Leon started walking.
He wasn't entirely sure when the decision had been made. One moment he was standing in the empty camp watching the dragon's approach, and the next his feet were moving and the distance between him and the gate - between him and safety -was increasing with every step.
I should have thought this through more, he noted internally, with the calm detachment of a man observing his own poor decisions from a slight remove.
The dragon was still approaching. Not quickly - nothing that large could move quickly in any way a human brain would recognize as such - but with the steady, inevitable momentum of weather. Of geography in motion. The ground had developed a persistent tremor that Leon felt through his boots, through his ankles, up into his teeth.
He kept walking.
The plains stretched before him, beautiful and indifferent. Behind him, through the gate, somewhere in the swamp, eighty thousand soldiers were presumably watching this through spyglasses and collectively holding their breath.
Actually, Leon thought, they're probably not watching. They're probably pressed against the furthest available wall.
A shadow fell over him.
He looked up.
The dragon was directly overhead now - or rather, part of it was. One of its forelegs, descending with geological patience toward the ground ahead. Each talon was larger than a house. The leg itself was way too wide, he thought. It met the earth with a sound that wasn't so much heard as experienced, a compression of the air that pushed against Leon's chest and made his vision blur momentarily.
The ground dipped. Not metaphorically - the actual terrain deformed slightly under the weight, a shallow depression spreading outward from the point of impact.
Leon recalibrated his route around the new geographical feature and kept moving.
If it comes to it, he thought, squinting upward at the vast scaled expanse above him, I'll climb. I've never climbed a mountain before but the principle is straightforward. Find handholds. Go up. Don't look down.
He paused, reconsidering.
Don't look down will be difficult when the mountain can choose to look back.
The dragon was settling. That was the word his mind reached for, the only word that fit. The way a bird settles onto a branch, but scaled up through every order of magnitude imaginable until the concept became something else entirely. Vast weight redistributing across the landscape. Limbs folding in ways that temporarily redrew the local horizon. The wings - those impossible wings - pulling in against the body with a sound like distant thunder, like the world taking a long slow breath.
The ground continued to move beneath Leon's feet in long, slow pulses.
He kept walking.
He was close enough now that the individual scales were distinct. Each one was enormous - larger than the defensive platforms they'd built in the swamp, each one carrying its own history of impact and weathering and time beyond calculation. Too real in a way that made everything else seem slightly less so.
Leon walked past the base of what he'd initially catalogued as a ridge, and understood it was a toe.
He kept walking.
I would very much prefer, he thought with great sincerity, not to have to climb this. I'm not opposed to the idea on principle, I simply have no equipment, no training, no experience, and the mountain in question is alive and could at any moment shift its weight in a way that would be catastrophic for anyone on its surface.
Also I'm fairly sure there isn't enough mountain-climbing in any amount of mountain-climbing to prepare someone for this specific mountain.
He stopped.
The eye was there.
It had appeared - he wasn't quite sure when, his attention had been on his footing -and now it occupied his entire field of vision. Not the whole dragon. Not the head, though he understood the head was there somewhere above him, connected to this by scales and structure and the impossible architecture of something this size.
Just the eye.
Amber. Deep amber, the color of old honey, of light through autumn leaves, of something warm that had been warm for so long. The iris alone was wider than Leon was tall. The pupil - vertical, focused - had contracted slightly as it settled on him.
On him specifically.
He was close enough to reach out his hand and touch it if he wanted to.
He did not want to.
He also couldn't move. Not from fear exactly, but from the simple cognitive impossibility of being regarded by something this ancient. He could feel it looking at him. In the way you felt the sun. Something that simply was, radiating, present, impossible to ignore.
The intelligence in that eye was worse than the size.
He'd half-hoped, on some level, that the dragon would be like the creatures that came through other gates. Huge, yes. Deadly, absolutely. But ultimately animal. Operating on instinct and hunger and the simple mechanical logic of a predator.
The eye looking at him was not an animal's eye.
Leon stood very still.
Well, he thought. I got its attention.
Now what.
The question hung in his mind with genuine, open urgency. He'd had a plan up until that point - walk forward, close the distance, make himself impossible to overlook. He'd achieved all of those things.
He had not, he now realized, developed anything resembling a plan for what came after impossible to overlook.
The eye didn't blink. Didn't move. Just regarded him with that warm, ancient attention.
Leon's mouth was very dry.
He thought about the last time. About that sound that everyone else had heard as devastation and his memory had processed as words. About the pause afterward - that beat of waiting -that he'd been too terrified to fill.
He wasn't less terrified now. If anything the proximity made it considerably worse. But he'd walked across an empty field toward something that could end him with careless movement, and the least he could do was open his mouth.
He cleared his throat.
The sound was absurdly small. A human throat clearing, in front of an eye the size of a building.
"Hello," said Leon.
His voice came out steadier than he had any right to expect. Barely above a conversational volume, because there was no version of this where shouting felt appropriate.
The eye remained on him.
"I'm," Leon started, then stopped, then tried again. "My name is Leon. I'm - we're from the world on the other side of the gate."
A pause. The ground pulsed gently with the dragon's breathing.
"I heard you speak," Leon said. "Last time. When you-" He gestured upward vaguely, indicating the event that everyone else had experienced as a devastating roar. "I heard words. I didn't answer. I should have answered. I was-"
He considered the honest version.
"I was terrified," he said. "Which I realize isn't a great impression. You came back, and I thought-"
He stopped again. The eye had shifted. Fractionally. Adjusted its focus in a way that felt different from before, more deliberate.
Like it was listening.
"I thought," Leon finished quietly, "that someone should probably stay and apologize for that."
The silence stretched out around them both. The empty camp. The open plains. The gate shimmering in the distance behind him.
Leon waited.
He was very good at waiting, by this point. Years of maintaining a fraud that could collapse at any second had taught him that silence wasn't the absence of something -it was just another thing to hold still through.
He held still.
And waited to discover whether the most important conversation of his life would actually turn out to be one.