The Toll Bridge
A world by Ari Weaver
The Toll Bridge
The only road to the slate quarry at Carreg crosses the Dulas Gorge on a toll bridge four hundred years old. For three weeks the dragon who sleeps on its toll tower has attacked anything that tries to cross, and Carreg hasn't had its post or its wages. You're the courier who took ten shillings to carry them over anyway. Halfway across, the bridge breaks in front of you and she rises out of the cloud beside it. Bad plans fail here the way they really would. When one does, rewind and try something better.
Playing as Travelerยท
Drizzle is coming down so fine you only see it on the glass of your lantern. The bridge runs ahead of you into the cloud, wet grey stone between two low parapets, and the iron chain bolted along the outside of the downstream parapet drips at every bolt. You've just passed the halfway stone, where the two parishes meet. Your charcoal wool cloak is soaked through, and the satchel of Carreg's post knocks against your hip with every step.
Then the road in front of you moves. A crack runs across the stones, loud as a slate splitting, and twenty feet of bridge drop away into the cloud. You don't hear them land. Where the road was, there's a ragged gap three times your height across, with a strip of broken parapet still hanging over it on the downstream side and the chain sagging under that. Beyond it the bridge goes on toward the dark shape of the toll tower.
Something moves in the cloud off your right shoulder. A wing comes up out of it first, slate-grey and torn thin between its long bones, wider than a chapel roof. Then the rest of her rises beside the bridge, close enough that the wind off her wings pushes you back a step. Her scales are chipped like old roof slates and running with rain. One eye is clouded white. The other is fixed on the lantern at your hip.
She hangs there on slow, heavy wingbeats, level with you. Smoke starts to curl from her nostrils.
Halfway across1 of 3