooks at a jaunted angle, lava tumbling in sheets down its buckled sides, as if an invisible hand is pouring it from an earthen cup onto the landscape.
The Scar is deceptive. Beneath its crater, beneath the mountain’s hideous mass, there is a churning sea of magma, an underground lake that laps and scrapes beneath the floor of the earth. It is ever-growing – crashing in waves against the dirt and stone that lines the walls of its caverns, gradually eroding it, consuming it. It has seethed for eons. It will not cool for eons more.
The land should have long since collapsed into the lava lake. It would have, were it not for the impossible plates of diamond-hard, galvanised material that cleanly separate it from the layers of earth above – the floor of the world. A ceiling over Hell.
The plates shine with oily iridescence when exposed to sunlight, like scales.
Inside the cavern of the lake, there are holes in the walls. They are small – only big enough for a pony, if that – and they are countless, spider-webbing through the ground and into the dark. At first glance, they seem like mine shafts, carved out by industrious hands (or hooves) – but the walls are ridged, too natural to be industrial, too unnatural to be geological.
The tunnels are littered with tiny fossils – little legs and wings and glistening chitin, perfectly preserved. They crunch underfoot, heaped up in mounds.
Within those tunnels, there are even smaller burrows. If one were small enough to follow them, they might find hives, containing petrified spheres clutched to the breasts of those same insectoid fossils.
The walls of the tunnels aren’t formed from stone, nor from dirt.
And, everywhere, seeping from the walls, is that same crackling, crystalline dust. Most of it has dried up, but here and there it still carries the sheen of a deep, deep red.
Deeper in, where the tunnels end, the walls shine bone-white in the lingering lava light.
It is not a gradual change. The sedimented ash and dust and stone falls away sharply, laying bare the impossibly smooth ivory walls of the cavern.
The whiteness is marred, in places, by deep black scorch marks. Within these black patches, little mounds of slagged material have fused to the floor, the ceiling, the walls, congealed into misshapen globes, like frozen tar.
This is not the only cavern. It branches into more branches, overlaps with them, entwines, connects with those same tiny tunnels to caverns that lie deeper still. It is a network.
All of them lie parallel, shooting straight southward from the source.
Sometimes, the slag twists into familiar shapes. Here, there is the skeleton of a fibrous wing. There, a claw juts from the ivory into gnarled hooks, or a clenched fist. Sometimes, they are held aloft, palm up, as if in supplication.
In other places, the shapes are harder to define. The horn of a beetle, maybe, or an antenna. A wing of spun glass, impossibly delicate.
A reptilian skull fused, unnaturally, to an insect’s carapace.
Pairs of mismatched wings flutter, ever so slightly, in the volcanic breeze that flows up, from the south, towards the farthest end of the tunnel. When the ground rumbles, the southward end of the tunnel flares with firelight that reveals a shadow – a biped, one arm splayed behind it, the other shielding its face – of something that had stood there, once, briefly, and will now forever stand there, as a pattern of carbon upon the walls of bone.
And as the light passes over the walls, there are more patterns there – reptilian creatures crawling from the walls and slashing at swarming, stinging insects.
A mural. An ink-spot tapestry of a battle lost to time, captured like a snapshot by some impossible heat.
Then the ground rumbles, and the firelight fades, leaving the tunnel in darkness. There are many others like it, in that skeletal network – countless, enormous bones, scorched and blackened and buried in the ground, containing only burnt, dead things.
At the farthest end of the tunnel of bone is an enormous chamber. Lightning arcs in its darkness. The brilliance of it reveals, briefly, a throne of flesh.
Or, rather, a throne of what was once flesh – now fossilised. It forms an uneven, coagulated mass, poked through with countless burrowed holes.
In the holes are more insects. Many of them are burnt and blackened. A sparse few flicker with sparks of electricity. Impossibly fine threads, woven throughout the chamber, pulse in response before falling lifeless.
The flickering happens three times, briefly, then three times again, but longer. It repeats the pattern, winking intermittently in the dark.
A glassy, yellow-orange substance coats the ivory walls and pools thickly on the floor. In the amber, countless clutches of eggs are forever suspended.
The amber sluices through the fossilised membrane of the throne of flesh, which has curled in upon itself. Cocooned within it is an enormous insect – legs thick as tree branches, eyes like fist-sized black pearls, stained-glass wings curled along the edges of a house-sized abdomen, corpulent and spherical. It is perfectly still, save for the crown of antennae upon its head that vibrate invisibly in the gloom, flickering with electrical energy.
Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot.
The Queen sleeps. Perhaps someday her message will be received.
The royal chamber is incomplete. If one were to dig into the dirt that has buried the thing so far beneath the ground, they might find huge, thick shards of bone, broken from some immense impact.
But the royal chamber is not the only thing lying there, underground, waiting.
If they were to follow the path back – back along the tunnel of bone, out along one of the countless tunnels that feed in from the lake of lava inside the enormous, churning organ beneath the Scar – back along the countless ridges of the Worldspine that poke out through the earth’s crust, jettisoning magma into the world above – out, along the length of an enormous shoulder blade, trailing country-sized flaps of desiccated leather…
The skeleton spans the width of the Dragon Lands, touching its furthest edges with its outstretched wings, the tip of its tail, the shattered skull that contains the Queen. One of its arms, outstretched, plows deep, deep into the earth, as if to break its fall.
Inside the ribcage of the enormous husk, at the southward end of the corpse-strewn tunnel that connects the lava-spewing Scar to the royal chamber, there is a raging core of molten metal. The other arm is curled up here, blackened from its proximity to the core but intact. The fingers of the skeletal hand curl around that core, cradle it desperately, forming yet another cocoon in the darkness of the underground.
Within that cocoon of giant, gentle fingers, there is an egg. It is enormous. It burns with the heat of suns, the glory of stars.
It will not hatch yet. Give it time.
In the Dragon Lands, the Earth breathes.
The volcanic vents on the Worldspine mountains, the countless tiny tunnels through the earth around the Scar – in all of these places, if one closes their eyes and listens, they can hear the sound of distant bellows, feel on their face the hot wind that pokes through from beneath the ground. It smells like burnt bone, and ash, and scales.
The holes through which the Earth breathe were not naturally formed. In the dirt and stone around them, one can see the slashes and tears of countless claws, digging desperately. Crawling on all fours out of the ground, towards the sky.
Far above the city-corpse, the dragons twirl in the heat of the blood and breath of the Earth, and know nothing.
