Chapter 106 Very Terrifying

Chapter 106 Very Terrifying
Cassandra's POV

"Gosh," I whimpered. "How the hell do I get out of here?"

I had been trying, to no avail, for days now.

The worst part was the cold and the hunger arriving together, with no food in sight.

Layers of old and new bruises made my head ache constantly. My body had stopped telling the difference between pain and background noise. Worse than the pain was not knowing how long I'd been here. Time moved strangely in this place, like it was being rationed by something that didn't care whether I noticed.

The noises from the dragons soaring above made my heart skip every time. That's why I'd been hiding in this deep cave. God knows how I'd even ended up here.

I still remembered how it all started. I thought it was just a dream at first, but it had turned into something closer to reality, a journey with no clear way back.

"My goodness." I needed to get out of here by any means. I looked around the cave for anything that could help me climb out.

I spotted a damaged ladder in the corner. I pulled the strip of fabric tighter around my leg so I wouldn't feel it as sharply whenever I stepped on rough ground.

"You are not dying here," I told myself. My voice came back off the cave wall, flat and swallowed. "You are not dying in a dream, Cassandra Sterling. That is not how this ends."

My gaze drifted to the cave mouth, where the dragons circled.

They were enormous. They screamed at each other across the grey sky, breathing fire in long sweeping arcs that lit the clouds from underneath, and the sound of it had stopped terrifying me two days ago.

That was the one thing I'd managed to be grateful for in all of this. None of them had come down. They circled, screamed and breathed fire, ignoring me entirely, like I was invisible to them. They always looked past me, which was more courtesy than most situations in my life had recently extended me.

"I will not die in my own dream," I told myself.

I was on a mountain, the air cold and grey. When the dragon had hit me, I'd fallen and landed here. Ever since, I'd been looking for the exit, running the perimeter, climbing, descending, trying different directions and every time I ended up back at this cave, like the place was folding in on itself, refusing to let me leave.

I grabbed the stick I'd found on the floor. Thick enough to take my weight.

"Cassandra, be strong. Find the edge and get out of here," I muttered through gritted teeth.

The blizzard hit me the moment I started climbing out of the cave again. The cold was a physical thing, pressing against every exposed inch of skin until it felt like my soul was being pulled out of my body.

My stomach made its feelings known. I'd resorted to eating snow, which was doing a very poor job of being food.

"I know," I said to my stomach. "Just manage."

I ignored the noise of the dragons overhead and marched forward. I was reaching for the next rung of the ladder when my left foot slipped, I tripped and my mouth struck the cave wall.

I went down hard and the pain compounded immediately. It felt like my leg had been severed from me. The cave spun around me, everything rotating in slow, sickening motion.

The scream left me before I could stop it. I lay on the ground with my face pressed against the ice, breathing through the white-hot agony radiating up my leg.

Then I sat up and looked around. "This mission seems impossible."

I was shattered and broken.

"Alright," I said. My voice was shaking. "Alright. You've done worse. You've survived worse."

I had not, strictly speaking, survived much worse than this. But the encouragement was for me, not for accuracy.

I grabbed my leg with both hands, positioned it, and snapped it back into place.

The sound that came out of me was not a scream. It was something deeper and more animal than a scream, something that came from a place below language, and the pain that followed it was the closest thing to blinding I had ever experienced.

I lay there for a moment, just breathing, the ice cold against my back.

"How on earth will Liam find me here," I muttered to the grey sky. "I don't know if the war has started. I don't know what's happening up there. I don't know if you're okay or if you're hurt or if Harlan has already–" My voice cracked and I pressed my lips together. "I need to get out of here. I need to get back. Just–" I stopped. "Just be okay. Please just be okay until I can get back to you."

The sky didn't answer.

I was still crying when I heard a low rumble, deep and directional, coming from somewhere far down the mountain. I lifted my head and looked.

The dragons had changed direction.

All of them, simultaneously, wheeling away from their circling pattern and moving toward the far end of the mountain range with an urgency entirely different from the lazy, proprietary looping they'd been doing for days.

‘What could be happening there?’ I needed to focus on finding my way out first. I was still thinking through my options when I noticed the ground around me beginning to shake, the floor beneath me starting to crack, the fracture lines spreading toward my spot. Everything above, beneath and behind me was shaking and splitting apart.

I turned around.

The avalanche was already moving.

I grabbed the stick and tried to stand.

My ankle screamed.

I stood anyway.

I moved, because I was not going to die in a limbo on a mountain while Liam needed me.

I pushed with everything I had left, climbing fast because the earth could not be allowed to swallow me, that would be the worst outcome of all. Every ache in my body fell away because I was running on the last reserve of whatever was keeping me upright, and I needed to make it out.

I looked up. The ladder was three feet away. Almost there. The avalanche was much closer than three feet.

Then the dragons flew past me in waves, enormous shapes cutting through the air above, their tails sweeping low. One of them caught me across the back and flung me sideways. The stick left my hand and I hit the ground hard and slid.

I cursed. "I really tried ducking to keep them from hitting me. I will not give up," I willed myself.

I started crawling.

"I am not dying here," I said through gritted teeth, tears freezing on my face before they finished falling. "I am not dying in a dream. I am going back. I am going back to Liam."

My fingers closed around the stick again and I kept climbing, without stopping.

Too late.

The floor beneath me cracked completely. The ground gave way and I was falling– the cold rushing up to meet me, the mountain disappearing above, the dragons screaming somewhere far overhead, the darkness rising fast from below.

I screamed.

The sound dissolved into the dark.