Page 20 of Dragon Cursed
The fatigue eased a little.
That was reason enough to keep walking.
The forest closed around her.
She knew this path.She had picked elderflower along it every spring of her life.But today the trees stood differently.Closer.Branches tilted toward her as if leaning in to listen.A low hum threaded through the moss and the soles of her boots.
She mistook it, at first, for the memory of his voice.
"I met a dragon," she said aloud."I had sex with a dragon.”A lot of sex.With mind blowing, Earth shattering orgasms.“And he hasn't called."
The forest swallowed the sound.No answer came.
She hadn’t really expected one.
The hum grew louder the deeper she went.It pulled at the soft place behind her sternum — the same place that had ached all morning.The ache eased as she walked.Her steps quickened.The path narrowed, then disappeared, and still she walked.Ducked under low branches.Climbed a fallen birch slick with rain.
The trees were older here.
The light was greener.
She had lived in Cuanfirth her whole life and until a week ago, she’d been very careful to keep to the outer edges of the forest, had never ventured into the haunted part.Yet here she was, doing it again.Yes, and look at what that got you the first time.A dragon.A real one.Could be more, less friendly ones in here, too.Dragons that would eat you.Or ogres.Or Sidhe.Dark elves.Probably lots of creatures in here that don’t like humans.
She should have been afraid.
She wasfurious.
The hum was directing her.She could feel it now — a hand at the small of her back, pushing her forward.And underneath the hum, somewhere in the deep place where her grandmother's voice still lived, she knew exactly who had set this trap.
"If you're calling me,dragon man," she said to the trees, "you'd better have a damn good explanation."
The forest hummed louder.
The sound of water reached her before she saw it.A rush.A rumble.The kind of noise that swallowed everything else.
She pushed through a curtain of fern and stopped.
A waterfall.
A slim, white braid of water that fell from a cleft in the granite into a black pool below.Mist rose off the pool.The air smelled of cold stone.She stood at the edge and looked.And looked.
She already knew what she would find behind it.
The path around the pool was narrow and slick.She picked her way along it, hand braced against the wet rock, hair already damp with spray.The hum was no longer a hum.It was a chorus.Voices she couldn’t understand spoke just under the roar of the water — and theshapeof the words felt familiar in her mouth, as if she had once known the language and forgotten.
She rounded the curtain of falling water.
The world went quiet.
A shrine.Small.A chamber no larger than her own kitchen, hollowed into the rock behind the falls.There was a stone altar at the center and a floor worn smooth by feet she would never know.
The walls were covered in carvings.
She stepped inside.
The carvings were old.Some had been deliberately scored through — deep, angry gouges that crossed out faces and figures.Others had survived.She moved along the wall slowly, fingertips a hair's breadth from the stone, and used the flashlight on her phone to chase shapes out of the shadow.
The story rose to meet her in fragments.
