Page 230 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

But she was now a match for a troll, unless one caught her unawares, and she had no intention of letting that happen. She watched the sides and floors of the canyon as she passed over trees, out of reach of even the longest troll arm from treetop below or concealing rock to the side.

Unfortunately, its attack came from above.

Later she visited the spot, and guessed where the troll had climbed when it saw her course. Perhaps it had been sitting on a high ledge, surveying the western slopes of the rock-strewn mountains, and climbed up a little farther when it saw her coming.

It was a good thing the sun was high when it jumped, for some piece of her noticed the shadow of its fall on the mountainside below, and she turned to avoid it before the rest of her figured out why. The hammer-blow of its arm therefore fell on her side rather than her wing or spine.

The troll grappled her with its awful rubbery fingers and she felt a tearing at her wing edge. She instinctively folded it down and out of the way, and her careen through the mountains turned into a one-wing plunge into the stony slopes. She had just enough sense to roll over so the impact struck the troll—mostly—and her tail rather than more vital limbs.

The impact knocked the wind from her, and for a second she did not know where she was.

Fury took over when the troll’s fingers locked around her neck, trying to twist, trying to throttle, and she clawed at it, but it moved with that horrible, rubbery mobility she remembered. She batted it about the body with her wings, and may have struck the sense organ cluster, for it backed off and swung up a rock, leaving smears of blood as it squeezed into a crack. She righted herself and spat her hunger-weak foua after it, but did not know if she hit it or not.

Fearing another sudden jump from above, or thrown boulders, she backed down the hillside, watching the black smoke of her fire disappear into the winter sky.

She flapped her wings experimentally. The right was sore but worked. She launched herself into the air and saw the troll wedging itself through a crack. It retreated beneath an overhang like a wary spider.

“Call it a new throw,” Wistala said, using the slang of the Hypatian dice pits for when a bet is neither paid nor lost. She was breathing and unharmed, and wouldn’t risk her wings going after a troll on a point of honor.

Her injuries allowed only a short flight before she had to stop and rest, but she made it to the other side of the mountains. From a prominence she looked out upon the Sadda-Vale.

The vale reminded her of a half-filled cauldron. Water filled the center of the valley, though unlike the Ba-drink, green flats and low hills surrounded the water. The water was calm and the color of polished steel, the grasses around a deep green that reminded her of seaweed. Forests grew in the spaces between the toes of the mountain.

Capping the cauldron were low-hanging clouds, made of mists rising from the water, or so it seemed from the sheets of moisture rising in slow spirals. The rock face on the inner ring of mountains was black with moisture. Wistala felt the cold wet on her face.

The temperature had risen considerably on this side of the mountain; Wistala no longer felt frozen and windstruck, but simply chilled and damp. She didn’t like this much wet in the air, it fed itchy growths that lived under your scales.

As she rested she counted waterfalls. It seemed every mountainside had a trickle or two running down, more easily spotted at a distance, as they cascaded between the thick fern growth—higher up they looked like faint veins against the rock face.

An orange flash caught her eye, a gout of flame that welled and slowly faded. The odd shape to it was evocative of a dragon’s—no, there was a dragon there, on a ledge where the mountain was broken by a crack, like a smashed plate unevenly repaired.

So excited was she—hope died hard in Wistala—that she immediately launched herself off the prominence, flying for the dragon as fast as sore wings would carry her.

The dragon—she saw it was a male by his distinctive coloring: a dull orange like a fading sunset that alternated with stripes of black. The pattern intrigued her; in her experience scaled dragons were usually uniform in color. Auron sometimes showed stripes like that against his gray, but he’d been born without scales.

She landed a little up the ledge from him—she folded her wings as she came in, absorbed the impact with her tail and settled with only a slight slip. She wanted the advantage of height just in case.

Though she thought it a well-done landing. But the dragon ignored her.

He nosed in a pile of broken rock, grasping pieces with his tongue and swallowing them. He had four horns, and two more buds, rising from his crest. Older than she, younger than Father, and there was a strange gold behind his griff: he had a ring threaded in the skin of his earhole.

He extended his long neck, took a big mouthful of water, then swung his neck to the other side, where the mountain face was broken. Wistala looked closely at the rock—there were threads of metal in the rock, like bits of ragged sewing.

The four-horn spat water into the broken rock. His head bobbed as he read distances, then he spat flame where he’d placed the water. The rock flamed and hissed, cracking, and with a suddenness that surprised her and made her edge back, he whipped up his tail and struck the flames. Pieces of broken rock slid down and hit the ledge, and he commenced nosing again, still ignoring her.

“I take it there’s metal in that stone,” Wistala said.

He swallowed a piece, and rolled an eye toward her as he sniffed over more shattered rock. “What is your name?”

“Wistala,” she said.

“We don’t know each other.”

“No,” she said. “May I have your name?”

“DharSii.” He swallowed another stone.

The name struck her ear funny. If the word were rendered in the simplest form of Parl, a human would have called him “Sureclaw.”

---