Breathing Fire (Drakonian Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Breathing Fire

  B.D. Snowden

  Geeky Goth Press

  Copyright © 2016 B.D. Snowden

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0-9980843-2-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9980843-2-9

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to the awesome readers who have become friends through the miracle of social media. I love you guys!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The book wouldn’t have been possible without the baristas at 8th Street Coffee House who kept me supplied with caffeine. Besides coffee a lot of work goes into creating a book for publication. I would like to give a shout out to my editor Nick and my amazing cover artist Lillian who worked their magic on my behalf.

  1

  “Alexis! You should wait for the rest of the team.”

  Alexis Carmichael pushed the dark curls that had escaped her clip out of her face. She was too close to stop now. They had just breached the outer wall and she knew from the ground radar that a vast chamber that no human had entered for hundreds if not thousands of years was literally inches away from her. Her excitement couldn’t be contained, and she would be damned if she let her assistant slow her down.

  “I’m almost there, Charlie. I’m not going to fucking let Dr. Monroe get a look at this before I do.”

  It was well known amongst the members of the dig team that Dr. Carmichael and Dr. Monroe had a major rivalry going. What the team didn’t know was that the two had been lovers when Alexis was still just a doctoral candidate. She had been attracted to the charismatic Dr. Monroe and naïve enough to take his flirtations seriously. It wasn’t until later that Alexis had found out that the good doctor made a habit of banging any female he was an advisor for.

  Once she had her degree conferred, she had made a point to avoid him whenever possible. This dig was her baby. It was her research that found the chamber beneath what everyone, even the locals, believed was just a hill in a meadow. So it really chapped Alexis’s ass when the university had insisted that a more experienced archeologist be placed as co-director for this dig, otherwise their benefactor was going to pull the funding. Anyone else would have been fine, but they had to send Dr. Daniel Monroe, who was presently trying to get into the pants of nearly every female member of the team. God, I should have cut his balls off years ago, Alexis thought.

  “Dr. Carmichael…” Oh no, Charlie was using her title. She absolutely hated making him feel uncomfortable, but this was her dig no matter what that pansy-ass Daniel Monroe thought.

  “It will be fine, Charlie. I just want to look around. Nothing will be disturbed until properly documented and cataloged.” Alexis’ bright blue eyes looked over her shoulder. The sun was just coming out over the horizon. She had chosen to wake up early and work in the predawn hours because she knew that Daniel wouldn’t be awake until the sun was well up. She needed this time of peace and quiet—without his casual touches. The man always seemed to be touching her. Alexis made a face.

  Alexis removed the final stone. The opening was now wide enough for her to fit. She flicked on the headlamp on her helmet and slowly slithered her way through the opening. Charlie was relegated to standing watch outside of the chamber because of his large athletic frame.

  A wide smile spread across her face as she surveyed the chamber and its contents. She had been certain that she had found a burial site of a high-value Celtic chieftain; but nothing prepared her for the wide range of artifacts that she was now faced with. It was like she was in a European version of King Tut’s tomb. This find was going to make her career.

  Alexis did a silent little happy dance, which she stopped mid jiggle. She had forgotten, in her revelry, about Dr. Monroe. He was her own personal Rene Belloq. With a find this big it was a certainty that he would try to wrestle complete control and, along with it, the recognition. She could almost see him sneering at her and paraphrasing lines from Indiana Jones, “Dr. Carmichael, you see there is nothing you possess which I cannot take away.”

  “Fuck!” Alexis groused.

  “What was that Dr. Carmichael?” Charlie’s voice called from the entrance.

  “Nothing…I’ll be up in a few minutes. Go tell the rest of the team to get their butts into gear. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Alexis could hear Charlie leaving to go get the rest of the team. She only had a few moments to get a private look. This find was like nothing else in this area. Other cairns, even the huge complexes, didn’t have the riches that she was seeing here. Kings and great leaders had been buried with their arms and armor; a few had treasured household items or even animals. But this…. Everywhere Alexis turned…gold, gems, artwork. She walked deeper into the chamber. Her hands itched to touch the artifacts, to examine them more closely. She wouldn’t, at least not until they were documented where they were found. The fact that a living person had not stepped foot into this space for over a thousand years made Alexis giddy.

  Something on the far side of the chamber caught her eye. From a distance, it looked like a heavily carved floor-to-ceiling altar panel, but those weren’t prevalent until the medieval period with the cathedral boom. As she was moving to investigate it further, she heard the clamoring of the rest of her dig team. Oh well, there was always time later to see what had caught her attention.

  *****

  Alexis ran her hand through her chin-length mahogany curls. The gesture was a sign of her frustration, but is also gave her a sexy, just-out-of-bed look. Six hours…the team had been tirelessly working for the last six hours and she had spent the last six hours fending off Monroe’s advances. Good god, did the man actually do any work? She stalked off, hoping for a bit of a reprieve from his company.

  Alexis wasn’t a conventional beauty. She was short, barely over five feet tall. She had curves in all the right places, which kept her from seeming too petite and childlike. Her skin was peaches and cream, which contrasted greatly with the curly mass of dark hair that haloed her face. Her eyes were an amazing shade of sapphire blue framed by thick lashes. But the most amazing thing about her appearance was that she was oblivious to the effect she had on people. This was one of the reasons that every set of male eyes on the team followed her as she crossed the chamber.

  Dr. Carmichael was all business. She wanted to examine the wall of relief carvings that had caught her attention when she first entered the chamber. She had always had an instinct for knowing when something was going to be important, and that sixth sense of hers was buzzing like a hive of bees at this point.

  The closer Alexis got to the carving, the more her body hummed. She took out her soft-bristle brush and gently swept away centuries of dust and dirt. Underneath were the most exquisite carvings of stylized dragons that she had ever seen. She got down on her knees to follow one particular carving that seemed to draw her. The remaining flecks of paint that she so tenderly preserved showed that this dragon carving had at one time been red. Its shape was vaguely reminiscent of the Welsh Y Ddraig Goch, though it was positioned vertically, as if climbing down the wall. There was a similar dragon facing the opposite direction on the other side of the carving. If that dragon was colored white…. Alexis couldn’t help the gleeful grin spreading across her face. Perhaps this may have been where that particular legend was born, since this chamber was estimated to predate any other references. Even without the impressive gold and artifacts, a find that pinpointed where a legend started would be a paper that could cement the name of Dr. Alexis Carmichael as one of the leading authorities on European history.

  With her headlamp positioned to pick up the finer details, Alexis followed the body of the carving, starting at the head. As she moved
up the length of the stone beast, Alexis noticed something strange. The claws of the dragon were carved in such a way that they seemed to be holding something.

  Upon closer inspection Alexis realized that those claws weren’t just carvings, but hinges. This wasn’t just a magnificent piece of relief sculpture, but a door. Alexis examined the carving, and sure enough there was a barely discernible line right down the middle. She was standing in front of a massive carved double door.

  Her mind started working at a hundred miles an hour. It was possible that this door was placed here because of its decorativeness, like a master artwork. There was the chance that the door was strictly symbolic or religious….a passageway into the afterlife. But the last possibility was what excited Alexis the most. It could just be a door that leads to another chamber. If it did, it might be the burial chamber, since the team had not found an occupant for this tomb yet. Oh, wouldn’t it just chap Monroe’s ass if I found the burial chamber first, Alexis thought.

  Trying not to draw any attention to herself, Alexis went and fetched Charlie as well as one of the interns who was cataloging items. Between the three of them they measured, documented, and photographed the doors.

  The whole process was taking longer than Alexis would like. So far her luck had held out and Dr. Monroe had stayed away from her. Glancing over her shoulder she saw him trying to smooze the stunning blonde intern cataloging the pottery found in the far corner. Since the blonde was blushing prettily at something Monroe said, Alexis figured they still had a little bit more time before he noticed what they were doing.

  “Charlie, help me look for a latch or pull.” Alexis started gently running her hands along the doors, starting at the seam that split the two. She surmised that if part of the carving was a pull then it would most likely be near where the two doors met. Simple physics said that would be the most logical place.

  After a few minutes of futile searching, Charlie sighed, “I don’t think we are going to find a handle, Doc. Maybe we could pry it open.”

  Alexis narrowed her eyes at him, “Do you want to damage this?”

  He held up his hands in defense, “Of course not…but it may be the only way to get it open. Plus, I think if we padded where we leveraged the pry bar we could minimize if not eliminate the damage.”

  Dr. Carmichael had to admit that Charlie’s plan was a sound one. But even the slight possibility of damaging such a masterful carving had her hesitating.

  “All right, Charlie. Go see if you can find something to pry this open, with and a lot of padding while you are at it. I’m going to stay here and give it another once over to see if we might have missed a hidden latch or something.”

  Alone with the carving, Alexis swore she saw something glint near the eyes of one of the dragon carvings. She laid her palms on either side of the carving’s head and leaned in very close, but she couldn’t see anything that would have shined like she saw. She had been hoping to find some sort of mechanism to spring the doors open, but that didn’t look like it was going to be the case. She really didn’t want to pry the doors open, but finding out if there was another chamber outweighed the damaged that might or might not occur.

  Alexis leaned her forehead against the head of the dragon carving. Resigned to what they were about to do, she heaved a big sigh.

  If anyone had been paying attention they would have noticed something strange when Dr. Carmichael sighed. Her exhaled breath curled like smoke and was tinged with red and orange when it touched the ancient wood. The dragon carving seemed to inhale this essence and its eyes flashed a fiery red.

  Alexis felt a rumble through the great carved door. She stepped back, staring at the vibrating carvings with wide eyes. With a whoosh, the entrance to a secondary chamber opened, emitting air stale with age. The sound disturbed the rest of the dig team, and everyone, including Dr. Monroe, turned to see what the noise was.

  Alexis saw Monroe heading her way out of the corner of her eye. The blonde intern was forgotten as soon as he sensed a possible new discovery. Alexis was going to be the first to enter that chamber, and any discovery therein would be listed as discovered by Dr. Carmichael—not Dr. Monroe.

  2

  His dreams began to swirl and fade. The fantastical images of his cosmic consciousness coalesced into the here and now, leaving behind the shadows of the past and the imaginings of the future.

  “Yr wyf yn?…” He was having trouble remembering who he was, a sure sign that he had been held in stasis for too long. He forced himself to concentrate, to disentangle his sense of self from the greater universe. “Yr wyf yn Ladon.” His declaration ripped his consciousness from the cosmos and slammed it back into the physical realm.

  Returning to consciousness was almost a painful experience. It felt as if the hand of god had physically body-slammed him into the ground. He wondered how long his mind had traveled among the neural net his nano machines had created to help keep his mind from going mad. While he knew that his body had not been disturbed since falling into his deep slumber, the world around it felt alien to him.

  When his mind was fully merged with his great dragon body, he found that he still could not move. He could feel the presence of men and women outside of his chamber, but they were foreign. Their smells and minds were unknown to him. The language running around their group was not the language of his people. Had something happened to his nano machines to make them malfunction? Ladon sent his senses out trying to find someone familiar, but none of his beloved handmaidens were near. In fact, the only thing that greeted him was the smell of death and age.

  For days Ladon felt the people outside in their activity. They used crude tools and did not seem to notice the microscopic machines that observed them. He took that time to slowly reintegrate into his body, moving muscles that had frozen to an almost stone-like state after who knows how many centuries. When he was not reestablishing neural pathways, he listened to the minds of those around him that his machines and attached themselves to. He learned the strange language that most of the people outside of his chamber seemed to speak. He still didn’t understand many of the things their minds showed him. The people seemed much more technologically advanced then he remembered of this planet, yet they still paled in comparison to the Drako people.

  Still, he wondered what had happened. Stasis was only used for emergencies, such as a fatal wound. A few chose to use stasis for long-distance travel to move live cargo. Even if he slept because of an injury, it was the duty of the handmaidens to keep the temple. They should have programmed the nano machines that controlled the stasis field to release him once his injury had healed. Ladon could find no trace of those special women who carried the DNA and nano machines of a dragoness within them, and it seemed as if many generations had passed.

  Suddenly he felt her on the other side of the door—a woman who held the dragoness within. Her nanos were few, but strong. He could feel them gathering strength. Perhaps the council had sent him a new handmaiden. But sensing a single person with faint traces of shared DNA didn’t explain why he was alone in this dust-filled chamber. In the past there had been numerous handmaidens as well as other dragons. He was impatient to question the woman on the other side of the door.

  The question now was if she could pass the test. The doors would open only if the nano machines within her were strong enough. She had to ‘breathe fire,’ releasing enough of Drako DNA combined with nanos in her breath like a key that only a handmaiden or dragon carried. If she could do that, the doors would open for her. If there wasn’t enough of a nano presence, then the doors would remain firmly shut.

  Ladon was almost giddy with anticipation. He felt the woman’s essence through his nano machines; surprised filled him when he first connected to her. Compassion delicately balanced with a warrior’s spirit…she was intoxicating and beautiful, and he hadn’t even set eyes upon her yet.

  The door opened and Ladon’s heart roared.

  3

  Alexis shined her headlamp into the cham
ber beyond. On the far side was the most realistic dragon sculpture she had ever seen. It looked like a sleeping dragon curled in on itself. The body of it was red and glimmered in her lamp light. Briefly, Alexis wondered if perhaps it had been inlaid with jewels. The massive size of it would make it one of the world’s wonders if it was in fact bejeweled. She swept her lamp through the chamber, noting that there didn’t appear to be a sarcophagus of any sort. The lack of a king’s burial disappointed her. Her eyes went back to the massive dragon sculpture. It would be a very unique find in and of itself. It was a one-of-a-kind piece. Perhaps she could still make a name for herself in the archeological world with it.

  “Dr. Carmichael!” Dr. Monroe called to her as he hurried over. Alexis knew it was petty, but she wanted to be the first to enter the chamber. It was almost a compulsion. “Wait!”

  Alexis ignored Monroe and stepped into the chamber, alone. She was blinded by the flames that sprang to life, illuminating the entire room. In the back of her mind she made a note to herself to figure out the parlor trick that did that. With flames flickering around her, she reached up and turned off her headlamp to conserve its battery.

  Walking towards the great dragon sculpture, Alexis saw the shadows from the dancing flames play across the creation. Even though the light was fairly bright, it still made the dragon seem to be alive. If she wasn’t the reasonable, educated person that she was, she would have sworn that the dragon moved. It was probably the effect that the ancients of this area wanted to project. Perhaps this was a temple complex instead of a burial site.

  “Whoa….” Alexis turned at the sound of Charlie’s voice. For a moment, she had forgotten that she wasn’t alone here. In the doorway stood Charlie and Dr. Monroe, both of them wide eyed. Alexis could see the wheels turning in Monroe’s eyes. This was a one-of-a-kind find. Nowhere in the history of archeological sites worldwide, let alone here in Wales, had anything like this been found.