Vidar stumbled out of the circle, panting hard and clutching his chest with his free hand. It felt like his heart wasn’t moving like it should, like it was sluggish and weak. The empty area around his heart had wrapped itself around it, clamping down hard and smothering the life out of him. Each breath was a battle, but Vidar couldn’t lie down and rest. If he did that, it felt like his hand would be useless forever.

  Cold. He needed cold to help with the burn. With that sole purpose in mind, he crawled to his pack and desperately pulled out its contents, searching for the ink. When he found the bottle, he uncorked it and stuck a finger inside, not bothering with a brush. Vidar drew dark lines on the first piece of paper he found, using only his finger. In a daze of pain and his head swimming from lack of air, the lines came out terribly crooked and uneven. He did not care. In that moment, he was just desperate for something to soothe the terrible heat.

  It worked, somewhat. Cold wafted from the piece of paper once he triggered the rune, but it did little to help with the pain.

  “Why does it hurt more?” Vidar whimpered, removing his hand by lifting it with his other one.

  With some distance between the wound and the cold, the sensation actually improved and it felt a little better. Not good by any stretch of the imagination, but better. His breathing was stabilizing as well and Vidar no longer felt like he was about to pass out, even if he still couldn’t move his arm or hand at all.

  Time crawled as he waited for the return of his limbs. The loud sound returned once more, but other than that, it was dead quiet. A kenaz rune lit up the pile of ash that’d been the spear and Vidar wondered what the hell just happened. After letting the cold from the isaz rune soothe the wound, he braved a look. His entire palm was scalded like he’d dumped hot water over it, but it wasn’t too terrible. The worst of it was the area where a rune had apparently touched him, or he touched it. A deep groove for each line created a runic symbol in his flesh that would never go away. Blackened skin covered the bottom of the burn mark, showing the rune in a clear way. The same rune he was seeing everywhere on the floor, the one responsible for stealing essence from himself, and by all accounts, the dragon. Moving his fingers shot lances of pain through the now tingling hand, whispering of worse pain to come. Still, he could move the fingers a little. His hand was not ruined.

  In his mind, he saw himself putting his hand under a pile of snow and letting it melt into the wound. Terrible pain would shock him at first, but after that? Bliss. His throat felt dry, and he finished the skin of water he’d brought with him before testing his legs. They wobbled but carried him.

  Vidar needed to get out of there, but two unanswered questions remained. The sound and the destination for the white painted line. The knife he’d brought would have to do for a weapon, and at least his stronger hand remained healthy and whole.

  The spear was the weapon he needed to kill the dragon, and he cursed its remains on the floor. Still, the broken-off piece from the skeleton was still nestled safe in his pocket. If the bone-tipped spear killed this dragon, there was nothing stopping Vidar from making a spear of his own using this new find. Now all he needed was a weaponsmith. He knew of none in Halmstadt, but there had to be a few, surely.

  His walk toward the source of the sound started off sluggish. Vidar carried the isaz rune in one hand as he walked, holding his injured hand over it to calm the angry, burnt skin. With no way of carrying the lantern at the same time, he settled on holding the kenaz rune in his mouth. It was not the best of solutions and his drool soon made the ink run, something he hadn’t considered, and that effectively destroyed the rune.

  Thankfully, the destruction of a triggered kenaz rune did not produce the same explosion as a sowilo rune, or that would’ve been the end of him.

  “Stupid,” he muttered, fumbling through his pack in the dark to find the tinder sticks needed to relight the candle used in the lantern. His fingers brushed up against something he didn’t remember packing. String.

  Vidar’s eyes widened. An idea appeared in his mind, clear as day. One that’d surely be considered a great invention. Poking holes in the paper of another kenaz rune took some considerable effort with only one hand, and tying the string into the holes made him want to abandon the idea altogether, but he persevered and finally pulled the string over the top of his head, careful not to rip the paper.

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  There it was, his very own light rune affixed to his forehead. Perfect light without having to hold anything in his hands.

  “Revolutionary!” he screamed, rejuvenating it with the rune touching nothing more than his forehead. A chill ran through his head and a dull headache set in. Using his head for rejuvenating runes was perhaps not such a great idea, Vidar admitted, but they couldn’t all be winners.

  The light though? It was perfect. Something sturdier than paper would be necessary, of course, like a wooden disc with holes drilled through it, perhaps. But for a prototype, it was difficult to beat the light it provided. Moving his head moved the light, illuminating whatever he was looking at. How this was not something previously invented, he didn’t have a clue, but he would be sure to profit off of it. Profit greatly.

  His previous bellow actually echoed back to him from somewhere far away straight ahead, telling Vidar he was approaching the end of this massive chamber. Essence returned to him little by little until he finally felt whole, except for the wound in his hand that would not stop throbbing.

  He walked past another circle of runes but this one was empty with neither dragon, spear, or treasure. Two more such circles appeared as he made his way to the other end of the chamber. Both were just as empty.

  At this other end, there was no ladder. No, this was where the dragons entered through. Or their corpses, at least. A circular door of massive proportions, much larger than even the dragon, rose into the ceiling. It took him a little while to even figure out what he was seeing, and when it moved, creating that horrible sound of stone grinding against stone, Vidar screamed in fright, his ears ringing.

  He kept on walking and found a gap where the door did not fully close. Something was in the way, blocking it. That must be the reason, then. The door was trying to close itself by some unknown means, but when it ran up against whatever was blocking it, the door retracted to the side again, but only a little, because something must’ve broken so it couldn’t fully move back into the wall.

  In the door’s opening, he found a tunnel leading deeper into darkness, but all he could focus on was what lay crushed between the stone door and the wall. Bones. Skeletons but not a dragon’s, not this time. There were hundreds of them. Human skeletons. Rags hung from some of their frames and weapons lay at their feet. Piles and piles of dead humans, dead since long before Vidar’s birth. Each time the door attempted to close itself, it broke more of the bones. Ground them into dust. But many still remained. So many.

  “What happened here?”

  He did not dare get too close, not when the wall could smush him without warning, but he did reach in and grab a short sword resting beside a pile of bones that may have been two people once, perhaps three.

  Looking out across the dead, Vidar got the vague sense that they’d all faced away from the chamber. Unsure what brought him to that conclusion, he leaned over and returned the sword. Whoever these people once were, whatever happened to them, it felt wrong to steal from their final resting place.

  The stone door attempted to slam shut again and the piles of bones resisted, just like they’d been doing for untold years.

  It didn’t take long for Vidar to find the painted line once he was back at the skeletal dragon. Following in its direction only brought on frustration when it disappeared into a hole at the bottom of the wall. Even getting down on his stomach and shining the kenaz rune into the small space revealed nothing more than the line continuing on in that tiny tunnel.

  Enough was enough. It was time to head back up to the surface. The burn on his hand stung something fierce, but the chill rune helped soothe the pain a little as he made his way back to the dragon again. The biggest question of them all was how to kill a dragon, and that was one, at least, he’d found an answer to. You kill a dragon by using a weapon tipped with the bone of their own kind. If that enormous body withstood normal metal, then something else was required. This was that something else.

  He glared at the skeleton as he kicked another two spikes free from its tail, daring the thing to move. Those eyes still haunted him, and he felt them on his back as he walked through the darkness, back to the ladder. Turning back, Vidar thought he could see them glinting in the darkness. Shuddering, he rendered the kenaz rune affixed to his forehead inactive. Light was not a necessity when climbing.

  It was a struggle, to be sure, working his way up with only one hand able to carry his weight. The added bulk of the coins and spikes didn’t help, either. The ascent was not a quick one. When he finally opened the narrow hatch out onto the street and the cold crashed over him, Vidar was almost thankful for it. Almost. Plunging his burned hand into the snow was perhaps not the best of ideas, and it made him cry out in pain, but the numbness was welcome.

  The light of day was gone, replaced by night. With so few hours of sun each day, Vidar was not surprised. By the time he’d made it back to the building where his new home was located, he was a shuddering mess again, cursing the cold after the sweat he’d built up climbing made his shirt freeze against his skin, clinging painfully and making his movements sluggish.

  His hand was getting worse, not better.