MDS Ch. 7: A battle for life and freedom

I waited for a long time. I figured that my captor was by now very suspicious. However, when she came in I knew I’d have the advantage – my eyes were by now very well adjusted to the darkness, enough that I felt I could reliably shoot an arrow. I was worried that Jarrod had left me only five, but it was no good dwelling on that now. I started making little plans for every possible contingency.

For instance, I made a plan for if she hit one of the two traps, if she managed to avoid them both, or if they didn’t work. And I waited. Finally, after an hour or two I heard the gruff voice of my captor yelling, and a few minutes later I saw her approach. I saw her notice the pressure pad and gingerly step over it. She had entered the main part of the room, the one that was in my full view but she was still looking around to see me.

“I know you’re in here you little rat, and when I find you, I’ll eat you! Forget the ransom, you’re not worth it. Now it’s personal!” She let out a roar, but no flame. She must have been worried about setting off the trap.

Meanwhile, I silently knocked an arrow and drew back, aiming not for the dragon, but for the second pressure plate, the one that would send spikes flying through her. I closed my eyes and prayed then opened them, checked my aim, and let fly.

The arrow flew true, whizzing right past the dragon and hitting the plate with enough force to set the trap in motion. The dragon immediately took in what had happened and panicked. When she saw the spikes poke out, she jumped backwards out of the room, avoiding the second trap, but, in her hurry, setting off the first. Unfortunately the spikes blocked some of the shards, but some still got in her eyes, because I heard her screaming. Then I began to hear monstrous thumps from behind me.

“I’ll collapse this whole cave on you!” she yelled, “What do you think of that? So clever now, your highness?”

Rocks had begun to fall. I dropped down from my hiding place to see the dragon, luckily facing away from me, thumping her tail against the cave wall. I readied another arrow to fire at the “sweet spot” in the back of her neck and fired. I missed her entirely, but she turned around and saw me. Or sort of saw me. I could tell she was partially blinded by the shards of metal, some of which were still sticking out of her monstrous eyes. She lunged at me, but I rolled out of the way into the tiny crawlspace I had found before. I escaped, but she’d nicked me with her claws. I was bleeding. As I tied a torn piece of my dress around my waist, I instantly realized this hiding place was a mistake. She could toast me alive in here and I’d have no escape.

So, as the confused dragon swept the outside tunnel with fire, I ran back into the main room to look for a way to deflect the flame. I noticed that the wooden ladder had fallen down and splintered into pieces. I grabbed one of the long planks, and brought the end (which was a good ten feet away from me) into the dragon’s flame. The minute she stopped flaming I rammed the torch on a stick into her face. It didn’t damage her much, but, coming out of nowhere in her blindness, it did confuse her for a while. Long enough for me to drag the ejected spikes crosswise across the side opening of the crawl space. If I sat near the whole where the spike had originally been, I had enough space to pull back and I could shoot my last three arrows with immunity. I knocked one and drew.

The dragon had recovered from her distraction and was now actively seeking me out. She was walking right toward me. She was walking down the wall, carefully peering at the crawl space, until she reached my hiding place. I saw her eyes clearly now, and saw that one was nearly filled with shards, but the other was working fine.

Before she could do anything, I let an arrow fly into her good eye. She screamed in pain. She blindly reached toward me, found the spikes with her hand and tossed them aside, almost hitting me with their points on the way out. To evade them I had to back into the alcove the pikes had come from. Then it was just me with nowhere to run and she knew it.

“Do I get my one chance to surrender?” I asked hopefully, putting down my bow and readying my knife.

“Like hell,” she replied.

“Then let me give you yours!” I screamed. Somehow, I scrambled over her head and made it to her neck. I drove the knife down into the spot between the scales. She screamed again, an agonizing scream.

“Do you surrender?” I asked, but she didn’t, or couldn’t respond. Thinking only of survival, I drove the knife upward, into her brain. Her scream ended and she twitched, dead. I looked down at the wound in my side that I hadn’t much noticed up until then and realized there was an awful lot of blood. Then everything went black.