Above and Below by Savannah Laux
Dragons & Wyverns Short Story Challenge
8th place
Above and Below
A young girl in a city atop a mountain is recruited to learn magic under the tutelage of a powerful mage. Years later, she comes to realize that there is far more to understand about her city, and it might just cost her everything.
Trigger Warnings: implied death by fire, implied child sacrifice, mention of starvation, unsettling tension, no onscreen gore or violence
The balance of the world is made up of that which sits above and that which lies below, but the two are not entirely separate. They feed off one another, each taking something vital, and the world continues breathing.
That was the first lesson Greer learned when she joined the ranks of the Citadel. The High Curator had spoken the words to her right after their first meeting. It had taken place in the lower part of the city. Greer had laid down a small illusion, ensaring unsuspecting passersby into thinking they had walked into a spiderweb. A small thing, just enough of a distraction that Greer could slip her hand into their pockets.
She had only been fourteen. A young thing tucked between the different streets of a city that had not learned to care about her, had not found it in itself to bend to her existence. The High Curator had walked right into her spell on the outskirts of one of the markets and as Greer’s hand had made its when into the woman’s pocket, she pulled out a large spider. The young girl had flung herself back and the spider disappeared.
If you are going to ensnare someone in a web, at least make a spider to go with it. Hours later the woman in her crisp grey coat had ridden away from that small alley with the young girl in tow. Handing her a brush for her hair and a rag for wash her face. A promising talent tucked in unassuming skin, the High Curator had remarked. As Greer watched the grime of the streets she grew up on make way for dusted marble and high spires clad with carved facades, the woman taught her that first lesson, something sits above and something sits below, and Greer, for the first time in her life, felt herself rise.
In the many years since, Greer almost learned to forget the gnaw of hunger in her stomach, the feel of dirt caked under her fingernails. Under the High Curators tutelage, long hours spent staring a plants until they grew, instructions to prick her finger until it healed, lockedin a dark room until she learned to make her own light, that terrified child had become a young woman. She had learned to be something that her city would deem to notice. Something it would remember.
Her apprenticship was a private affair, personal, something set apart from the rest of the students at the academy, that building built of tall spires that sat atop the highest reach of the mountain, looking down upon the city sprawled below. You will be different, I will mold you in my image, the Curator had said every time the girl questioned the isolation, and you will do something more. On the eve of her twentieth birthday, the woman, lack of any new wrinkles despite the years, finally gave Greer a glimpse of that destiny.
The city was known for its legends, even in the slums and the muck, parents told them to their babies and children whispered those same stories to themselves in the dark. Haughty kings with too much bloodlust and the razor tipped wings of dragons fueled by greed. The fledging city had learned to burn before it could ever grow until the king’s sister, armed with magic, locked the beast of fangs and fire deep beneath their sacred mountain in which they buried their dead. Atop that dragon, that city become something more.
That which sits above and that which sits below, the High Curator had murmured as she led Greer down a set of stone steps that wound down and down, until the light of the torch in her hand barely breached the darkness below.
The two are not entirely separate, the woman said as she laid her hand upon a wall of stone until it split in two, enough to form the arch of a doorway, and waved Greer through. The torchlight in Greer’s hand only shown a few feet ahead of her, enough to illuminate the corner of a stone coffin, and as she took a step forward another coffin was illuminated. Shecould imagine it, from the stories she had whispered to herself as her stomach gnawed away at her, the endless rows of forgotten dead tucked away inside a mountain with a monster. Your true potential sits before you, with it, you will learn the true trade of our city. It was the last thing Greer heard the woman say before the cleaved stone knit itself back together behind her, the arch door sealing shut, a definitive line between the above and below, and Greer was left in the dark.
The coffins were endless, rows and rows stretching out in every director, facades lovingly carved into every lid, picturing the face of the person that lay within, their features still round with life, captured forever. Eventually, as Greer wandered deeper and deeper into the crypt, her torch burned itself to nothing until the coffins faded from sight.
Something was breathing in the darkness.
It had been there the whole time, Greer realized, a deep rumbling breath so present the very stone vibrated with it, present enough to be masked by the sound of her steps. Greer held out her hand and a small ball of light formed in her palm, shining in every direction, and illuminating the great maw of fangs before her.
Greer stumbled back throwing out her other hand, a ring of frost forming at her fingertips, ready to come to her aid.
The fangs shifted and the beast chuffed and eyes blinked open above her, a deep green ringed with a bright amber, liked melted gold.
Such a small thing.
The words reverberated through the cavern beneath the mountain like thunder through a valley. Greer felt them sink into her bones. She thought to run, to turn around and sprint as fast as she could through the rows of coffins until she was right back where she started, stuck on thewrong side of a stone wall and a door that no longer existed. It was not lost on her the High Curator had never taught her how to part stone, how to unlock a door that bared her from safety. She doubted, that learning how to form stone was not the lesson the old woman was trying to teach her. If so, she would have locked the girl in a stone coffin a long time ago. This was something different, something far more dangerous and if she ran, if the beast chased her, all of it would be for nothing.
“Small things often matter the most,” Greer said into the emptiness of the cavern. The dragon chuffed again and picked up its head, the sound of the movement echoed through the cave like the grinding of a landslide.
Like a thorn on a rose, or a raindrop in an ocean. The Dragon said and spread its wings wide in the dim light of Greer’s spell, most of their great expanse buried in the darkness. Greer took another step back and the dragon swung its head to the side, lowering it until she stood only a handful of feet from the eye that stared back at her.
“A rose without a thorn is food, an ocean without a raindrop is empty,” she said. Small and wise. I knew a king who did not understand the world in such a way, and it cost him.
The beast picked up its head and let out a high pitched sound that resonated around the cavern, choppy and broken, like the wail of a thousand mourning mothers, and Greer realized it was laughing.
“What did it cost him?” She asked and took another step to the side angling stone between her and the dragon.
Everything.
The dragon lurched forward and wrapped a massive claw around the coffin between them, each individual claw dug into dirt of the floor with ease, but the coffin itself was untouched beneath, cradled gently under the unending strength of something far greater than stone.
He lacked your wisdom and with it he burned just as his city did. I am not an unreasonable creature, I do not ask for much.
Something rolled in her gut as Greer continued to retreat from the beast, coffin after coffin growing between them, but she never looked away from its eyes as magic danced at her fingertips.
Small things are often forgotten by the larger whole but I see the value in it all. The dragon stretched out its wing and another claw descended, grasping another coffin gently, and another, lumbering forward with every step. Never crushing what lay beneath. I see the magic glowing within, wrapped in the thin binding of human flesh. I cherish it while others throw it away.
Greer felt the unease settling in her bones as the beast focused its attention upon her, the distance between them closing with every moment.
She held out her hand and let a ripple of magic burst free, ice crashed into one of the coffins to her left, shattering the stone, a cloud of ash catching the light.
The dragon roared and the mountain shook. It jumped towards the broken coffin, nose pushing at the fractured pieces. Greer turned and ran like she had all those years ago, her feet light in the dark alleys as things loomed to gobble her up. She ran like that starving girl, but now the ache shifted from her stomach to her heart, where she starved for her life to live.
I am a collector, not a beast. These coffins are the treasures of my love. These small things will never fade away for I will remember them. The world will turn and I will care for them. The rain will come to wash them away, but I will hold them under the span of my wings.
Greer could feel the cavern groaning under the weight of the beast’s fury as she cleared the last row of coffins and slammed herself into the stone wall.
It’s a simply story, an old story, they woke me from my mountain slumber, I wished for those small things as reparation but King refused.
Greer forced every ounce of magic into the wall before her, envisioning it splitting in two just as the High Curator had done.
As the city burned, one almost as wise as I stepped out from the ashes and gave me a gift. A fissure formed in the rock, sweat dripped down Greer’s brow as she dug her nails into as if she could pull it apart through brute strength.
A small wiggling thing in her arms, it glowed with the same magic I saw within her. A worthy addition to my collection. She promised me that so long as I remained within the mountain of my home, she would bring me those forgotten treasures.
The rumble of the voice drew closer behind her but the crack in the stone was barely wider than her hand. For one second, Greer thought to cry out to the woman beyond the wall but she knew there would be no answer.
You, small one, are a great treasure indeed.
The dragons words reverberated through the cavern like the mockery of a whisper between lovers. The door in the rock remained sealed to her, and Greer turned as she felt warm breath caress the skin of her neck and was met with a maw of fire.
Above, an old woman sipped the same tea she had for hundreds of years as she watched the sun rise over a city which moved on unaware of the girl trapped forever below.