traveled across the room.
As the torchlight penetrated the darkness, a group of annoyed bats twittered overhead, startling me. The dragon hardly even flinched as they flapped by his head, then he continued to approach the pool. Instead of stopping to marvel at it like I was, he moved to examine the smaller openings that led off this room and into the heart of the mountain.
I crouched by the pool, not quite sure why he was still letting me hang around. He did not seem that opposed to my presence, but neither did he encourage it. Maybe I was just not enough of a threat to warrant much attention. Unconsciously, I put my fingers in the water. It was cool and clear, so I cupped it in my hands and brought it to my mouth.
It tasted horrible. As I coughed and rubbed my lips with the back of my sleeve, I could have sworn I heard the dragon-kin snicker. After a moment of sputtering, there was a tug on the hood of my coat and I fell backward. I glared at the kin and was about to voice my objection to such treatment when I saw what he was looking at. Something had begun to glow under the water in the middle of the pool. A quiet rumbling sound reached my ears and I quickly scrambled behind the dragon. The dark-haired one reached under his cloak and unsheathed a strange-looking black sword, holding it out toward the thing that produced the light. The rumbling grew louder and more violent, sending some pebbles skittering across the floor. My ears clamped down to block out the noise, but it continued to grow. I flinched, holding my ears down with my hands.
A wave surged across the surface of the pool as the strange glowing something emerged, and then the rumbling stopped abruptly.
No doubt both the kin and I had been expecting something far more sinister to appear from the pool. I frowned slightly at the pedestal that had just halted about two feet above the water. A sphere full of roiling white liquid rested atop the pillar and produced the glow I had seen under the water. However, no matter how much I stared at it, it did not make any sense to me.
My view of the strange object was blocked as the dragon-kin’s heavy grey cloak fell on top of me. I wrestled myself out of the material, the words of rage that rested on my lips dying as soon as I could see once more. I stared at the dragon-kin for a long moment as he waded into the water toward the pedestal.