The Runaway's Hope (Part 6)

Time passed in agony as the serpent’s acid ate away at Vola’s clothes and skin. As the clothes succumbed, more fresh skin flared in pain. Despite the damage, she could not move. Frozen in fear, she waited for the twitch or muscle spasm revealing life in Suviklarg’s body.
The silence had become deafening. The pain in her head from her master’s intrusions was gone. She heard nothing. Her heart filled with the forbidden hope.
The rancid air had become stale from the struggle and it was getting more difficult to breath. The acid continued to chew away at her skin and the scent burned her lungs. The pain in her feet wasn’t there any more. Either she was becoming numb to the pain or nothing was left to be dissolved.
Vola tensed as she slowly moved one of her legs. The whole foot flared with intense pulses of pain. Pain was good. Pain meant she still had a foot. Pain meant she was still alive.
Vola pushed her hand through a gap in the fangs to pry open the dragon’s lips. A small hole let in the volcano’s sulphuric air and a dim column of torch light that survived the battle.
The lips were difficult to move. Soon it would be impossible. The petrification of the other magical creatures began soon after death. Suviklarg’s weakened body, without the cores’ magic, must have begun transforming to stone before suffocating.
Vola punched the dragon’s lips to make another breathing hole. Pain shot up her arm as the lips remained as they were. They had lost their leathery texture and turned to stone. The smooth texture of the tongue was no longer soft, but a rough surface of countless shards of new crystals.
Vola had smashed her way through enough carcases to know what was coming. The crystals on the tongue had already doubled in size.
Her heart raced as she struggled to evade the growing crystals. She failed to keep her breathing regular. The quiet resolve of self-sacrifice had died with Suviklarg. Vola wanted to escape, to live.
The crystals pierced through her robes and scraped her skin. New thoughts of death pounded her brain.
Crystals now cut through her remaining skin. Her blood freely ran along the length of many shards. The fear of dying gripped her heart.
Each new piercing released a flood of images, now flashing through her mind faster than she could comprehend. These memories were foreign to her. Each were more vivid than those from the dead familiar. She could feel her senses become stronger and sensitive. Each new crystal made the following cut more painful.
Strong emotions overwhelmed her fear of dying: anger directed toward an ungrateful slave, desperation as he waited upon a golden horde for a slave who might not return in time, and panic when she kept the last core away from him. She had seen memories of the dead familiars before when a crystal cut her. Suviklarg’s final memories mixed with hers overloading her consciousness.
Vola screamed from the pain of a thousand cuts. The sensation of burning acid was gone. It was replaced by the heat and pressure of a volcano. The crystal shards sank deeper into her skin. The squeezing pain mounted. Breathing became impossible.
She felt a change in the energy from the crystals. It weakened slightly. One of Suviklarg’s organs had died. The sensations decreased again, and again. She thought of how nature did not care what happened to her. A powerful new core would form from Suviklarg’s remains and no creature would be able to use it.
She struggled to forestall the inevitable, working to get further down the throat. Her survival instinct took over as she pulled one arm over her head. The skin was marked with countless lines of crimson and her whole arm dripped red. Acid burned in each one like a hot knife drug through her arm. She grabbed a fang farther down the side of the mouth to help her maneuver her other arm above her head. Broken shards remained in the cuts on her stomach. She could see them embedded in her arms.
The space she created by moving allowed another moment for breathing, but that space soon was soon filled.
The growing crystals closed off the beam of light. She groped through the fallen darkness with grasping fingers for anything helpful in surviving a little longer.
The power she felt flooding into her body stopped. The last of the dragon’s organs had finally died.