Chapter 3 – Collar
The collar changed.
I do not know when. Time had long since lost its meaning, bleeding together into an endless stretch of dark and pain and the slow, creeping rot of my own mind. But one day, the chain was gone. Replaced by something worse though.
It was purple. The metal was dark, almost black, etched with yellow runes that pulsed faintly in the gloom, like the slow, sickly heartbeat of some monstrous thing. It was heavier than the first collar. Tighter. The moment they clamped it around my neck, I felt a wrongness, a pressure, like a hand squeezing my mind until it could not breathe. My breath came sharp and fast. I thrashed, my claws raking against the stone, my wings flaring to seek a way out of this, but they were useless, battered things that had not stretched in years. The runes flared bright, searing into my mind, and then… pain.
Not the pain of flesh. Worse. A white-hot agony behind my eyes, as if my skull was splitting open from the inside. I roared. The sound tore from my throat, raw and broken, more animal than sentient creature. My body convulsed. My vision blurred, the world reducing to a haze of light and shadow and the suffocating weight of the collar’s magic.
Then there was silence. Not in the cell. In me.
The rage was gone. The fear. The desperate, clawing need to fight. It was as if something had reached into my chest and torn out the part of me that was wild, that made me the dragon I am. I collapsed to the floor, my sides heaving, my wings pressed flat against my back as I was shaking.
The humans laughed. “There. That’s better.” The voice was male. Familiar, but my brain did not want to work with me.
I could not move. I could not think. The collar hummed against my throat. A low, constant vibration against my chest scales, its sound adding to the constant reminder. It was in me. In my bones. In my blood. I hated it with a depth I did not know I still possessed. But I did not fight it. I could not.
The next time they came for me I barely registered it. The door groaned open, but this time no food bowl scraped across stone. Rough hands seized the scruff of my neck, fingers digging into scales softened by years of captivity. I twisted with whatever was left of my instinct, claws scraping futilely against the floor as the collar burned with sudden heat. My mind dulled and my muscles loosened. They dragged me into the light at the end of a stone hallway. But it was not to the tapestries and fire. It was not to her.
The raw, dying blaze of the sun hit me as it bled across the horizon. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the light burned through my lids, red and searing. I averted my head and when I forced them open again, the world was a blur but I could make out a shape of the prison behind me; a castle of dark stone, its towers jagged against the fading sky. The air smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke, but it was fresh air nonetheless. For the first time in my life I felt some hope returning in me.
A boot prodded my ribs. “Move.” I stumbled forward, having forgotten how to move on uneven ground my claws slipped on the dirt of a worn path. The ground sloped downward, the castle’s shadow stretching long and skeletal across the land. Wooden structures were built at its base, their purpose unknown for me. Stables or storage sheds perhaps. Their timbers gray with age, their roofs sagging. As we moved further down the path the air got thick with the scent of brimstone and oil, of charred wood and fresh rock. Torches flickered in iron sconces, their flames casting shadows that made the humans moving between the buildings seem like monsters. I only got a glimpse at this all before the path narrowed and we descended into the earth.
A jagged wound in the hillside slowly revealed itself to me, it was a mine entrance. The timber supports were black, some beams warped and splintered. Cart tracks grooved the dirt and followed different paths leading away, making deep cuts in the earth through years of use. The smell in the air down here was even stronger than before. Damp and heavy, thick with the scent of wet rock and something acrid, like burning metal. It burned my throat and everything in me told me not to enter. A guard shoved me forward. “In you go.” I hesitated but could not disobey.
The mine was a throat, swallowing light, sound and any hope I had felt earlier. Torches flickered in the distance, their glow barely piercing the gloom. The walls glistened with moisture, the rock weeping. The air was stale, thick, pressing in from all sides. And the sound; the clink of metal on stone, the creak of wood, the murmur of voices, rough and commanding. The wet, ragged breathing of others ahead. And dragons.
The realisation hit me like a stone. Their scent was faint beneath the stench of the mine, but unmistakable. Sharp, feral, carrying the faintest memory of mountain air. My pulse quickened. I wanted to call out, to roar, to do something—The guard’s whip cracked against my flank and my intended roar turned into a cry of pain. “Move.“
I flinched as he held the whip up, the pain still sharp, the collar’s magic flaring in warning. In this moment of recognizing my kin I had forgotten what brought me here. My legs trembled, but I stepped forward. The ground beneath my claws continued to be uneven, this time littered with loose stone and rusted remnants of broken tools.
The mine has been in use for a very long time. The wooden supports lining the tunnel were ancient, their surfaces blackened, their joints reinforced with rusted nails. The cart tracks in the stone smoothed out, their edges worn by generations of wheels. The walls bore the marks of picks and hammers, the stone pocked with countless strikes.
But what were they mining for? The air didn’t taste of coal or salt or, as I would later find out, any of the things humans usually dug for. The scent was wrong in my nostrils, sharp and chemical. Like an alchemist’s potions, but fouler. Not gold. Not gemstones. I didn’t see any obvious glimmering of silver among the darker rock. Instead, the stone itself was veined with something even darker and metallic.
Ahead, the tunnel split. One path sloped deeper into the earth. The other led to a wider chamber where torchlight flickered against the faces of other dragons. A small light lit up in me, but just as quickly extinguished. After such a long time I laid eyes on my own kind again. But, like me, they were but shadows of our beautiful species. Their eyes were hollow. Their scales were dull with dust, their wings strapped tight against their bodies. Their bodies chained to walls or carts. Some were small like me, others were larger, their bodies scarred. And all appeared as if the weight of the mountain pressed down on their bones. None of them looked at me.
In the distance a human barked an order. A chain started rattling, its sound coming from the deeper tunnel. A dragon -his scales the gray of old ash, his horns broken- came into the light, pulling a cart toward the entrance of the mine. The wheels groaned under the weight of its load, wrapped in burlap that smelled of oil and something wrong. A whip hit me again and a hand seized my collar, jerking me forward to the deeper tunnel. I didn’t fight. I followed.
The humans hitched us to wooden harnesses, the leather straps having no regard for our bodies and digging into our wings. An additional collar was added and chained to the carts, the metal cold against our throats. The weight of the carts was unbearable at first. My muscles were weakened by years of captivity and trembled under the strain. The tunnels sloped ever downward, the air growing thicker, hotter, until it burned in my lungs like inhaling water.
The scent of sulfur was the worst though, for both dragon and human. Its foulness clung to the back of my throat, coated my tongue with its bitter taste. The deeper we went, the stronger it became, until every breath was a struggle, until my lungs felt raw and bleeding. My claws slipped on slick stone, my wings were useless, battered things, unable to help me steady myself, the membranes torn where the straps had cut into them.
Whatever they mined here was heavy, wrapped in oilcloth that reeked of chemicals. The bundles shifted as we pulled, their contents clinking dully, like stone that weren’t stone, metal that wasn’t metal. The scent of it made my head pound, my vision blur at the edges. Sometimes, when the torches flickered, I thought I saw the bundles glow a sickly. An unnatural light seeping through the fabric.
No one spoke. The silence among us in the mines was worse than when I was alone. In the cell, at least I could use and hear my own voice. My roars, my whimpers, the sound of my claws scraping against stone. Here, there was natural. Only the creak of cartwheels, the clink of chains, the wet rasp of labored breathing. The humans did not allow words. They did not allow sound that was not the crack of a whip or the grunt of exhaustion.
I tried once. A whisper, no more than a breath. A single word in my own tongue, hissed toward the gray-scaled dragon pulling the cart ahead of me. A desperate hope that he might be from my tribe or know my language, that he might remember the mountains, the ice, the way the wind howled through the caves like a living thing back home.
A guard’s armored fist struck the side of my head before I could finish a single word. My head snapped sideways. Pain exploded behind my eyes as my scales were no longer able to give me the protection they once had. I staggered, my claws scraping against the stone as I tried to hold my balance while also trying to keep the cart I was pulling in the tracks, my wings flaring instinctively, only for the collar to flare with punishing heat. I choked on a growl, my vision swimming. The gray-scaled dragon didn’t even turn his head. He kept pulling, his muscles straining, his breath coming in ragged gasps. I learned.
The next time, I wasn’t the one who whispered. A younger dragon in front of me did, his scales still holding the green colour of his homelands. He let out a low, trembling thrill, his voice breaking with exhaustion and immediately a whip came down. The lash cut across his wings and back with a sound like tearing fabric. He yelped, a high, broken sound as his body coiled against the harness. The scent of blood filled the air, sharp and metallic. The guard laughed, a rough sound rolling through the mine, and struck again. The second lash opened a gash across the dragon’s flank. He collapsed, his legs giving out, his breath coming in shuddering gasps. They didn’t unhook the cart. They didn’t drag him aside. Instead they kept holding him up by the collar, making him gasp for air until he found his feet again. The whip had reminded not just him of what pain really was. Every example was a warning for us all.
We all learned. We pulled carts. That was our purpose. Our life. We worked until we could not. Until our legs shook so violently we could no longer stand. Until the guards dragged us back to the cells, where we would collapse into the straw, our bodies too broken to do more than lie there, trembling, as the dark pressed in around us again.
I do not know how long it lasted. Years I would say. The dark became my skin. The pain became my bones. The collar became my mind. I stopped dreaming of mountains. I stopped dreaming of the wind, of the ice, of the way the sky had once stretched endlessly above and below me. I stopped dreaming of my mother’s voice, of my father coming home after a hunt. I stopped dreaming of anything. I was a thing. A beast. A pair of wings that would never fly again, a set of claws that only knew how to dig into stone, a body that could pull a cart until it broke and then pull another. Yet somehow, I survived.
The years in the mine left me hollowed out, my growth stunted by the collar’s magic, by the meager scraps of food they threw into my cell, by the endless, grinding labor. My wings were a ruin. The runes on my collar a constant reminder of the magic that kept me docile, that kept me broken.
But the work had made me strong in other ways. My muscles became steel from hauling stone. My claws got unbreakable from digging into the earth. My mind, what was left of it, had learned the rhythm of survival. I knew when to flinch before the whip fell. I knew how to brace my legs before the cart’s weight shifted. I knew how to breathe shallowly when the sulfur burned my lungs, how to blink away the sting of smoke and sweat in my eyes, how to curl into myself when the pain became too much.
And still I did not know how many years passed like this. Time had no meaning in the dark of my prison, nor in the mine. The only thing that changed was the weight in the carts, the presence of different dragons around me and the way the guards’ voices grew tighter, their orders sharper, as if whatever they mined was becoming more precious. The only thing that stayed the same was the silence and the darkness.