Free The Dragonswarm by Aaron Pogue

my breath. I flexed my fingers and closed my eyes and worked the exercises I had learned at the Academy. My breath caught as I felt the immensity of the mountain around me. I lay imprisoned beneath the floor of a great cavern, and outside the cavern was earth as far as I could stretch my mind.
    I shivered. Buried in the heart of a mountain, I felt incredibly small. But I cut that thought short, measured my breath, and turned my attention back to my surroundings. I looked for my captors, for the pulsing glow of lifeblood. I looked at the black cavity of the cavern above me, searching, but there was only emptiness.
    And then a piece of the emptiness moved. Then, for the first time, I recalled the drake that had surprised me on the edge of a farmer's field. I remembered it propping me up for a grown dragon swooping in to strike. I looked on the vast blackness above me, and I saw that it moved.
    No. It roiled . I could almost see the empty spot of blackness thrown by a dragon in motion, large enough to be the adult I'd seen before, but as I tried to track its flight across the cavern's ceiling, it passed another Chaos shadow flashing the other direction. Everywhere I looked, there was motion. I tried to count, but there was no sense of perspective, no distinction between one living darkness and the next. There might have been a dozen or a thousand there.
    A prisoner of dragons. I had never heard of anything like it. I shifted in place so I could crouch on my knees, then turned my attention back to the space above me. Beyond the dragons, behind them, the cavern yawned wide. It was easily a hundred paces in all directions, perhaps more. At one end of it, a sudden, sharp edge dropped off into a terrifyingly deep chasm. At the other end a wide, shallow pool danced with the soft azure sheets of still water.
    And in the heart of the cavern was a blazing inferno. Not fire, not real light, but the blazing flash of pure power shaped by the oldest magics of man. Silver, gold, and steel. Coins and gemstones, relics and treasures. I could not see the shape of any given item with the wizard's sight, but I could taste the human purpose that had imbued them with such focused energy.
    It was not the treasure store of a king; it was the wealth of a nation. The nearest edge of it was perhaps thirty paces from my prison, but it climbed into a mountain of precious metals. It blazed in the darkness. It called to me. I raised my fingers to the wide, flat stone that sealed my cage and, as carefully as I could, pressed up and to the side.
    Stone on stone screamed again in the silence. I moved it perhaps a finger's width, and for all my care it still dragged and scraped. I swallowed a curse, blinked my eyes, and then lifted the stone away with my will. I lowered it to the earth without a sound, but I felt the strain of it in my fingers and wrists. I paid it little mind. My eyes were drawn to the hoard.
    Even without the wizard's sight, the gold shone in the darkness. A thin, strangled light reached the cavern's interior through a wide cave mouth set high in one wall, but the treasure gathered the light, focused it, and threw it back bright and clean. The hoard glowed within the darkness.
    A handful of it would have been enough to buy me a life of luxury. If I could have filled a pack from it, I might have been as wealthy a man as Isabelle's father. If I could have loaded a farmer's cart, I could have shamed the king. And still I would not have touched a tenth part of the dragons' store.
    The thoughts came unbidden and went mostly ignored. I looked upon a sparkling treasure like I had never imagined, but the darkness hanging over it devoured all my attention. To my wizard's sight it hung like a great cloud of smoke, hovering above the pyre of perfect gold, but fear shattered my concentration and I looked up only with the eyes of a man.
    I trembled.
    Sprawled atop the hoard was a dragon. Dark and red as midnight embers, as heartblood in a pool. I remembered