Chapter Text
Cynder peered up at cracks of silver in the walls around her, veins that stretched across the blanket of darkness like a shattered mirror.
Her body was burning, but it was nothing compared to the purple dragon at her side.
Spyro was motionless except for a faint rise and fall of his chest. Patches of scales and the skin beneath were blackened and flaky like parchment, as if they'd been burnt away. Over the rest of his body, the scales were dull and thin, and Cynder was sure it wasn't just the poor lighting.
The air was still, weighed down by vaporised metals. Masses of stone radiated a dull but penetrating heat.
Were they in the centre of the Earth?
At least the cracks in the rock gave her some sense of direction. Within the crevasses laid freshly grown crystals of shifting, indeterminate colour, light dancing beneath their surfaces. Cynder was drawn to their energy, but held herself back, in case she compromised the integrity of the cave.
She took a deep breath, and began her first task.
Spyro was light on her back, a bundle of burnt out firewood that was barely there.
She snorted the vapours out of her nose and followed the silver linings.
*.*
The crystals were beginning to form a spinning kaleidoscope in Cynder's eyes. Her claws kept slipping into cracks in the ground that was half crystal and half stone. Footholds were increasingly hard to locate and secure as her vision began to blur.
She rotated an aching wing to adjust Spyro's body on her back as she struggled up a crumbling cliffside. If he was dead, she wouldn't be able to tell until she was on solid ground. She didn't know when that would be.
Had Spyro's aether fury left this crystal residue within the planet's core?
Was that how the ancestors...?
The waves crept between the gaps in her scales, too close for comfort as her blood simmered. Magic vibrated across time and followed her shadow relentlessly, halting in exhilaration whenever she lost her balance. The crystals reached for her. She set her haunches and got moving.
She wasn't sure she would be able to stop herself from reaching back.
*.*
Cynder took a deep breath. It was as unsatisfying as the last, and all the others before it. The dry air scraped against the brittle walls of her lungs.
*.*
Time returned when Cynder felt a blinding burn in the end of her tail. She snapped her head around to see that the sharp tip of her tail spade had fallen off. It must have happened during the battle. She hadn't noticed it until now. It couldn't have been during her climb, she wasn't hurting herself that bad.
Was she?
*.*
There was a strange taste in her mouth. Her fangs felt like they were fizzing away in the air.
She spat out a gob onto the rock and thought the blood was glowing.
*.*
Spyro wasn't dead, but he wasn't awake, either. The glow of the crystals made him look skeletal.
Cynder wasn't sure if she was dead or awake. Her skin vibrated at a frequency where she couldn't tell if she was hot or cold, wet or dry, if her scales had ossified and the blood was gushing out of the cracks. Time was a dance she'd fallen out of step with, and her partner had left with a traitorous flourish. She could almost hear the ancestors laughing.
She wanted those crystals annihilated.
*.*
A fresh wave of pressure made her shiver with shock. It shook her out of the haze that had seeped into her skull and the rest of her bones.
Her vision focused on some pinpricks of light in the distance, nestled within a small circle. They were different to the crystals. They were far away. They didn't spare her a glance.
She crawled towards them. The stone scraped against her underside. Both were crumbling. The circle grew.
Even more pinpricks were visible. But she closed her eyes.
She slowed her breathing. Flexed her claws into the stone. Counted the seconds. Opened her eyes.
She dragged herself across the rocks and shrinking crystals, towards the circle.
Something pulled on her gently. She didn't fight it. Wind slithered beneath her wings as the column expanded.
She flapped her wings once.
The world shattered and the circle shrunk to a single point. The rocks pressed her shoulders together and pinned her to the floor as they continued to toss her head back and forth.
When the shaking finally stopped, Cynder swore out loud.
She and Spyro were squashed beneath the fallen rocks, with nothing to see save for a greyish film of light plastered over her cramped, unfocused vision.
"Not again," she muttered, ignoring the crawling under her scales and the thudding of her heart against her compressed ribcage. She took as deep a breath as she could (again), and closed her eyes (again).
She felt for the voids between the rocks, searching amidst the general darkness for vacant pockets of air that snaked up towards the surface of the Earth. The crystal coverage had thinned, and so had their disorientating interference, so the tendrils of shadow were easier to locate...
Then she remembered Spyro's weight on her back. She wouldn't be able to bring him through the shadows... would she?
She couldn't try it, not in his negligible state. He might disintegrate completely.
She didn't know how anything worked anymore.
Nonetheless, she let the shadows billow in her mind, and waited for them to siphon her focus. They pulled at her gently...
She found a path. She turned her powers towards the smaller rocks resting against her body. They were tough, but their facets held organic weaknesses. She felt for those that were most conducive to her Poison, and melted them slowly.
She stopped before they crumbled completely. After, wriggling her wings and spine to keep Spyro on her back, she inched forward.
She snorted Fear, keeping the splintered rocks frozen in place as she inched forwards and upwards. The rocks she moved sat as stable as a tower of glass. For whatever reason, Wind was not her element right now, substituted for the Fear that lingered in the air.
Pressure built up against her skull, but she kept moving. She wasn't going to let this Earth that Spyro saved kill her.
The passage of half-melted, half-sculpted rock led her to a slightly larger crevice that existed in the gap between a few larger rocks.
She blinked, and woke up with a scratchy, parched throat, chin sore from being pressed to the ground.
The light hadn't changed, so she couldn't tell how long she had been out for. She wondered if this had happened at some point on her way up without her noticing.
Spyro's chest still rose and fell. She nudged him with her wing, but he didn't stir. Their scales were still flaky, so nothing magical had happened while she'd been unconscious. Maybe.
It was time for her to take control again. She looked for the next best crevice to climb, and continued her fight against gravity.
*.*
A whooshing sound grew above her—a light patter at first, before suddenly the sky fell.
She thirstily lapped up the water that trickled down from the surface, hoping that whatever she missed wasn't going down the wrong one of Spyro's pipes.
She exhaled heavily and pushed forward, resisting the urge to rest. She had to outclimb the water before they drowned.
First Earth, now Water. Maybe if Spyro woke up and misfired they would have the honour of perishing by all four elements at once. She held back an annoyed gust of wind.
Just a little further, now. She wondered if it would have been better to die in the planet's centre. Might have been more heroic. It was a shame that poetry wasn't helping her not outclimb a flood and or rockslide.
The rain hammered directly against her head, now, tumbling down from a bright grey sky. One last push.
But it had to be the right element. This would have all been for nought if Cynder lost control of her poison and disintegrated the both of them just before they reached the surface.
Actually...
She unleashed a shockwave of fear against the rocks, then stirred up a cyclone beneath Spyro and herself. It bumped against the crevices around them until it threw the rocks out of the way in their entirety.
She scrambled up as the slippery rocks went flying and squinted through the burst of light, most of the sky now visible.
Damn it... she had to keep the wind going until they were clear of the now-falling rocks.
Fire rushed through her veins as the effort diminished her magic supply. She'd never hated rocks so much. Magic and otherwise.
Just a little more...!
In one last manoeuvre, she clamped her paws around Spyro's fragile body, angled her wings and catapulted them up in a whirlwind.
Before Cynder could take her first good breath of the open air, a fog descended upon her consciousness and pushed the world from her mind.
*.*
The fragrance of a vibrant, multicoloured flower field filled Sparx's nostrils, and summery warmth radiated over his body.
"I could get used to this," he sighed, stretching his arms over his head. He bobbed through the tall grasses, brushing his hands against the blooms and feeling them tickle his palms softly. "Maybe I should start gardening. Make use of the peace and quiet."
Indeed, not a soul was within eyeshot. It felt like he hadn't had a moment to himself the past few weeks, even though most everyone had hardly spared him a glance as they got along rebuilding their lives and homes. Terrador had probably been the closest to a remotely pleasant presence, even if virtually all of his compliments were backhanded.
Turns out he didn't enjoy being left alone as he would have thought. It didn't help that he'd been ditched.
But that was yesterday—the flower field was now, his alone to enjoy. And it seemed to call him further.
He hovered along, determined to survey just how much of a good time he was going to find here.
Insects smaller than himself skittered among the leafy grasses and atop the blossoms. He snapped off an unoccupied flower bud, sucking on the nectar as he flew forth. He passed over a slow stream of what was the clearest water he'd ever seen, as if it was made of liquid glass. Its bed of smooth, mottled rocks snaked along the ground, surrounded by a narrow shore of rich, exposed dirt.
He looked down at the water's surface and wiggled his eyes at his own reflection, which winked back.
"You devil, you," he snickered, turning away from the dragonfly in the wavering mirror.
He must have spent the whole day perusing the field, because before he knew it, the sky was turning orange and indigo and the stars were coming out. Though darkness was usually a time for increased caution, he felt no such impulse as night approached.
He thought little of it, leisurely taking to finding a spot to hunker down in. He soon found a thick tree that had a plaited, twisted trunk and supple vines curled around it. The surrounding grasses waved like dragon's crests in the soft breeze, beckoning him to rest. Before he landed, he looked to the heavens.
Away from the lights of Warfang and the smoulders of the Burned Lands, the sky was clear. The stars twinkled like happy crystals down on the world beneath them. He took a deep breath of the sweet air, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them, the glowing whites of empty eyes were gaping in front of him.