Ember Flameheart's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By dawn Ember and Spindle had put three ridges between themselves and the dragon. Ember dropped to his knees beside a patch of colored mushrooms and held up his staff. The living dragonfire pulsed inside the dragonblood core, blue-white and awake. He had it. But holding it was not shaping it. To forge a crown, he needed a forge, and no fire he could make ran hot enough to bend that flame into metal. "You can't build a fire big enough," Spindle said. Spindle had trailed him across three valleys, and complained through every one. Now they crouched among the mushrooms, spider-arms wrapped tight around their knees. "You already woke a dragon. Let the crown go." "The crown makes me king," Ember said. "I don't stop." He pulled ordinary flame from the staff and poured it over a ring of stones. The fire roared orange. He set a strip of iron in the middle and waited. The metal glowed dull red, then held. It would not soften. Ember's ordinary fire was too weak, and the living fire refused to leave the staff to join it. The two flames would not mix. Spindle pointed one long arm past his shoulder. "Look at that." A plant grew from a crack in the rock. Purple and pink leaves fanned out below small green flowers shaped like folded wings. Between the leaves sat a lizard, green with gold-edged scales, its foreleg braced on a stem. As Ember watched, the lizard breathed on the plant. The green flowers glowed. Heat shimmered off the leaves. The rock beneath them had gone black and smooth, like slag from a furnace. Ember crawled closer. He touched the blackened rock. Still warm. Far warmer than his own fire had made the stones. The plant drank the lizard's breath and threw the heat back tenfold. "That's my forge," he said. "That's a plant," Spindle said. "With a lizard on it." Ember cleared a space around the roots. He laid the iron strip in the heart of the glowing flowers. Then he lowered his staff and let the living dragonfire drip out at last. The blue-white flame slid down onto the metal. The plant's heat caught it and held it. The iron softened, then ran like water. Ember worked fast. He bent the glowing metal with the butt of his staff, folding it into a band, then points. The living fire stayed alive inside the metal, blue veins running through the iron. A crown took shape under his hands, warm and burning and awake. He lifted it. The circle of iron pulsed with dragonfire that would not die. Then the ground shook. A shadow crossed the mushrooms. Ember looked up. High above, wide wings spread against the pale sky, three orange eyes fixed straight down on him. The dragon had found his face again. And now he held the proof of what he had stolen.