Cold

            She pulled back from the ledge, panting heavily.Kyna had always admired dragons: their glorious wings, their beautiful tails, their majestic size, their wings! Her clan had readily accepted that she was simply a very eccentric dragonborn, but as she grew so did her power, and the danger of her somewhat pyromaniac tendencies. She learned soon enough that she was a danger if tucked away inside a closed space like the undermountain city the Sefaldren Clan called home, and so she left, chasing the storms and dreaming of one day flying among them, and promising to visit often.

            But man, she never thought she would get to see a dragon, and so close-up! It was beautiful and majestic and incredibly terrifying. She suddenly remembered the stories she had been told—the ones she had put off as nothing but fantasies to scare wander-prone children. Suddenly the idea of these powerful beasts lazily calling upon their humanoid lookalikes to do their bidding, to suffer at their whims and frustrations, seemed much more like history. And she had attacked one! A good hit it was, too, she thought with a bubbling pride as it turned its blazing eyes toward hers: blazing eyes that pierced her soul with a coldness she had not expected. She told herself the cave was freezing, that she had knelt on the ice for too long, as she found herself trembling quite uncontrollably. But the pride and giddy excitement had frozen, dead, inside her as well, and it hardened into something much more unpleasant.

            Beneath all her prized cloaks, beneath all warm new clothes, she shivered. Beneath all the excitement and enthusiasm… beneath all the memories of rain and snow, blizzards and storms, that she had endured—enjoyed, even… she trembled. It worse than being electrocuted—a feeling she knew well—as her muscles had seized up and would do nothing useful but spasm and shake. She couldn’t look away from its terrible, beautiful eyes.

            Her fingers hurt, and she realized vaguely that she was clenching the edge of the ledge she cowered on. She found that she severely regretted sending that bolt of lightning through such a creature, one that would surely kill her with nothing but a thought. The electricity that had surged through her veins and crackled at her claws had died in her, frozen away in a distant part of her she could never dream of reaching.

            She wasn’t sure if time was passing too fast, or too slowly. She wasn’t even sure if she was thinking. If she was, the thoughts were of nothing but fear and death and captivity, of pain and helplessness. They flickered through her mind so fast that it was just a string of nonsense that not even she could decipher. But each wave of thought could be summed up quite neatly: panic. Panic frozen inside an unmoving body, her head so distant from everything else. But not quite distant enough, for there was nothing she wanted more than to leave her pitiful, sinning, weakly wingless body and get as far from that glorious monster as she could. Some distant part of her must have known that this wasn’t natural, but that knowledge was tucked very far away, coated in layers of ice, cowering wherever her electricity must have gone.

            Kyna hardly felt the ground crumble beneath her, but when her ears were filled with the loud roar of destruction, and the cold air rushed past her, and those eyes…. those great and terrible Eyes… rose far above her, she heard something else. Screaming, of a most undignified kind. Even more pathetic than Marl’s screech. The bird must have been hurt, she thought numbly, for only a small singing-creature could have made such a pitiful sound. But her heart was too cold and too scared to grieve. Until suddenly, the Eyes stopped rising, and the walls no longer grew around her, and she felt something soft against her back, something warmer than stone, though not by much. And her jaw began to ache, as her muscles froze and locked together, and she realized that Bawk was not screaming because he was chattering at her, grunting in the effort to slow her fall, and she realized that she was the one who was creating the terrible noise. And somewhere in the distant parts of her mind, she felt bad for laughing at her dragonborn friend.

            It occurred to her that she was touching cold, icy stone once more, and every part of her body and soul cringed away from that terrible coldness. Bawk must have set her down, and the screaming sound had stopped, and Kyna lay where she was, feeling horribly useless. As she watched vague shapes of flashing and movement above her, she finally found the sense to move, to get away from the horror. She heard voices around her—were they saying anything of importance? She couldn’t tell. Stiffly, she crawled into a sheltered-looking area that became a tunnel, and there she crouched, trembling. It’ll never be safe though, she knew. Never safe from those terrible Eyes. Eventually we will all die, except for those that he keeps to do his grisly bidding. I’m not sure which fate will be worse, but I’m sure I’ll find out. Curse Marl, and his wretched dreams and his girly screams!

            A wriggling under her many cloaks drew her attention away from the stone walls she had fixated her gaze upon. Kyna glanced down in surprise to see a soft shape push itself out of her winter gear and bleat angrily. Sam! Instinctively, she clutched the ram, hugging him tight and rocking back and forth. “I-It’s okay… I’ll war… warm y-you up, Sam…” She chattered hoarsely. She was sore all over: tired and stiff and so very cold. “I’ll… I’ll protect you, Sam…”

He was too cold and scared to argue this time.

            As she focused on the soft warmth of the creature she so dearly loved (even if the feeling was not mutual), the halted workings of her heart and mind began to thaw, and she eventually found that she had stopped trembling as much. Things were less confusing now, she realized as she lay on the cold ground and reveled in the feeling of newfound freedom from her own pitiful mind. She was so tired.

            But she had learned something about dragons: they were not that great. They really didn’t deserve those awesome wings and all that great respect she had once help for them. Anger and frustration buzzed up inside her as the events of the battle finally dawned on her. Pale blue veins of electricity flickered around her horns and claws, and sparks crackled on her scales. The energy warmed her more than she knew it could, and the indignance she now felt seemed to pull her off the ground. She leapt to her feet, ignoring Sam’s shocked bleat, snarling to herself as she faced the exit of the tunnel from which the sounds of combat still rang.

            A pale shape flashed through the entrance, and as the spiked form barreled past, she leapt back with a gasp of utter horror before realizing it was too small to be the dragon. It was Marl, who gazed behind her in alarm.

            “I… I remember…” The words seemed painful as he forced them out in disgust. “This was not the place… of my… childhood. It… it was the place o-of my torment!”

            His realization didn’t reach Kyna’s ears. Instead she mumbled an apology—for laughing as he was so brutally injured. But both dragonborn were so focused on their own pain and fear; neither one registered the interaction, and Marl stumbled to the ground, murmuring to himself.

            Kyna however, had important things to do. With anger and betrayal still crackling in her blood, she marched towards her friends—and towards that hateful dragon. She roared as she pushed all those feelings—the terror, the cold, the anger and indignance—up at that creature, and grinned in toothy satisfaction when she saw him flinch, when she saw his charred scales smoke and his hide twitch painfully. I am the one to be afraid of, she hissed as he opened his great mouth, his bright and horrible eyes glinting with pain.

            Until suddenly the cave filled with cold—with cold so deep it burned through her cloaks and pierced her scales and stung her very heart. Her eyes widened in agony, her mind crystallizing to a painful numbness. As she crumpled to the ground, claws clenched and body crying out in frozen helplessness, she knew that she wasn’t screaming this time. The only sound was the ringing in her ears.