With his eyes more acclimated to the darkness, Jon had a better understanding of the dragon's shape and position. He could also see the place they were attacked the last time and made a few deductions using what he had learnt till now.
Cannibal either wouldn't or couldn't move too much from where it stayed. Part of its body even seemed buried inside the magma it slept upon.
Cannibal knew where they were without even looking. It could sense their position and use that sense to form a connection with their minds. Jon guessed that all unbounded dragons could do this with potential dragon riders, but Cannibal had learned to use it as a weapon to incapacitate the potential dragonrider by barraging their mind with its harshest emotions.
It had a possibly hard range for this ability, since Genji had not been affected.
With the rope tied around his waist he walked towards the beast and stopped just where he believed the edge of its range was. Taking in a deep breath he remembered what had happened when he had connected to it. First had come the emotions you would expect from a dragon. Rage, hunger, even apathy. Then instead of shying away from these visions, like he believed Mya and before them Genji must have done, Jon had dug deeper.
And found the emotions that Cannibal did not project into their connection. He had sensed sloth, cowardice, fear, a lot of fear. Fear of dragons bigger than hatchlings. Fear of armies of men, of projectiles being fired high up in the air, fear of getting lost over vast oceans, fear of never finding food again.
The Cannibal was a craven.
Weird as that idea was, Jon could feel the truth in it from the visions and the emotions. Underneath the scary superficial emotions it projected to incapacitate its prey, it was just very scared itself.
Despite its size, the dragon was closer to a scared little pet than not. Well, a pet with a taste for dragons and dragon blooded humans.
Letting out the breath, he took the next step and felt the dragon notice him. He knelt of his own volition just as the connection formed again, and focused on projecting his own emotions and visions.
He remembered the scenes from the show, and imagined an army of the dead, stretching till the horizon. He tried to imagine the despair such a sight would generate and projected that too. He took in the dragon's projected feelings of rage and let himself feel fear. Then projected that fear onto it too. And through it all, he thought of all that death and rot and projected the words,
"Help me or this will come true and there will be no more life anywhere. There would be nowhere to hide. And nothing to eat."
Jon felt the dragon's attack falter at his unexpected counter-attack and smiled.
…
"What is he doing?" Genji questioned from in front of her.
"Getting lucky." The leaner brother, Lemmy, added. "Dragon must have been tired from the previous try."
"That's not luck then, is it?" The youngest brother, Wally, interjected. "We've never tried twice. Much less on the same day."
"That's cause we're not mad like this tall fucker." Genji said. "Look! The dragon has started to move!"
She had seen that as well. Its limbs had started trembling as if it was preparing for an attack. Yet the tail or claws did not snap out. They spent another minute watching Jon kneel silently before the brothers started getting impatient.
"Could he actually… succeed?" Wally asked, and his brothers shared a look.
"No way!" Genji laughed nervously, but exchanged a look with Lemmy.
The shorter brother licked his lips then addressed her.
"It's getting a little dangerous. Come, we should get out of here. My brothers will go and help the man."
The other two nodded and he moved towards Mya. She guessed from their reaction that this really was not the typical behaviour for Cannibal. So what Jon was doing must be getting some results.
"No, I think I'll wait right here."
Lemmy opened his mouth to try and convince her, but Wally cut him off.
"Oh, just grab her! We can just kill the man afterwards."
"Shut up, Wally!" Genji hurriedly grabbed his younger brother.
"Why? So you can win her heart after her man's dead and make her your wife? And leave us with nothing?"
"Hey, I didn't say that!" Genji turned to Mya, perhaps expecting her to be angry or scared, which she supposed was why he blanched when he found her sporting a wide smile.
"You already knew." Lemmy said in realisation.
"I suspected." She confirmed, unsheathing Dark Sister. "I don't think you lot have a lot of experience fooling people."
"Fine." Wally grunted and jumped at her. It was the last thing he did as her blade, already at the ready, stabbed into his lungs.
Mya twisted the blade as his brothers screamed his name, and swiped it to the side. The Valyrian blade cut its way out of his left side, the sharp blade even slicing through his bones.
"You bitch!" Genji tried to attack her next, but she dodged, then tripped him to the ground.
"Ah, it's so good to do this to someone else." She said, thinking of all the times Jon had used his better footwork to send her to the ground.
A quick boot to the head knocked him out and at the sound of a scream she turned to look for the third brother. Lemmy had been trying to sneak up on her, but now had an angry wolf biting on his ass.
She went and put him out of his misery with a stab to the throat. Then bent down to pat Domu.
"That's a good boy. But I had it covered."
Domu growled at her. Frowning, she looked at his eyes then rolled her eyes.
"Oh, it's you, bitch! Don't try to steal my kill."
There was a rumble behind them and they turned to look at the dragon pulling itself up from where it was partly buried in the hot ground of the not entirely dormant volcano.
Only Jon walking towards them with a wide smile gave her the confidence to stay her ground in the vent as she saw the true size of the beast for the first time.
Cannibal's eyes, green like wildfire, looked at her half lidded before latching on to the dead bodies.
"Mya!" Jon greeted. "I see you have some food for our new friend."
She gave a slightly trembling smile back.
"Would rather have it fed than not." She answered before pointing to Wally. "I even let them make the first move."
"And Genji?"
She shrugged. "He did help us out. Despite his intentions."
The dragon moved towards them, its footsteps echoing in the otherwise silent chamber and she helped Jon throw the two bodies to it.
…
Nora fidgeted with her hands nervously on her spear as the man called Kane stared at them.
"What have you done to the dragon? Why is it roaring all of a sudden?!" He demanded and she tried to wake up Munda once more.
Their Child guide completely ignored the interloper to their little camp. She wanted to take comfort in its apparent confidence, but it really didn't look very strong.
She tried to wake Munda up again, then gathered her courage to reply to Kane.
"We didn't do anything! We didn't even go inside!"
Munda warging into Domu who was inside didn't count. Probably.
"Then why the hell are you still here?" She blinked at him, confused before he clarified. "When even we are running the fuck away."
"Oh, we're just.. about to leave."
She was going to say 'just waiting for someone', but then thought that would raise the question of 'where are these other people?'
Struggling for a better answer, she looked at Munda and grabbed onto the excuse.
"My friend fainted from the shock. We'll leave as soon as she is better."
Kane sighed and she detected some sympathy in his gaze.
"You look familiar." He admitted after a sigh, seemingly giving up on any answers from the Child. "I did not know that Father had started sending his daughters now."
Oh. She realised. It's one of my brothers.
The thought seemed strange to her. All her brothers were kids. They had been kids when she was a kid, and all of her brothers back in the Keep now were also kids.
She must have known that the ones who were sent away would have grown up over the years. But it had not really settled in. Truthfully, the only reason she had even been thinking of her lost brothers was because lately Jon had been asking more questions about what happened to them. She told them what she knew, but that really was not much.
"Oh. I'm Nora." She felt that she had to introduce herself first. "Did Father send you here to live?"
Kane laughed disbelievingly.
"More likely sent me here to die." He cast a contemptuous look at the Child. "They didn't even tell you? All of us got sent here to tame the dragon or die trying. I was the first to survive it, and have been doing my best to save the others who came after me."
He looked at the volcano, where the sounds of a dragon's roar came every few minutes and turned to her.
"I suppose you are lucky in a way. At least you won't have to test your luck against the beast. Say, who is your mother? I remember little from my time in the Keep, but the younger ones remember a lot more. So perhaps I'd have heard of her."
"I am Nella's daughter," She answered automatically, then his words really registered. "Wait, Molly's son Bill was sent away a year ago. Is he here too? She really missed him. Can I take her back with me?"
Kane was taken aback by her sudden enthusiasm.
"A year, huh. He is likely still with the Greenseer, with these ones." He pointed at the Child. "But there's about ten of us here, and I can tell you about the youngest ones that I have saved. Perhaps their mothers miss them as well."
Kane said the last part mournfully.
"Don't you need to escape?" She asked.
"The ones I could find have already escaped into the underground caves and I'm waiting for the last three. And if this place was in danger, the little demon would be the first to run."
They talked about Kane's life being sent to the greenseer, learning dragon lore before being sent here the same way they had come and going to bond with the Cannibal. He found it in a cavern inundated with the skeletons of kids his age. He was too scared to go closer, but that had been the very purpose of what he was raised for. So he had moved closer to the dragon but it had not reacted at all.
Later he had learnt that his dragon blood was simply too weak and that was what had saved him.
The Child let out a shrill shout, interrupting their conversation and they looked up in time to watch the black dragon fly out of the vent.
"Well, I'll be damned. Did someone tame it? Or is it just leaving?" He muttered. "At least no one else will be sent to die here. I wonder where it is going though."
"Ah, about that.." Nora hesitated over what to tell him.
"Yes, I think there's someone on its back. Wait, why is it getting bigger?!"